Ubuntu 9.04- the Jaunty Jackalope, report.

It's been more than 2 months since i upgraded my laptop to 9.04 'Jaunty Jackalope', and about time to share the results with the rest of the world, the whole upgrading process took about 2 hours (8.04 LTS to 8.10 and then 8.10 to 9.04) but it was completelly painless and there wasn't much i had to do, i even went to the gym for the last hour of the process and when i came back the whole process was almost finished, hurray!!

Warning!! don't hold me responsible if after following my notes your system is messed up, my laptop is 100% Linux compatible and your hardware may not be, do this at your own risk.

First thing i did was update my 8.04 LTS, once my system was up to date i started the upgrading process to 8.10 (you can only upgrade to 9.04 from 8.10). Note that upgrades from 8.04 LTS to 8.10 are not enable by default because 8.04 is a long-term-support release and 8.10 is a regular release, but upgrade is 100% supported and easy to enable, if you are not sure which version you are currently running type on a terminal 'lsb_release -a' to find out.

Now go to System/Administration/Software Sources, then click on the "Updates" tab and change "Show new distribution release" to "Normal releases", now get outta there.

Again start System/Administration/Update Manager, click the Check button to check for new updates. If there are any updates to install, use the Install Updates button to install them, and press Check again after that is complete, make sure you have all the updates for your current version installed before upgrading, a message will appear informing you of the availability of the new release, click upgrade and follow the instructions on screen, the upgrade manager will then start downloading the necesary packages.

Depending on the speed of your Internet connection this can take just a few minutes to a few hours, once the necesary files are fetched you can sit back and watch it work, this may take a while too depending on your hardware speed.

Once this is done and you have restarted your system you can check again with 'sudo lbs_release-a' if the upgrade was succesful, then you should see the following on your terminal:

Distributor ID: Ubuntu

Description: Ubuntu intrepid

Release 8.10

Codename Intrepid

Not as colorful as 'The most incredible and really unbelievable dream has become true: You compiled e17 successfully!' (Enlightenment fan here) but if you see this then you have succesfully upgraded to 8.10.

To upgrade to 9.04 the steps are pretty much the same, update your 8.10 and then proceed with the upgrade, it should be as easy (or even easier) than the previous upgrade.

Was it worth the upgrade? Hell yeah!! For example hibernating did't work that good with 8.04, now it works without a problem, from switching on until login screen takes about 20 sec, the overall impresion is very good and the new release works faster and efficient.

Before you attemp to do an upgrade, don't forget to backup your system and get as much information and feedback about other people's experiences about upgrading their systems, best place for this is of course the Ubuntu Forum, good luck!! :-)

Upgrade.

After many months of happily 'ubuntuing' with 8.04 LTS i decided to upgrade my notebook to 8.10 and then to 9.04, tests and results will be posted soon.

Connect Ubuntu to wlan automatically

One issue i had in my Ubuntu laptop, everytime i booted up i had to manually enter the password to connect to our wireless lan at home.
-Oh well, it's just once- i thought.
But this little issue became slowly an annoyance so i decided that it was time to do something about that.
What is the first logical step? right! ask google! a couple of minutes search and i found this little trick in order to make my laptop connect automagically to my wlan.
Open up a terminal and navigate to /etc/network, the open the file 'interfaces' with your favorite editor in superuser mode, then add this under iface eth1 inet dhcp.

wireless_essid (essid here)
wireless_key (password here)

Make sure you don't use quotation marks with the essid or it won't work and don't use the brackets.
This little trick has saved me some anoying time, now everytime i boot at home, my laptop finds and connects automagically to my wlan :-)

Macbuntu.

Not long ago i had the chance to play around on a friend's macbook and must say that i quite like the interface, specially the bottom bar with the jumping icons, so i decided to give it a go and turn my ubuntu into 'macbuntu.'
First step? of course ask o'powerful google for enlightenment, which came by the lot, at the end i ended up following this excellent tutorial and i must say that i'm very satisfied with the results.

In the following picture you see the original mac leopard desktop


The next picture shows how my desktop turned out, mind the 1024 x 768 resolution of my 12' laptop :-), notice that there are more icons on the top right that i decided to keep and the missing menus of the left that i think i could live without, installing the needed applications was a easy as copying and pasting most of the commands from the tutorial into a terminal ( was too lazy to type) and the result you can see, give it a go and have fun!