Ubuntu 9.04 (Jaunty) Beta Released and available for download
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Note: This is a beta release. Do not install it on production machines. The final stable version will be released on April 23rd, 2009.
DownloadUbuntu 9.04 (Jaunty) Beta
Get it while it's hot. ISOs and torrents are available at:
http://releases.ubuntu.com/releases/9.04/ (Ubuntu Desktop and Server)
http://releases.ubuntu.com/releases/edubuntu/9.04/ (Ubuntu Education Edition)
http://releases.ubuntu.com/releases/kubuntu/9.04/ (Kubuntu)
http://cdimage.ubuntu.com/releases/9.04/beta/ (Ubuntu Netbook Remix and Ubuntu MID)
http://cdimage.ubuntu.com/xubuntu/releases/9.04/beta/ (Xubuntu)
http://cdimage.ubuntu.com/ubuntustudio/releases/9.04/beta/ (UbuntuStudio)
http://cdimage.ubuntu.com/mythbuntu/releases/9.04/beta/ (Mythbuntu)
http://cdimage.ubuntu.com/netboot/9.04/beta/ (Ubuntu ARM)
Upgrading from Ubuntu 8.10 (Intrepid) to Ubuntu 9.04 (Jaunty)
To upgrade from Ubuntu 8.10 on a desktop system
press Alt+F2 and type in "update-manager -d" (without the quotes) into the command box. Update Manager should open up and tell you: New distribution release ‘9.04' is available. Click Upgrade and follow the on-screen instructions.
To upgrade from Ubuntu 8.10 on a server system
install the update-manager-core package if it is not already installed; edit /etc/update-manager/release-upgrades and set Prompt=normal; launch the upgrade tool with the command sudo do-release-upgrade; and follow the on-screen instructions.
New features in Ubuntu 9.04 (Jaunty) Beta
GNOME 2.26
Ubuntu 9.04 Beta includes the latest GNOME 2.26 desktop environment with a number of great new features, including
- brasero, developed by Philippe Rouquier and Luis Medinas, as an all-in-one CD burning application
- Improved handling of multiple monitors with an updated gnome-display-properties by Federico Mena Quintero.
X.Org server 1.6
The latest X.Org server, version 1.6, is available in Jaunty. A number of video cards have been transitioned to free drivers as part of this update.
The -ati driver has received numerous fixes and performance improvements. It now uses the EXA acceleration method by default. 2D acceleration support for the newest R6xx/R7xx family of cards is also available. 3D support is available up to R5xx cards for -ati. An updated -fglrx proprietary driver is available for R6xx/R7xx users who need 3D support.
New style for notifications and notification preferences
Included in Jaunty is a simple menu which can be used to set preferences for notification icons, such as where they pop up on the taskbar. Ubuntu 9.04 beta also includes a whole new notification system
Boot performance
A number of improvements to the Ubuntu start-up process bring significantly improved boot performance to Ubuntu 9.04 Beta. Please open bugs if you experience any degradation, and tag them with boot-performance.
Linux kernel 2.6.28
Ubuntu 9.04 Beta includes the 2.6.28-11.37 kernel based on 2.6.28.8.
Ext4 filesystem support
Ubuntu 9.04 Beta supports the option of installing the new ext4 file system. ext3 will remain the default filesystem for Jaunty, and we will consider ext4 as the default for the next release based on user feedback. There has been extensive discussion about the reliability of applications running on ext4 in the face of sudden system outages. Applications that use the conventional approach of writing data to a temporary file and renaming it to its final location will have their reliability expectations met in Ubuntu 9.04 beta; further discussion is ongoing in the kernel community.
Ext4 support in GRUB was provided by Colin King. If you choose to upgrade your / or /boot filesystem in place from ext2 or ext3 to ext4 , then you must also use the grub-install command after upgrading to Ubuntu 9.04 Beta to reinstall your boot loader. If you do not do this, then the version of GRUB installed in your boot sector will not be able to read the kernel from the ext4 filesystem and your system will fail to boot. Ext4 support in gparted has been provided by Curtis Gedak.
Cloud computing
Ubuntu 9.04 Server Edition makes it easy to experiment with cloud computing. Eucalyptus, an open source technology which is included in Ubuntu as a technology preview, enables you to use your own servers to deploy, experiment and test your own
private cloud that matches the Amazon EC2 API. You can dynamically create virtual machines, configure multiple clusters into a single Cloud and even provide an EBS (elastic block storage) equivalent and an S3 compatible storage manager.
Turn-key mail servers
The dovecot-postfix package in Ubuntu 9.04 Beta provides an easy-to-deploy mail server stack, with support for SMTP, POP3,
and IMAP with TLS and SASL. dovecot-postfix was packaged by Ante Karamati?.
