Karmic Koala Released!

Great news, Ubuntu 9.10, called Karmic Koala, has been released!

I upgraded my workstation at work and my home workstation and so far haven't had major issues.

It took about four hours over a dedicated connection to do an in-place (read: told 9.04 to upgrade to 9.10 instead of formatting and reinstalling a clean version) upgrade. Probably would have gone faster if I tried using a CD image to upgrade, but I haven't tried that. I just opened the update-manager and clicked on the button that said a new release was available; upgrade-manager handled the rest.

While it upgraded I couldn't help but think about the people that are upgrading to Windows 7. People are trying to grab release candidates, downloading pirated versions, paying hundreds of dollars for a store copy, or having to buy a new computer to get the latest version of Windows.

Usually the upgrades go fairly well, but when the upgrade goes wonky...I get especially mad, because it usually means I paid to get screwed. I paid money to lose my time in the upgrade, have hassle in trying to get things working, and basically I paid to create a headache for myself (whether the upgrade went well or not I still lose time in the process of upgrading). I also get more irritated at the idea that I paid for the operating system only to run into later headaches with the OS, but that's another topic.

Karmic, on the other hand, is Ubuntu Linux. Free. It has some irritations and quirks; it's not perfect and I would never claim it was. And I was upgrading to the latest and greatest version without paying anything but time. If something broke, I lost time. Not money. No expectation of support, and no resentment at a company charging me to get stabbed with such expectations.

My upgrade went well both times with one minor exception; one irritation with Ubuntu has been the network manager. It sucks. Never seems to work right. So the first thing I do is install Wicd, which drops in palce and replaces the network manager. My work system kept everything just fine, while my home system replaced Wicd with Network Manager again, and lost my static IP entry and thus broke my port redirection from my home router. I came home, checked out what happened, and told Synaptic to reinstall Wicd and all worked fine again.

I'm still experimenting with Karmic to see if things that quirked and broke in the previous release work in this one. Some of my compiz graphics coolness would malfunction or barf on my home system so I had to turn it off; now I've reactivated some of the goodies to see how well (or horrible) it works now. My work system used to lock up if compiz effects were left on too long. My home system just had weird application crashes. I upgraded before Halloween and so far it seems to be working better.

Canonical (the company behind Ubuntu) has integrated a new cloud-storage system so I could, if I wished, upload 2 gig of data for free to a storage area on their servers that then I could access from any other Ubuntu system or use a web browser to download documents and files to other systems. Not something I see me using, but maybe in the future something will come of it since Apple has been trying to leverage their version of cloud storage with Mobile Me and Microsoft has a trial system in place as well.

Canonical also changed the software installation system. Right now it's mostly eye candy changes, not something overly functional, and they're expecting the next release (probably next April) to include greater functional changes to the installation system so users can find and install software more easily.

Other than that, it's a lot of incremental usability and bug fixes. Nice touches, nice refinements, and best of all, I didn't have to pay for the upgrade. As soon as it was ready I clicked a button and got it.

I'm sure most Windows users I know will be upgrading soon. They usually do as soon as they need a new computer, since then it's preinstalled...