I just couldn’t wait for the 24th of April and decided to upgrade Intrepid to the present Alpha version of Jaunty yesterday. After downloading some 1300 mb’s and then taking up another hour to complete all the modifications, my computer restarted.
Apparently Jaunty is supposed to boot up faster. I did not notice any difference though. A possible reason could be that I had installed Intrepid using WUBI, so the disk access are going to be slow. Also I do not know if this speedup in boot time is for all the partitions or just ext4. Unfortunately, I still am running the older ext3. To make a change to etx4 probably I might have to format and do a clean install. I am only guessing. Not much funda here.
The ext4 filesystem is backward compatible with ext3, making it possible to mount an ext3 filesystem as ext4. Not only this, but also the ext4 filesystem is forward compatible with ext3, that is, it can be mounted as an ext3 partition. However, if the ext4 partition uses extents (one of the major new features of ext4), forward compatibility and therefore the ability to mount the filesystem as ext3 is lost. Extents are not used by default; the “extents” option is explicitly required. You might want to have a look at the following two articles: Converting ext3 partitions to ext4 on Ubuntu 9.04 (Jaunty) and Ext4: HowTo. Thanks to Gen2ly for pointing the way.
Music is what I love the most. So amarok was the first application I tested. Yay, Amarok 2 fired up. But my joy of having the new Amarok was quickly turned into dismay. The new look darker theme of Amarok looked disgusting. Earlier editions had a small left hand sidebar, and a wide informative playlist area. Amarok 2 features 3 bars. The leftmost one lists all the collection and last.fm service and all. The artist info and lyrics are all moved into the mddle bar while the playlist has been compressed into the smaller rightmost sidebar. Also very little information is shown in the playlist area. I liked the earlier Amarok’s feature of being able to sort the playlist by score or last played. It is lacking here. Or atleast, I did not find a way to do that. And the biggest disappointment was incompatibility of last.fm scrobbling. The application fails to scrobble if you are behind a proxy server. I tried everything, using manual proxy settings in kioslaverc, setting system-wide proxy, but with no luck. Apparently there is this bug in Amarok which prevents it from scrobbling from behind proxy. We’ll have to wait for a later release.
Next came on the messenger. Jaunty has implemented this notifications thing. The idea is that all the notifications could be sent to a single application which will display them to the user. Earlier it was a bit distracting. Any friend logs in and a black patch appears on the top right corner of my screen. However, after a few hours, I learned to filter it out. I am not distracted by it any longer. The notification doesn’t interfere with what one is doing though. If you move your mouse over the notification, say to close an application, the notificaion fades into the background. So far, I have only seen pidgin and rhythmbox notifications appear. But I am sure, very soon all the applications will use this feature and start deploying their notification in this manner. I feel options needs to be provided to the user making it possible for him to filter out few types of notifications. I certainly do not want to be notified when any of my friend comes online.
There is this Libnotify Popups plugin which dictates the notifications that is shown on the right hand corner top. You can check/uncheck the events you want to be notified about from pidgin itself.
New themes have been introduced in Jaunty. I love the New Wave theme. It is considerably darker than the customary orange human theme. Below is a screenshot of my Jaunty desktop.
Ubutu Jaunty Desktop Screenshot
I have had no problems so far yet, except a few applications crashing unexpectedly. But those instances were few and rare. One of the main goals of Jaunty was to improve user experience. So far it has been good. Only Amarok has disappointed me. But on the brighter side, my last.fm client is working once again. It wasn’t in Intrepid. Apart from these, I haven’t really tried much. Shall write again if anything comes up.
More about amarok 2
I like Amarok 2 still. Amarok is not a complete rewrite but it alot of it is. Advanced filtering an sorting has yet to come. Not sure about the darker theme though, maybe Ubuntu is using a different theme for kde apps. As for the previous link, i’m not seeing the problems that that dude is.
Also updating to ext4 isn’t terrible difficult. Check out the official wiki page:
http://ext4.wiki.kernel.org/index.php/Main_Page
Thanks for the info on etx4. Amarok 1.4 used to have predominantly white appearance, but Amarok 2 shows up all greyish. Whatever, I have always liked Amarok, and do so even now.
To see the faster boot times you must install Jaunty in a separate partition formatted as ext4.
What if I convert the partition containing /boot into ext4, that should work, shouldn’t it ?