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.

Anyway, I’m generally happy with the direction things have gone in 9.04, but they really need to make sure that this stuff is fully baked in the next release and these usability regressions are fixed, or they’re going to really alienate a lot of users.

Had a good weekend. Spent most of it pottering around at home. Graham and I finally put in the time to get our home network into a decent state, which meant getting the home router / server / thing (known as Zinn) all setup. Well, it turns out that the motherboard we were going to use was in a questionable state. Questionable meaning that although it seemed to work, every single capacitor of a particular size on it had vented, a couple rather explosively. So, Zinn currently lives in Liz’s old desktop (actually a low-end server, but I digress…) until the parts we ordered today arrive. When all is said and done we will have one box hooking up to our DSL, running our private and public wireless, terminating our VPNs, and routing all the traffic amongst them. I’m expecting the power consumption on it to be somewhere around 50 watts. Not bad, if I say so myself. I guesstimate that our current consumption is around 120 or so, so this is a significant drop.

Gr also got a pretty bad-ass net-boot setup running on Zinn, so we can do netboot installs of Hardy and also run a number of diagnotics. It will be especially nice once our local Hardy mirror is complete. We’ll be able to do completely current installs at Gb speed. It’s pretty cool if you’re into that sort of thing.

I also got a random “Thank You” email from someone out on the Internet who found my Socialtext installation guide useful. That’s nice.

So, I decided to install Epiphany, the default Gnome web browser. Now, I’ve used Epiphany before and it had some pretty big rendering problems. So far today, no problems at all. And you know what? It feels substantially faster, a lot faster than Firefox. And the Javascript stuff on gmail and reader isn’t hammering my machine into oblivion.

Will I stop using Firefox? Probably not, there are a lot of extensions for it that I find pretty integral to my work, like the Web Author add-on and Firebug and a few others that slip my mind at the moment. I will, however, probably start using Epiphany for my normal browsing needs if it continues to perform well and Firefox continues to perform so poorly.