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I recently posted about a very bad experience testing out Ubuntu 9.10 Karmic Koala. What happened, as it turns out, is that I had installed Ubuntu 9.04 Jaunty Jackalope. I went to ubuntu.com on release day, and I saw 9.10 available for download, but I followed the link for the official torrent instead. I guess I didn’t notice that the link was still for the previous release. I guess they hadn’t uploaded the torrent file for the new release on release day.

So I downloaded the new version. Everything worked swimmingly. The weirdness in the installer was gone; it correctly showed my unallocated space next to my Windows partition and changed the color when I selected the option to install on free space side-by-side. It of course didn’t prompt me to upgrade the OS. Network services were discovered via bonjour and printing to my MacOSX shared printer worked out of the box. The WiFi indicator light doesn’t blink neurotically. And the complete meltdown problem wherein it randomly re-mounted my root partition readonly has not showed up. It’s been stable and all around a pleasure to use. The graphics effects are smooth. I’m very impressed.

Obviously the 6 month old Ubuntu 9.04 Jaunty Jackalope had some incompatibilities with the hardware in my 9 month old HP Elitebook 6930p. The newer kernel and other software included with the latest offering from Canonical seems to support my hardware completely. This is usual with Linux, that there is some lag between new hardware platforms and their support in Linux. So I apologize for maligning the usability of today’s desktop Linux distro. It’s top notch, and it was only due to my own errors that I thought otherwise.