Back on 4/20, Canonical announced 9.04 was available for download. I have been following Ubuntu since 7.04 and even switched to it from Gentoo. This new release has a number of visual improvements bringing it closer into the desktop market.

While looking to load up a spare PC with an OS, I decided to give the new Ubuntu a try…

Downloading the ISO was a snap using bit torrent.  You can use the usual http downloads from their site [http://www.ubuntu.com/getubuntu/download].  The size is about 600-700 meg depending on the iso you ask for.  I downloaded the standard i386 desktop version.  If I was looking to put this on my normal desktop, I’d have opted for the x64 (64 bit) so I can make use of my 8gb of ram.  4gb or less is fine with the i386 build.

The first thing I noticed was the install looked a little more polished.  I had jumped from 8.04 to 8.10 with a ‘system update’ so I never saw the 8.10 installer.  Selecting the disk I wished to overwrite was easy and the rest went pretty fast.

The bootloader replaced my installed WinXP loader but still kept an option to load it.  If this was more than a test machine, I’d quickly want to remove that delay to select the Kernel/OS just to get things moving fast.  On the note of fast, the OS loaded and was ready for use in under a minute.  Reading on Matts Blog he managed to trim this down to just under 18 seconds.

Ubuntu left me in the familiar Gnome interface and immediately I started tweaking.  Restricted drivers for the video were the first to add, Nvidia’s drivers provide much better use of their card than the default.  I’d recommend the same if you have Nvidia or ATI for your video card.  Most older and newer hardware is supported.

The desktop looked the same somewhat, but the font rendering looked much nicer.  Tweaking the aliasing from anti-aliasing to sub-pixel resulted in even better fonts.  This, visually was always a nag at me in the windows/linux conversion.  Now it looks like Linux (or X11) has finally caught up.

All the usual software was around, Open Office, Firefox, Pidgin (IM), Evolution (email), CD/DVD burning, imaging editing, and audio/video editing.  Anyone familiar with Ubuntu can find anything they want right out of the box.  Everything is here for the light user and the power user with an interface that is a reasonable layout.  Adding new software from the online application database is as easy as a few clicks.  All the software is packaged to install without issue.

As I get to use it more, I’ll make comments on it’s usability as a desktop.  Linux has made many strides from the command line to the desktop, but so has the competition.  XP increased over Windows 98 and OSX increased over MacOS. Right now, I’d still place Ubuntu’s Gnome interface as a step closer to WinXP.  The interface is cleaner, tighter than it has been in the past.  That was a large complaint that I have had with the few Windows managers I have had the experience with, too much wasted space.  Take Win7, this is arguably a step in the wrong direction in some places.  The directory listing is not as tight in explorer as it was in WinXP.  Little things like this can make tasks that normally were 1-2 steps and make them 3-4 once scrolling is added.

For now, I’ll play with this version and wait for 9.10 in a month or so.  By then it should be a few steps closer to the competition.  Here’s some more screen shots: