back to article Ubuntu's Karmic Koala bares fangs at Windows 7

Ubuntu 9.10 - aka Karmic Koala - is taking the fight to Microsoft and its new Windows 7 operating system. The Koala - due for its official release today - brings faster boot times, a revamped software installer, better disk encryption, online services, and quite a bit more to the popular Linux desktop. We took the release …

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  1. The BigYin

    @Trevor

    If you are lucky and have well-support kit, then I don't think you will have any problems at all (e.g. Nvidia cards). But for more edgy stuff (read: old) then it really is pot luck.

    You want too much Trevor. If you want Puppy's size and boot speed, then use Puppy. But don't expect all the bells and whistles of a full-fat distro.

    I guess you might be best going Slackware style-ee and rolling your own.

  2. PT
    FAIL

    Disappointed

    First I tried the update servers, but on seeing that my download would take 1 day, 23 hours or so I downloaded the ISO image instead (23 minutes). It installed ok, but I didn't get too far with it after that because it shipped with a beta version of Grub that doesn't work. Grub will boot whatever is on its top line, but if you move the cursor off that line it hangs forever. I was much more concerned that it didn't trash my XP partition than that 9.10 worked, so I manually edited the grub.inf file to put XP at the top, breathed a huge sigh of relief when XP booted, and decided to do without Ubuntu until the next service pack.

    For the short time I had 9.10 up and running, I did find one major annoyance. I could not set the clock to the right time. The PC clock was right when I started the install but somewhere in the procedure it got set to some other time, 14 hours behind my local, and it would not be reset. Well I could try, but about 2 seconds after I finished it reverted again.

  3. Drak

    bares fangs, ha ha ha .....just use Mint if you want a professionaly done Linux distro

    I do have huge respect for Shuttleworth and his merry band of freetards for finally making a user friendly distro. But their ability to make a commercial ready distro is nill. Their own company mission statement just parrots Stallman's 'freedoms'. Try Mint Linux or Elive if you want Ubuntu/Debian compatible distros that are not pig slow.

  4. Anonymous Coward
    Grenade

    I'm not going to use Linux until..

    {insert long list of things Linux has been able to do for 5 or 10 years blah blah blah snore}

  5. Whitefort
    FAIL

    Windows 7 has nothing to worry about.

    From (until now) a Ubuntu fanboy.

    Every 9 months I have a ritual. One by one, I install the latest Ubuntu on my 7 PCs and laptops, and set them up the way I like them.

    Same thing last week, when the new Ubuntu appeared. Now, nearly a week later, all but one have had the *previous* version reinstalled.

    Karmic Koala boots much more slowly than Feisty. The login screen is ugly as sin (unlike Feisty's classy, professional-looking screen. The list of features that now don't work across my range of machines is stunning. The desktop experience has been dumbed down to a point where it feels almost as 'nanny' as Windows.

    If THIS is the Ubuntu that Shuttleworth thinks can go head-to-head with windows, I predict an EPIC fail.

  6. James Neave
    Thumb Up

    Ubuntu 9.10 + MythTV 0.22 FTW

    My friend is learning MythTV and Ubuntu with his DVB-S card and Freesat.

    Mythbuntu control center is a revelation.

    The amount of groupware style integration is bordering on holy.

    The new software center is lovely.

    The 6 month small steps rather than Vista 50-year f**k everything up is better.

    Cloud software is getting very good.

    Everything Just Works.

    Windows 7 + my C905 phone for playing music was Epic Fail.

    Nobody has mentioned the new Bluetooth stuff:

    Mice finally Just Work

    Phones with PANu (Bluetooth wireless broadband router) Just Work

    Bluetooth Audio

    The amount of joined up thinking that's arriving is so exciting to see.

    I just gibber with excitement to see what every 6 months will bring next!! 8D

    J.

  7. Dest
    Alert

    Stop with the stupid names already! "Karmic Koala" ?

    Stop with the stupid names already! "Karmic Koala" ?

    Ubuntu is too much of a pain for me to deal with anyway and Ubuntu is considered to be one of the easiest distros to work with but there is something better.

    Linux Mint is by far the best Linux distro available.

    Linux Mint is based on Ubuntu which is in turn based on Debian but Linux Mint is perfectly suited for the average home desktop.

