Intrepid Ibex testing

Over the last 3 weeks I’ve been using the latest beta of Intrepid Ibex, Canonical’s next release of Ubuntu. Because of reconstruction and redecoration of my living quarters, I’ve been restricted to using my laptop for the mean time. The laptop is a Fujitsu Amilo running as it came some 5-ish years ago with 512mb RAM and a 40gb HDD. The only modifications I have made are the removal of its dead battery which gave up about a year ago, somewhat limiting its mobility, and an awkward Linksys PCMCIA 802.11b/g wifi card.

I previously used the wifi card in an old Dell laptop which runs VectorLinux, so I’ve always encountered driver issues and had to run ndiswrapper at the start of every session. This was even the case when this Fujitsu laptop ran Hardy Heron. Imagine my surprise when it worked out of the box with Intrepid.

It’s not just wifi drivers that have been added to Intrepid: previously none of my machines running Hardy were able to make use of my networked printer as there were only drivers for the models above and below it in the product range and it proved invisible across port 9100. I thought I’d give it a shot and sure enough my printer’s drivers appear to have made it in the Intrepid release. Whatever bad tinkering I’d done to network visibility also seems to be resolved. I’m now working on copying this PPD file over to Hardy so other machines can print.

Brightside is a fantastic program for those running machines unable to handle compiz fusion but who wish to be able to jump workspace by moving their mouse off the edge of their screen. Ever since Gutsy Gibbon I’ve neglected the idea of ever being able to run compiz on any machine with less than 1GB RAM and associated specs. However upon installing Intrepid I was shocked to see that all windows wobbled without touching any settings. I believe Intrepid must handle graphics drivers differently, meaning that compiz can run effectively on lower spec machines. The upshot is that I’m able to operate the desktop cube that has always drawn me back to using my main desktop machine instead of just quickly reaching for a laptop. On this basis, I hope that the next release of Ubuntu-eee makes use of graphics better, because in its current form the refresh rate on my EeePC is visibly slow.

The only downside to running this Intrepid beta is in its title – “beta”. There are still bugs, and I’ve submitted a couple to Launchpad to find they were already well known and documented. On average when I run Synaptic Package Manager I receive around 100 updates and fixes per day. With 8 days to go until launch, I’m sure this will continue and perhaps the number will increase. Provided you keep on top of these updates, I deem Intrepid in its current form to be perfectly usable.

Ubuntu 8.10

Many thanks to Canonical, all the developers and contributors that have made Intrepid possible. I look forward to the release party and all the announcements and discussion about the next release in 6 months time.