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:

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“.