Known issues
As is to be expected at this stage of the release process, there are several known bugs that users are likely to run into with Ubuntu 9.04 Beta. We have documented them here for your convenience along with any known workarounds, so that you don't need to spend time reporting these bugs again:
- A bug in an Ubuntu-specific patch to X server logging code will cause X sessions to crash after they have been running forlonger than a day. Users encountering this bug should upgrade to the latest version of the xserver-xorg-core package, whichwill be available immediately after the beta release.
- Some users of Intel i8x5 video chipsets are unable to load X, getting an error message of "Fatal server error: Couldn't bindmemory for BO front buffer". As a workaround, use the VESA driver by logging into a text console, running "sudo nano/etc/X11/xorg.conf", and adding the line Driver "vesa" to the Device section. An alternative (experimental) workaround is touse the UXA acceleration method (see below). If in doubt, please do not upgrade to Ubuntu 9.04 Beta yet.
- Users of Intel video chipsets have reported performance regressions in Ubuntu 8.10 compared with previous releases. Althoughthese performance issues have not been resolved by default in Ubuntu 9.04, a new experimental acceleration architectureoption, DRI2/UXA, is available for Intel graphics users. Our testing has found this provides significant performanceimprovements for many users, but has also shown risk of severe stability problems, thus we are not yet providing to thegeneral public. You can opt-in to enable this by running "sudo gedit /etc/X11/xorg.conf", and adding Option "AccelMethod""UXA" to the Device section of your xorg.conf. Users wishing to maximize stability should stay with the standard defaultacceleration method, "EXA".
- Ctrl-Alt-Backspace is now disabled, to reduce issues experienced by users who accidentally trigger the key combo. Users who do want this function can enable it in their xorg.conf, or via the command dontzap --disable.
- Ubuntu 8.10 systems installed from the desktop CD mistakenly had the lilo package installed as well as grub, although grubwas used for booting. If you use the recommended Update Manager upgrade method, then the lilo package will be removed if itdoes not appear to be used. If you upgrade using some other method and are sure that you only use the GRUB boot loader, thenwe recommend that you remove the lilo package manually.
- On the timezone map in the desktop CD installer, the markers for cities are displaced from their correct locations. Users should be aware of this issue when selecting their timezone. This bug will be resolved for daily builds immediately after the 9.04 Beta.
- If any filesystems are mounted when starting the desktop CD installer, then a dialog labelled "Unmount partitions that are in use?" will be presented. Unfortunately, the buttons on this dialog box are poorly named: "Continue" attempts to unmount filesystems and then repeats, which will often just display the same dialog box again, while "Go Back" ignores this condition and continues. This will be corrected for the final release.
- On desktop installations from USB disks, such as typical Ubuntu Netbook Remix installations, the installer displays a warning about the fact that the installation medium itself (often /dev/sdb) is mounted. This warning is unnecessary, because the fact that it is mounted is completely normal, and does not interfere with the user's ability to install the system to devices other than the USB disk itself. You should ignore this warning; note that in order to do so you will need to select "GoBack", due to the issue above.
- In some cases, the "Prepare Disk Space" screen in the desktop installer displays obviously incorrect partition sizes in its graphical disk previews. This is only an error in the preview and does not reflect a problem with the partitioning changes that will actually be applied.
- The mythtv frontend in mythbuntu fails to render fonts correctly when using video drivers other than the Intel or closed-source nVidia drivers. This issue is expected to be resolved for the final 9.04 release.
- When installing to a system with another OS previously installed, the migration assistant will offer to migrate settings and documents even when the entire disk is being overwritten. The migration assistant will not be able to preserve documents when using the entire disk for installation.
- Users who were running eCryptfs on the Jaunty Alpha milestones are advised to re-encrypt any encrypted files. An upstream 2.6.28 kernel bug caused random kernel memory to be written to eCryptfs encrypted file headers. The fix has been applied and deployed to Ubuntu users in the Jaunty Beta kernel. Ubuntu eCryptfs users running this kernel should re-encrypt each encrypted file using /usr/bin/ecryptfs-rewrite-file.
- Users of Compaq Smart Array controllers will be unable to remove existing LVM volumes using the partitioner in the installer.
- The mdadm package in Ubuntu 9.04 Beta will fail to assemble RAID10 arrays on boot. Other types of RAID are not affected;investigation of this issue is ongoing.
- Booting degraded RAID may fail in virtual-machine setups where the host is running with cpu frequency scaling enabled, due to a non-deterministic race condition. Booting degraded RAID on physical hardware should not be affected, since the cpu frequency is constant through the hard disk detection process.
- Upgrading a desktop system using an ATI video chipset with the fglrx binary-only driver may result in a warning that the driver needs to be replaced. There is a bug in the driver replacement logic, so if you see this prompt, please cancel the upgrade until this is fixed, which will happen immediately after the beta release.
