Canonical's Ubuntu reaches for the cloud

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Jaunty Jackalope is DOA: Ubuntu 9.04 ("Jaunty Jackalope") is dead on arrival (DOA), as far as I'm concerned. I first tested it as a "LiveCD" on a 2.4 GHz Intel Celeron laptop computer with 512 MB RAM (470 MB available to system) and internal 30 GB PATA hard drive. Although the interface looked nice, the Firefox 3.0.8 browser performed extremely slowly. Loading Google (http://www.google.com) on this machine with Ubuntu 8.10 ("Intrepid Ibex") takes less than one second; with 9.04 it takes over a minute. Loading Weather Underground (http://www.wunderground.com) takes less than eight seconds with 8.10; with 9.04 I gave up when it failed to complete loading in ten minutes. (Yes, that's right -- ten MINUTES!!) Thinking it was a LiveCD memory swap phenomenon, the next day I actually installed it on the hard drive. Performance from the hard drive was just as poor. I could see that Firefox was rendering the page content very quickly once each file arrived, but Ubuntu was having an extremely difficult time communicating over the network. Acquiring a wireless network connection with 8.10 usually takes 10-30 seconds, but with 9.04 it takes as much as five minutes, with one or two timeouts and manual retries. The computer and base station were in the same locations for both tests, with no nearby electromagnetic interference to affect the outcome.

Naturally, Jaunty Jackalope only survived on my machine about three hours, just long enough to install it and perform some basic tests, before reverting to Intrepid Ibex. Had it not been for both of my Ubuntu machines mysteriously having their Samba installations trashed almost simultaneously late last week, unable to communicate with each other or any Windows machines, I wouldn't even have bothered with 9.04. (From the many posts on the Ubuntu forums, I gather that poor Samba networking reliability since Ubuntu 7.10 is a widely known, poorly understood problem among Ubuntu users, but that's an issue for discussion elsewhere.)

How could this happen? There is nothing unusual about the machine on which the test was run -- a Fry's Electronics "Great Quality" RX-7335 -- as the machine has performed perfectly well with Ubuntu 8.10, Ubuntu 7.10 and Windows XP in the past. It appears to be the result of insufficient testing and an accelerated release schedule. I'd rather see Canonical issue a major release once a year and shift more resources into testing and fixing some of the serious bugs and deficiencies in the operating system. Overall, Jaunty Jackalope is a disappointment, after the discussions I'd read on 'blog sites two months ago of how its power management was greatly improved. I'd like to use some version of Linux to run an ultra-low-power home RAID file server with wake-on-LAN capabilities in a mixed Linux/Windows environment, but Ubuntu 9.04 is clearly not it, since its network functions are seriously broken.; Posted by: Tony R. Posted on: 04/28/09 You are currently: a Guest | Members login | Terms of Use