The time is right

I just did a couple of timings on Ubuntu 10.04 beta.
Installed on a 1.6ghz celeron with 512mb of ram.....

From BIOS passing control to the boot loader (grub)
On mains power - time to login prompt = 6 seconds, time to desktop = another 6 seconds.
On battery power - time to login prompt = 7 seconds, time to desktop = another 8 seconds.

Shutdown - 3 seconds !

Once you have typed your password at the login prompt you barely see the screen change, your then straight onto the desktop and off it all goes, quite staggering for speed.

Firefox 3.6 does not hang about either, it's more than a match for many a browser, pages flashing in front of your eyes - due to collaboration from Yahoo and Canonical the search page now defaults to Yahoo but that's easily sorted if you want google or something else.

I upgraded one machine from 9.10 to 10.04 and on another installed 10.04 from CD.

This looks like the definitive release for speed and features.

Nice touches:
Dell broadcom drivers, work easily (select restricted drivers and activate)
Disk utility checks your drive for any issues, allows simple formatting of volumes, integrity tests, performance monitoring etc.
Gwibber - allows you to update multiple social networking sites at the same time.
If you don't like the windows buttons being on the left "mac" style look for mwbuttons, this script can change them to any orientation you like.

I made a quick launch script in the applications menu (just paste the absolute path to mwbuttons i.e /home/kevin/mwbuttons and give the launcher a name).

Time to play a bit more on it.

Ready 2 Go ?

I've been using these new "Ready 2 Go" batteries for some time now, in my opinion this is the future of rechargeable batteries.

When you get them they are already charged, pop them in and fire up your camera or whatever and you'll get just as long as you would expect.
Due to the new technology in the batteries they are ideal for low use applications like remote controls or similar where normal rechargeable batteries would self discharge before you got much use from them.

We have a multimedia PC keyboard for example, normal rechargeables are almost useless as you need to charge them up almost every time, give them a week or two idle and they run down.
The same goes for battery packs like Wii remotes, unless you put them back on their cradles they self discharge and your back with normal batteries.

These ones though, charge them up and pop them inside something or just put them in a container to one side, 3 or 6 months later take then out and put them in the item you want to use them in and they are still charged.
Effectively you get the convenience of alkaline batteries with the cost savings of rechargeable.

Other advantages are the ability to retain charge even at low temperatures and better hi current ability.

Sanyo call their version"eneloop" - http://www.eneloop.info/home/technology.html, the ones I use are Camlink batteries as they are about 50% cheaper.

Although I get my batteries from "Bupak" - http://www.budpak.co.uk
I found our local Home Bargains store selling 2 x 2100mah batteries with a charger for just £2.99, not bad when I paid £5.99 for 4 batteries.

If you need flexible power handling and have a mix of low and high demand products then these are the future, I no longer use my 2800mah high performance batteries as amazing as it seems these ones last longer.

I can charge them, put them in a torch, use them then transfer to something like an Xbox controller and use them, then put them away for a month, take them out and they are good to go.

Its all a bit technical how they work but the Sanyo site has the technology papers on etc, all I know is that these batteries work from the moment you open the pack or several months after you originally charged them - apparently they still retain most of their charge 12 months later even though you have not used them.

Ubuntu 10.04 imminent

Now many people may think being a little excited about a new release is just plain daft.
However, having seen some fun and games with Windows 7 and the fact I've not used Windows now for a good 2 years and I'm happy this is providing me an alternative that suits my needs.

Even my own team at work who have had Windows 7 installed have had amusing fun, one lasted 10 minutes from turning on his newly built machine to find it blue screen in front of him, finger print readers fail to work, bit locker security is causing us issues so we've had to turn it off, security programs won't work properly, our Cisco soft phones won't work properly and so on.

Don't get me wrong, Windows 7 when it's all sorted should be fine but lots of hardware fails to work, drivers are not working and so on.

So keeping my home computers on Ubuntu is a good choice and one I'm going to stick with, I even got a HP mini note 2133 working on Ubuntu 9.10 last week including the wireless (which was a bit tricky to get working on 9.04) and it runs perfectly.

so 10.04 is imminent, I've installed it on a virtual machine but also ran the live CD on some units and it looks the best release so far.
Fast boot up times (not that 9.04/9.10 were slow), added features like Gwibber (a social networking client to connect you to twitter, facebook etc) and lots of bits just fiddled with and generally made all shiny.

My laptop running 9.10 has given no problems at all, originally it had 8.10, then 9.04 then 9.10 and not a single crash ever.
My file server runs 9.10 and again has never crashed or locked up, my media PC is running 9.10 and again no lock ups or problems and so on.

Compared to Windows the housekeeping is far less, the stability far higher and things like on line banking are less stressful.

If you have some older hardware that might not work well on Vista and Windows 7 is not running too well then this is the way to go, my next steps are to try OpenVZ, the virtualization software that can run as a modified Ubuntu core with better distribution of resources than VMware on PC etc, and perhaps make some virtual containers so I can try several virtual machines running at once.

One chap has even had 1000 virtual machines running at once on OpenVZ so it's worth a look.

I'll get the full 10.04 installed on April 10th then will rant and rave on here.

So far it looks like more fun than a bus full of 20 year old Nuns all high on alcohol and drugs.