Ubuntu Unleashes Jaunty Jackalope Release Candidate; April 23rd Final Release Anticipated

by Kristin Shoemaker - Apr. 17, 2009Comments (1)

Late yesterday afternoon, Canonical let loose the release candidate disk images for Ubuntu 9.04 (Jaunty Jackalope). Canonical warns that while a release candidate is about as stable as one can get with a testing release, it is still a testing release, and users should hold off installing Jaunty on essential systems.

The good news, of course, is that those clamoring to install Jaunty on their essential systems haven't long to wait. The finalized, stable Jaunty release will appear on mirrors worldwide April 23rd.

As expected (and hoped) the list of known issues in the testing release has been getting smaller. A few bugs remain, and fixes are expected prior to the final 9.04 release. One of the more significant issues involves filesystem corruption triggered by accessing larger files on the ext4 filesystem. It is advised that those wishing to use the release candidate right now opt for the (still default) ext3 filesystem type, and convert it to ext4 once the finalized version is released. Other known problems include font rendering issues in the MythTV frontend on Mythbuntu systems using certain video drivers, and the inability to run the OEM setup utility in Kubuntu. All three of these issues are expected to be resolved prior to the final release next week.

I've been using the Jaunty beta for a little more than a week, and testing release quirks aside, the Ubuntu team has delivered some major improvements. The first one you'll likely notice is the faster boot process -- though I've heard boot performance improvements are most obvious on solid state disks, mechanical hard drives definitely have a boost at start up. The new notification system is unobtrusive, and attractive. Graphics card support and 3D rendering improvements have been integrated into the new release. Wacom tablets are now automatically enabled through the wonders of hotplugging, and no longer require the manual editing of xorg.conf (though button mapping still requires an fdi file be created in /etc/ha/fdi/policy/).

The Ubuntu release notes page for the Jaunty release includes instructions on upgrading existing installs and a detailed list of changes and features.


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Julio Dominguez uses OStatic to support Open Source, ask and answer questions and stay informed. What about you?



1 Comments
 

From the looks of it, I'm not sure that they will be able to solve ext4 issues. It affects not only Ubuntu too.


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