So I’ve continued to use the 10.04 Beta 2 installation over the weekend, and I’m finding a lot to like about the soon-to-be-official LTS release of Ubuntu after I fixed the titlebar button problem I ran into the other day. I still say that was a very bad call, and I hope they reverse it at the 11th hour, because it will do nothing but bad things.
To fix it, enter the following into a command prompt:
gconftool-2 –set ‘/apps/metacity/general/button_layout’ –type string “menu:minimize,maximize,close”
(Note you may have to fix some of the quotes, since the typographical quotes don’t work like “real” quotes in the shell)
An viola, sane titlebar button placement for your user account. I’m planning on building a little app in Quickly to do this push-button style. If / when I finish that I’ll put it in a PPA and post about it here. It will be of limited utility, but a good way to play with Quickly and setting up a PPA. Anyway…
The improved boot speed is FANTASTIC. I haven’t actually timed it, but on this laptop it feels as fast or faster than resuming from a suspend, which I think is pretty impressive.
The visual tweaks are good (modulo titlebar idocy…) and I love the “Ambiance” GTK theme. I tend to like darker themes, and this is probably one of the best ones I’ve used.
Of course the version bumps in major apps is nice, and being able to run the latest firefox w/o repo jiggery pokery is convenient. My webcam is also working out of the box, a first on this hardware, and is even working in Flash. Chatroulette here I come! On the downside, I am getting playback hiccup in full-screened videos from Hulu, which I never got before. Hulu has apparently made some changes recently that makes it not work at all w/ 64-bit Linux, so maybe it’s related to that.
So, long story short-ish,I think this will be a solid release. I have my doubts as to whether or not it will meet expectations as an LTS release given the fairly large amount of very visisble tinkering that has apparently gone on, but overall I’m looking forward to it.
