Back when I got my very own netbook, the first thing I did was installing Ubuntu 9.10 NBR on it. The experience was phenomenal: Just about everything worked out of the box with a few minor exceptions. So I saw nothing really stopping me from upgrading to 10.04 when it finally arrived last Thursday.
Well, nothing except for the Austrian mirror hopelessly hammered by requests and therefor unusably slow. Since I had to get up at 0500 in the morning on Friday, I had to skip the update and hope for some more speed on Friday afternoon. Well, not so much. In the end I just went with the main server and managed to update the system. It took a couple of hours but there was virtually no user interaction required (which really helps when you try to play MW2 at the same time ;-))
Previously there were a couple of minor issues like brightness controls, but this was a really simple fix after I found this issue on the tracker which contains a workaround.
And this morning I even managed to finally get tethering with my iPhone working – which is actually quite well documented but I think I just always forgot to do the DHCP request and therefor never could go online. In general the iPhone support is really nice so far. Once plugged in the system asks if it should import the photos from it and if Rhythmnbox should be used to access the songs on it. I think there is no real synchronzing just yet, but it is definitely a huge step forward :-D
I don’t have to mention the new default theme, do I? It is just gorgeous.
Naturally, some small problems are there, though:
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The battery icon, even when fully charged, indicates some charging as can be seen in the screenshot.
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At first Rhythmbox completely refused to let me log into my Last.fm account. There are quite a few topics about this already and after some trying I managed to get it working, too, but it was still quite annoying.
In general, though, I’m extremely satisfied with this release. I’m even thinking about leaving my MacBook at home for the next conference … although I might still have it at least with me for the respective sprints :-/ Although, I’ve been working on the netbook (and the couch) now all day and I had no problems (except for the stupid right shift key on the 1005PE…).
I don’t know yet, what I should think about Canonical using the Ubuntu brand for their “Ubuntu One” and “Ubuntu One Music Store” services, though, since they have not all that much to do with open source, Ubuntu’s core value in my eyes.
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