Karmic Koala, first impression

MMM OK, the boot up is fast with the new upstart and the new log in screen looks promising even though its still a little rough around the etches.

I have not used Gnome in a while or Karmic with another desktop so i don’t know who to blame yet,but i must say my desktop feels more responsive opening individual programs then ever before, is it Karmic, is it Gnome or is it the really smooth default Compiz that even works on my modest onboard graphics card?

First thing to do is to get the restricted multi media going.

Installing the “ubuntu-restricted-package” will get us a long way.

This package depends on some commonly used packages in the Ubuntu
multiverse repository.

Installing this package will pull in support for MP3 playback and decoding,
support for various other audio formats (GStreamer plugins), Microsoft fonts,
Java runtime environment, Flash plugin, LAME (to create compressed audio
files), and DVD playback.

Please note that this does not install libdvdcss2, and will not let you play
encrypted DVDs. For more information, see

https://help.ubuntu.com/community/RestrictedFormats/PlayingDVDs

Please also note that packages from multiverse are restricted by copyright
or legal issues in some countries. See

http://www.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/licensing

for more information.

After restarting Firefox FLASH worked instantly, no problems checking out youtube.

MickeySoft fonts, no problem

MP3 and LAME i did not check, i hardly ever use that.

But, the java JRE did not work out of the box, i did hear something about dropped support or replacement, nevertheless you can still find it in the repos by installing “sun-java6-plugin” after the old and trusted buggy and slow java worked. I wonder how far the free java replacement is and if its somewhat usable by now.

Almost there with the codecs, just the medibuntu stuff left to go

sudo wget http://www.medibuntu.org/sources.list.d/`lsb_release -cs`.list –output-document=/etc/apt/sources.list.d/medibuntu.list && sudo apt-get -q update && sudo apt-get –yes -q –allow-unauthenticated install medibuntu-keyring && sudo apt-get -q update

And install w32codecs and libdvdcss2

The upstart graphics don’t seem to be completely ready yet if you want a smooth transition from grub to desktop but its a good start, still some console text flying around here and there.

Also i receive the message that the “computer will shut down in 60 seconds” when shutting down from the menu, this is either a bug or something that has to to with the delayed allocation of the ext4 file system bugs? i’m not sure.

Still plenty to to about fine tuning the personal preference and the bug fixing but the conclusion so far…not the best ubuntu beta i’ve ever seen, but it could become one of the better stable ones