Yes, finally, I’ve gotten my hands on to Ubuntu’s latest iteration, 9.04, or the Jaunty Jackalope. It was released last April 23, 2009 but unfortunately, I just happen to install it today, April 25, because I was stuck at the office doing some extra work. *sigh*. It’s Canonical tenth release of the distribution and will be supported until October 2010. By the way, its the fourth Ubuntu distro that I had used.

After downloading the ISO, I ran my Unetbootin and installed the installer on my usb flash disk. BTW, unetbootin is a program that allow you to copy the installers of linux distros onto your portable drive or even your hard disk, eliminating the need of burning the ISOs unto a CD/DVD. And it’s much faster installing through your flash drives and hard disks. Anyways, I restarted and booted up my installer, clicked and Install icon on the desktop, choosed which partition to install to, changed keyboard, language, time zone, then it moved on to the installation part. After 10 minutes or so, the laptop rebooted, and next thing I know, Ubuntu 9.04 was installed. That’s one hassle free installation of an OS.

I was greeted by a revamped login screen, very sleek indeed. Though the installation was very easy, getting me up and running on my laptop was quite tedious. I tend to reinstall the whole OS when I’m upgrading with Ubuntu(that’s what I was accustomed to since 7.04). Good thing there was the Synaptic Package manager. There’s a ton of program that I need, including the driver for my video card. After installing the driver, the Compiz fusion effects that I growned to love with Ubuntu is back. And also the psptoolchain for my homebrew development.

So what’s good about this new release. Here’s some that I know.
1. Gnome 2.26. It got the Brasero as the default burning utility and improved handling of multiple monitors with an updated gnome-display-properties. The later was great for me since I often used multiple monitors with laptop.
2. New notification system implemented, very much sleek and less obtrusive.
3. X.org server 1.6. I don’t know much detail about this, but will surely have improvements, graphics wise.
4. Wacom tablet hotplugging. I don’t use this stuff.
5. Boot performance. It’s a bit faster than 8.10.
6. Linux kernel 2.6.28. We don’t know much about the kernel, do we?
7. Ext4 filesystem support. It now supports 1 exabyte files( I don’t even have 1 terrabyte hardrive.)
8. Cloud computing. Not interested.
9. Computer Janitor. Quite a decent way to clean up softwares. I usually don’t remove unneeded applications, and the only time that my Ubuntu is clean is when I install a new version. Very useful for someone like me that tries out many application.

My verdict: for those, who doesn’t want the hassle of upgrading your Ubuntu, it’s not that very feature packed. But the new feel and look, is very much welcome. Still a nice release for Canonical.

Karmic Koala is slated for release in October 2009. I hope that it provides more feature than Jackalope.