Time to re-align my Karmic

A wise man once said to me "if you write a shit Blog then put some tits on it or no one will ever visit your web site."

With that in mind I thought it best to start with something positive then quickly work my way downwards.

So with about a month to go until official release I've installed Ubuntu 9.10 Karmic Koala.
1st Impressions are pretty shit hot to be fair, small things such as a drive manager, in there you can rename or organise any volumes as you see fit, mark volumes bootable etc but more importantly it links into the drive SMART reporting so you can see any and all predicted drive errors or failures. You can take a drive from another machine, plug it in and see how healthy it is or what it's history is like due to SMART drives logging the errors on board.

You can also set up software RAID easily in here so this is something I'll be looking at further once it's fully sorted.
If you install Ubuntu on traditional Intel systems then it normally goes in without a hitch, Dell machines tend to use Broadcom network cards such as BCM4318 (Airforce one 54g). If your not familar with the recent Ubuntu versions then the old way to get such cards working was using the Ndiswrapper but recently there is a utility "FWCUTTER" which makes installing and using these cards a 30 second breeze.

With Karmic the fwcutter is installed on recognition of the BCM card, you just need to go into SYSTEM, ADMINISTRATION then HARDWARE DRIVERS and confirm it's activation.
Reboot and it's all sorted.

Testing it on a Dell machine the "WiFi" light didn't work or respond before, click the fwcutter option in the hardware drivers and it works perfectly.

Add to this Ubuntu ONE which is a free 2gb shared storage area where you can store and share your own files with yourself or others I expect this release to go from strength to strength.

Behind the scenes the Grub loader is new, the default file system is ext4 instead of ext 3 or 2, this adds new file system features such as support for file systems of 1 exabyte and individual files up to 16 terrabytes. Other features include file pre-allocation without needing to qualify the file by filling it with null values (as most operating systems do), on the fly defrag and other bits and bobs.

So far Karmic installed perfectly in a Virtual machine (Vbox running on Ubuntu 9.04) and installed perfectly on a donor Dell system with the system being "up" and running wireless plus all the OS updates in about 30 mins.

Although from the Windows side Windows 7 will be a hit many people are now fed up to the back teeth with persistent viruses and resource hungry programs, why should you need a dual or quad core notebook to surf the web and pick up emails etc ?

Using Ubuntu allows a wealth of royalty free programs, almost no risk of virus attack and immense security and features.
At the moment the only program I have not got running with any success is Itunes but the Linux community is working on this so it's only a matter of time and that should be sorted as well.

In the mean time Karmic looks a suitable update - don't worry if you apply it, the updater apparently won't change existing Grub loaders to the new version, nor will it change the file system to ext4 (ext 4 is backwards compatible anyway with ext3 and 2).