Ubuntu recently released their latest operating system, Ubuntu 9.04, also known as Jaunty Jackalope. I have been running it for the past 2 weeks on my Thinkpad X200, and I must say that I have been thoroughly impressed - more so than any other releases I have experienced so far. Top few things that impressed me:
- Amazing suspend and resume stability: I have been using it for the last 1 week with no reboots, only suspending, and resuming. And because I run around quite often, I typically suspend and resume about 4-8 times a day. And for 5 full days, the laptop didn’t freeze up on me. Wireless kept on working, applications, bluetooth, sound… you name it. I had to terminate Firefox twice in this 5 days cos it was taking up too much memory - i typically have about 60 opened tabs.
- Mobile Broadband: I was stuck in a meeting one evening, and xiaobai was using Singtel Broadband. Out of impulse, I decided to just plug it into my USB slot. To my absolute astonishment, a dialog popped up asking me Country, which I selected Singapore, and then it went on to ask me to choose M1, Starhub or Singtel, which I selected Singtel. And.. viola!
That was 3 days ago. I have just gone and bought my own Singtel Laptop Broadband package, and below are the screens:
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- New Applications: There are quite a lot of new applications available on Jaunty Jackalope. Amongst which are
- UNetBootin : Allows you to easily create bootable thumbdrives.
- BlueProximity: A very cool application that pairs with your handfone and locks/unlocks your laptop based on the distance of your phone from the laptop
Well, I am curious how the next version of Opensolaris will be like, especially now that Oracle has bought over Sun - if its on schedule, it should be this month.