Ubuntu 8.10 to offer a better mobile experience
It’s almost November and Ubuntu 8.10 should officially hit on the 30th of October, just in time for my "OS of the month" club. You can actually nab the release candidate of Intrepid Ibex now and if you need incentive, consider the following two mobile tidbits I noticed in OStatic’s preview writeup:
- An improved network manager that auto-detects and supports many 3G devices. This is a godsend in my opinion as I’ve often had to struggle finding ways to get 3G to work with Linux in general.
- Support to write the environment and data to USB making it easier to run Ubuntu on a stick along with your data. That gets us closer to the whole "computer on a stick" approach, pending you find, steal, beg, or borrow a computer for said stick.
There’s plenty of other improvements behind the curtain as well, but these two jumped out at me. If you’re running 8.04, you can press Alt+F2 and type in update-manager -d and you should be prompted to upgrade.
I upgraded yesterday from Heron. I have a laptop that I use to play with Linux distros.
The upgrade process went through w/o errors, but I did have a series of issues within my primary profile that caused me to have to create a new user account. It wasn’t a show stopper for me, but would be for another person. My Heron install was pretty vanilla, so I am not sure what went wrong.
Either way, I am enjoying Ibex. It feels a bit more solid and, yes, the wireless and networking component makeovers are quite solid and useful.
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I’m relatively new to Ubuntu installs on laptops. I just installed 8.04 on my Tecra M3 last weekend, and it was easy. The OS is solid too. I don’t know what 8.10 is going to change from an already useful 8.04. But I’ll upgrade anyway.