My Intrepid Disaster!

Well, as many of you know Ubuntu 8.10 Intrepid Ibex is around the corner and the BETA is already out! So, what about this post's title?... A few days ago I saw the announcement of Ubuntu 8.10 Intrepid Ibex Beta1, and since I can't wait for it to be released I went and downloaded it! Being kinda pushy, I went and formatted my hard drive and installed the BETA...And this is where the story begins...Sunday night, and I was running the Ubuntu 8.10 LiveCD happily, I installed and everything when smooth. During the LiveCD run I saw some awesome changes that were totally worth taking a look at, and I'll mention some of them.

First off, one of the first things I noticed was that Synaptic got a facelift! It now has a neat "Quick Search" textbox on top in which you can input the name of any program you're searching for and Synaptic will run through the database and show you the most relevant entries! The "Search" function is still available and takes a deeper dig into the database.


Then I went to "Hardware Drivers" and I saw that restricted drivers for Atheros Wi-Fi cards (like the one on my Toshiba laptop) have been changed for a native Linux Driver, tested by the Ubuntu developers. Which worked great until the Update Manager jumped on the screen and told me to install 68 updates, which I did, and when I restarted the internet connection was down...so I poked everywhere from my modem to my router and everywhere in the Ubuntu Network Tools...and nothing worked! Seems like one of the updates killed the driver and the connection kept being disconnected. After this huge frustration, and unwilling to check each update one by one, I decided to go back to Hardy until the final release of Intrepid. Right now I'm still fighting with the configurations and packages for my laptop...but it's kinda fun!

Anyways, back to Intrepid. Before the disaster struck, I went through some stuff I use often, and I was very pleased with the speed and reliability of the system. Another change worth noting is Gnome 2.24 which comes with tons of updates and bug-fixes! Works very smoothly!

Nautilus got a few fixes too and they added a Tab system for it, just like the one of Firefox so now you don't need to open a windows for every operation...just open them on tabs! And they also added "Eject" buttons for removable devices on Nautilus' sidebar.

As for everything else, it seemed a whole lot nicer and shiny. I won't spoil any more surprises for you guys, you either have to download the BETA or wait until October 30! Anyways, I hope you enjoy Ubuntu Intrepid as much as I did and will in 23 days!