    Linux Mint 7 Gloria is the latest distro so look it up and try it.

    It just works and it runs a lot faster and smoother than Ubuntu.

    Don't believe it? Try it and see for yourself.

    http://www.linuxmint.com/

    Also look up the youtube demos and reviews, there are a whole bunch.

    Linux Mint beats Ubuntu in every way.

  8. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Stupid user comments on Linux Mint love-in and alliteration

    I'm not about to be rude about Linux Mint, but "professional" and "better" are a little OTT. And considering Mint is based on Ubuntu 9.04, it's not worth bashing Ubuntu. Without Ubuntu, there is no Mint.

    Is alliterative naming such a burden to bare? What's so great about Apple's or MS' naming? Don't you prefer the name Jenson Interceptor to Citroen 2CV, for example?

    Anyway, while 9.10 seems a low-point for Ubuntu, I'm more than happy that I can revert to 9.04 and do what I want... or switch to Linux Mint... better luck next time, Ubuntu. At least your failures are not at the expense of the rest of us, though.

    Keep going, Mr. Shuttleworth!

  9. Anonymous Coward
    FAIL

    Mark Shuttleworth's Vista moment

    If I wasn't such a reasonable bloke I could be a Linux fanboy, and I really like Ubuntu. I've an old P4 box running an SiS chipset that runs Ubuntu 9.10 and Mythbuntu 9.10 superbly. There are so many improvements, particularly from the Myth team.

    Unfortunately my laptop and my main desktop (both Dells) are based on Intel chip-sets with integrated video, and on those 9.10 is unusable. There are fanbois in denial about the disaster, but the issues are repeatable on fresh clean installs on bog-standard hardware on multiple Intel chipset platforms.

    Problems include black screen boot hangs, 3 frames per second live video performance, slow keyboard response in Myth (MINUTES!) and incompletely rendered 2D windows.

    Canonical obviously can't have done even elementary testing. Maybe they think Intel video is a niche market. At a time when MS is getting its OS act together, Canonical needed to be on the ball - but instead they have dropped the ball. It's so bad it's embarrassing. How could you do this, Canonical?

    Bares its fangs? I think its dentures just slipped out.

  10. George 24

    Very nice

    The Karmic Koala is nice, not without its issues, Intel chipsets amongst others. But Ubuntu 9.10 has not made any steps towards resolving the real Linux issue, which is not really a Linus issue. There are not enough workplace ready apps for Linux. Developers make money in the M$ platform and are not porting to Linux. What a shame.

    Also, unless apps are installed from the repository, not all install properly, without tinkering and googling. Get all teh Linux flavours to standardise on file location and a single installer. That would go a very long way to eatup M$ market...

  11. Morten Ranulf Clausen
    Thumb Up

    As for working out of the box...

    ...I have just had an experience. Old box threw a wobbler and killed a disk dead, dead, dead. Sad, sad, sad. Doing it while backing up said disk and thereby scrunching the backup set too is just icing on the cake - plenty of backup survived and I could rebuild the machine in a day or so, I figured. New box arrived, destined for Windows-XP-hood. But guess what - XP Pro didn't recognize the NIC on the motherboard. No amount of badgering made it understand that yes, there's a NIC down there and it's perfectly capable of contacting the router for an IP address. Ubuntu did it right the first time. And everything else in the machine too. XP never quite got the hang of the old box either, with several pieces of hardware sporting yellow question marks in the device manager and no relief to be found anywhere. Not that I was missing anything (I'm not into gadgets so I'll survive not having a card reader, teevee card etc.), it was just a bit weird.

    Now I know I've taken a few shots at Linux in the past for being not quite good enough, but even I have to admit that Ubuntu's nearly there. A few issues (mainly with off-mainstream software like VMWare Server (which sux - now using Sun VirtualBox instead, great little tool)) notwithstanding, it's doing a marvellous job. Now if just IBM could manage to get out Domino Designer and Admin clients for Linux I'd be happy never to see a Windows box again.

    Ubuntu One is pants though. Overpriced and underperforming. Where's the ability to link in backup software, for example? And it's not as if the incentive isn't there, 2 Gb is going to disappear in a flash once backups start rolling in and people will then probably be happy to dump a load of money on the service. Try again. Please. It's a good idea, just do it right next time around.

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