New release of Ubuntu – “Intrepid Ibex”

I upgraded to the new Ubuntu 8.10 release and found it included a few improvements. These are some of my favourite:

A animation of an Ibex and the Ubuntu 8.10 default wallpaper
  • Nautilus now has tabs so you can middle-click folders to open them in a new tab.
  • The included version of F-Spot has had a bug fixed so it now correctly imports comment metadata from photos.
  • The eject software for my laptop DVD drive has been corrected and Nautilus now has new convenient eject icons.
  • The volume buttons on my laptop keyboard now work

Things that I’m still disappointed with:

  • Cheese doesn’t find my laptop camera. In fact, /dev/video0 was completely missing (see bug 255678). This is a big step backwards from 8.04 where video Skype calls worked out of the box.
  • Playing DVDs didn’t work out of the box – If your going to have an application called “Movie Player” I think it should player DVDs without putting you through too much trouble. Even after I installed the plugins (gstreamer0.10-plugins-ugly) the sound in the DVDs didn’t work and the frames were jerky. Installing xine is the easiest way to watch a DVD.
  • The memory card reader in my laptop still doesn’t work.
  • On shutdown I get a error about CIFS that causes a lockup of about a minute. It’s caused because Ubuntu tries to unmount Samba shares after shutting down network services (see here for a fix).
  • In F-Spot, it would be nice if the Facebook export plugin automatically set the Facebook photo caption using the F-Spot photo comment. Who wants to write a caption for each photo twice?
  • Tracking down why my Samba share wasn’t showing in 8.10 where it worked fine in 8.04 was quite a headache. It turns out the Samba user credentials file format has suddenly started to disallow spaces. “username = tom” now needs to be “username=tom“.

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