Ubuntu

Yes, I caught the fever spreading like wildfire… I downloaded and installed Ubuntu. It’s a pretty darn sweet distro with only a few quirks:

  1. It comes with pbbuttonsd as the default power manager. I tried it for a few days and found that pmud does a way better job with power management (I got almost 4 hours of battery with pmud and only around 2.5 with pbbuttonsd).
  2. Evolution spawns a new spamd process even with the -L parameter given to spamd. This means it take almost a half hour and the processor chugging along to download all the mail I had stored up over the weekend (108 new mails). This makes no sense to me.
  3. There are no bakery2.3 or libxml++-2.6 packages which means I had to compile and install them to work on Coaster. Not too big of a deal.

One cool thing I found is that there are Prism2 modules in the kernel Ubuntu provides. Maybe they have been merged in the kernel for a long time and I never noticed them, but that makes me happy. No more compiling linux-wlan-ng each time I get a new kernel. Now, I wonder which version of the prism2 drivers got merged… I hope it’s something pre21 or later.

All in all, this is a pretty slick distro. I put the CD in, hit enter a couple of times and that was it (besides repartitioning my hard drive, which I needed to do for myself… it detected my partitions flawlessly). Good job guys! I can’t wait to see what you have in store for the next release.