Ubuntu 9.04 Update!

I've been using the latest version of Ubuntu since it was released a few days ago, and so far I'm very pleased with it. The screenshot is from my Latitude D400, with the default wallpaper and the "Dust" theme. A lot of the issues from the last release have been resolved, but a few have not. Luckily the workarounds I developed still worked. I've got the xorg.conf file I've been using since 8.04 to resolve a problem with the Alps touchpad in my laptop. Other than a few minor issues like that, everything worked out of the box. All of my hardware was detected with no issues and I did not have to install any proprietary drivers.

If you're considering Ubuntu, or pretty much any other Linux distro, I've got a few small pieces of advice that might make things a bit easier along the way.

First off, the initial setup requires some planning ahead. When partitioning your hard drive, select the "manual partitioning" method and create at least three partitions:

1. A "swap" partition equal to at least the amount of RAM your system has. More is perfectly fine. My laptop has 512MB of RAM, and I set up a 1GB swap partition at the beginning of my drive. Select "Swap" under the file system option.

2. A "root" partition equal to maybe 20% of your hard drive space. 5GB is about the minimum for a large distro like Ubuntu, and more than 20GB is probably overkill unless you get really serious and start installing every package that's in the repositories. For the file system, select Ext3 or Ext4 if available. Ext4 is faster, but still somewhat experimental. I have not had any problems with it so far, but some have reported data loss. Select "root" or "/" for the mount point.

3. The remainder of the space should be dedicated to your "home" directory. This is where all your documents, pictures, and movies will be installed. Select Ext3 for the file system if you are concerned about data loss. Select "/home" for the mount point. Doing this will set the separate partition as your /home directory, where all the user data is stored. The beauty of this method is that if you ever need to reinstall, you can just re-format the root partition, leave the /home partition intact, and when your new install boots all of your data and settings will still be there!

Second, learn to google! If you run into a problem with your new install, just go to www.google.com and search for "ubuntu 9.04" plus whatever problem you're having. Chances are someone else has had the same problem, and a bit of looking around should get you to the solution you need.

Third, don't make yourself reinvent the wheel. If you have to hack on some configuration files to get things working just right, save a copy of those files in your /home directory. That way if you have to reinstall you can simply copy those files back, or at least use them as a reference for configuring your new system.

It took me a few installs and a lot of cursing to figure these things out, but they have been a great help to me lately, especially now since I've got several machines running Linux.



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Now playing: Bad Religion - The Fast Life
via FoxyTunes

Like a wispy feather, defying gravity
Or a rolling cobble in the middle of the stream
Propelled by a ghost force that never shows his face
Increase the ante of this perpetual pace!