I’ve been a Linux user on and off for years. 3 years ago I gave Ubuntu a try and it was my distro of choice for over two years (I always upgrade when new versions come out).
But I saw the light about 8 months ago and now my primary Linux distro is Fedora. Why? Because Debian/Ubuntu can’t seem to do what every other freawkin OS on the planet can do.
What is that?
Make installing and running 32-bit software on a 64-bit OS as easy as installing 64-bit software on a 64-bit OS.
OS X does it.
Windows does it.
And every friggin RPM-based Linux distro does it.
There are just enough proprietary apps out there that are only 32-bit (or free ones, but that are often too difficult to easily compile from source) that having this option is worth it.
And no, this has nothing to do with Firefox and 32-bit plugins (e.g. Adobe Flash).
Hello I have 2 other members of my family who have now switch to ubuntu. They switched after I installed your Super Ubuntu on their computes. Will you be making another for Jaunty 9.10 I hope.
Thank you for all the great help and information I do look forward reading you tips on my home page of google. Bill
I agree with the first poster. I have been running Mandriva for 8 years, and have been very happy with it.
I keep trying Ubuntu every time a new release comes out. Why? Because I keep trying to figure out what all the hype is about. But every time, I install it, have 5 times more issues than usual with other linux distros, and am over all just disappointed with the performance and usability of the system. I keep thinking there’s something I’m missing, but it never gets any better. It seems like many other distros are just a bit ahead, simpler to use, more admin tools to configure your system, ect, ect. I havn’t spent that much time in a shell since Mandrake 6.0.
I’ve pretty much given up wasting bandwidth on downloading their iso every time they release. Mandriva, Fedora, PCLinuxOS, Slackware, ect, are much better distros. Try a few distros before you buy in to the hype.
Tried them, realized why don’t they live up the the hype.
Name said: “I keep trying Ubuntu every time a new release comes out. Why? Because I keep trying to figure out what all the hype is about. But every time, I install it, have 5 times more issues than usual with other linux distros, and am over all just disappointed with the performance and usability of the system. I keep thinking there’s something I’m missing, but it never gets any better. It seems like many other distros are just a bit ahead, simpler to use, more admin tools to configure your system, ect, ect. I havn’t spent that much time in a shell since Mandrake 6.0.
I’ve pretty much given up wasting bandwidth on downloading their iso every time they release. Mandriva, Fedora, PCLinuxOS, Slackware, ect, are much better distros. Try a few distros before you buy in to the hype.”
i find the opposite to be true. how many computers have you tried it on? don’t listen to “Name”, he is a clown who doesn’t know what he is talking about. ubuntu works so much better on every pc i try it on. the only distro i will install on my customers machines is ubuntu, because it just works every time.
i have tried ubuntu on at least 30 different computers with fantastic results. it’s the other distros that usually leave something to be desired. but mandriva is a close second.
Just want to confirm what Wolfen69 says. If previous poster is using same computer every time, he should check the computer for problems. I have ubuntu (8.10 on three) on four computers and the only one that has any problems is 9.04 which is in beta.
After being a windows head since 1991 with 3.1, I tried Ubuntu feisty out of sheer frustration with vista. This was back in September of 2007. I have not looked back.
I have upgraded to the newer versions on several computers since then. I am very, very happy with Ubuntu. I have tried other distros but except for Fedora, I have not found one I liked as much as Ubuntu. If I could not run ubuntu I would run fedora.
I am on 9.04 already and so far so good. Its faster boot overall than 8.10. Ubuntu has come a long way since feisty. I hope that it continues to improve in the coming years.
Linux overall is a blast. I wish that I tried it sooner.
Use Intrepid currently. Jaunty beta runs great and looks good in a VM. Intend to upgrade after full release.
I have 9.04 Beta installed at a Intel 82440BX/ZX Mainboard with 1100MHz Celeron, 1GigMem and ATI 3D Mach64GT Rage IIC GUI+3D Accelerator. It works quite well. Better in any circumstance, than 8.10, at least when it comes to screen resolution out of the box. I noticed NONE of the “known issues” but had several hangups requiring restart when adding applications from the main menu: Applications->add/remove (astonishingly not when using synaptic as such: System->Control->synaptic). This is a fresh install from alternate CD, the upgrade program refused to update from 8.10 to 9.04 release, probably because it’s Beta.
It’s been a week now since I’m a Intrepid user. Had a hard time with Linux terminal and commands to follow. But i quickly realised that I was in better hands and the work is going to pay.
Intrepid for now, will patiently wait for the full release in a week and upgrade, hope all goes well and I stop booting my XPS 1330 with Vista ever again !!
Just one request please enable voice/video chat for yahoo and google !!
Hail Ubuntu..