Countdown to Ubuntu 9.04

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I did some searching- it looks like it actually is disabled in GNU Core Utilities, so it should be standard across GNU/Linux distros. Solaris and FreeBSD also disable rm -rf /. It seems OS X still allows it, though.


I've actually tried it before just for kicks and giggles. And the SUSE I tried to kill was in a virtualbox, and I had my friend's permission to kill it, so no biggie.

UPDATE: I actually did manage to kill it with "rm -rf /*" which gave a lot of confusing output, but didn't seem to affect anything at the time. Turns out that I at least killed grub and prevented him from loading the kernel again.

You maimed Suse!

Who killed bambi? YOU killed bambi!



err, rather, a monarchist that is.

See, thats the thing. We really CAN do stuff like that for kicks. In windows it would be a big thing, a long install, configurations, loss of data and the pointless waste of a licence activation.

I have an old Dell Inspiron 600m laptop that I installed Ubuntu on last year. Upgrading to 9.04 resolved a graphics issue. Apparently it uses an ATI chipset that linux didn't seem to like. Now it works better than ever. I will definitely be installing the final release on it.

It went live around 2am local time. Bloody well annoying if you ask me, I was TRYING to do something and the update manager would NOT go away.

But, it's cool. I'm going to update to stable while I'm out today.

I seem to have broken update manager and can't get to stable... well, at least a reinstall lets me try out the new filesystem.

I think their servers are just getting bogged down. I had the same problem when upgrading my kids computer from 8.04 to beta, but the next day it worked fine.

I also had the nagging update manager, which locked up when I tried to close it. I guess I had it in my mind that the stable release wasn't due for another few days. How time flies.

Speaking as one who is old hat at 6 month distros(speaking too late!), what I do is download the latest beta the day before release. Generally on release day you will have zero updates or maybe a few megs.

I've been through a few Ubuntu releases now, and 9.0.4 was the smoothest yet. Of course, the bits and pieces I've learned on each pass helped too, but still - nothing went wrong. Except for the double tap and drag on the mousepad, and that's probably just configuration.

My work environments are Windows clients and Solaris servers - at home I keep one laptop that runs Windows XP and another that started out with Vista but has been running one version of Linux or another for the past year or so. My current enthusiasm is XForms and eXist, and over a single day I've installed a fresh Ubuntu, given it a set of development tools, and built eXist from source to deployable. All that without being obsessive enough to upset anyone.

I may keep using 8.10 until version 10 comes out or upgrade to 9.04. Right now I'm too lazy to hunt for a blank DVD in my house. We forget to label our discs and there is an inequal ratio of written to unwritten discs. I may just have Jaunty jacalope mailed to me for free.

I have a CD-RW that I've designated for Ubuntu and always write over it with the latest release.

You can mount and loop back the iso and ubuntu thinks the image is a cd. Use that to upgrade.

9.04 sounds great - but when I tried to upgrade, I got a message that my 3D card drivers would be disabled because they aren't supported yet under Jackalope.
I'm waiting with 8.10 until some of the bugs, tweaks & fixes are all hammered out - why upgrade so quickly when your current version works so well?

I would like to upgrade as soon as possible, so I'm constantly monitoring driver updates.

A clean install is always best- when I did the "upgrade" path it disabled several of my third-party repos and I think a thing or two got broken. Not badly, and nothing that was impossible to work around, but a clean install is still less crufty.


To get new software and a performance boost- 9.04 is noticeably faster than 8.10, the packages are more up to date, and several things are more stable, most notably Compiz.

Definitely less crufty; I can fix the repos and restore some things, but I'm not as familiar with restricted drivers and how to re-enable them under the upgraded version. Even though I'm more knowledgeable about Ubuntu Linux than most of my peers and co-workers, sadly I'm at a loss at times when it comes to various tasks such as this.

I guess I'm kind of picky about that 3D graphics card...darn ATi.

The worst part is that the memory I upgraded a year ago is starting to degrade with over 200 errors after doing a memtest, and now I find out that the company (Kingston) that made it isn't as good as I was told. You get what you pay for, apparently.

Well, some settings change from release to release, so if you edited any config files manually they might get reset, which could screw stuff up in some ways. I think either my trackpad settings or my keyboard layout got changed when I upgraded. Anyways, I just have crappy integrated graphics, but I know Ubuntu has been incorporating more and more proprietary drivers. I'd be surprised if an ATI card worked last release but won't work this release.