With the latest release of Ubuntu coming up thought I’d give the beta a try for a few days. It served me well when moving from Gutsy to Hardy earlier in the year. The install was routine no problems and the only real changes were to manually partition the drive. By default /home is not on it’s own partition and doing that makes upgrades and backups a better experience.

After loading and logging in did the normal updates with apt-get and added a few apps like Geany, Bluefish, vpnc, Liferea, gFTP, irssi and some others. The latest version of GNOME has a modified network manager as well as some changes to user switching and logging off, obvious to me at least. You can see the complete list here.

Evolution also had some changes.

Message Templates
WebDAV Contacts support
Google Contacts support
Custom header support while sending mails 
Single Model view for Calendar
Sqlite Based message summary (aka Camel On-disk Summary)
New Bonobo-less composer for Evolution 
Quota support to IMAP/POP accounts
Gtk+ Recent manager integration in Composer
Contact-list for Exchange

I had some initial trouble with the conversion where the indexed messages didn’t match the db. But removing files in .evolution/mail/local leaving the mbox files fixed the problem.

So far no real show stoppers, until this morning when updating caused a firmware / driver mismatch with the wirless nic, ipw2200. Not to keen on digging into that at the moment so will go back to Hardy for now. More than likely another update in a few days will fix it or it will be resolved in general release.

Update: Oct. 20 – After further investigation the firmware was removed. Putting it back in /lib/firmware resolved.