Dialing for Donuts

I recently upgraded from Ubuntu 8.04 (Hardy Heron) to Ubuntu 8.10 Beta (Intrepid Ibex). Although this is the beta version, so far I have been absolutely thrilled with the results.

A little back ground: My first successful install was of 6.06 on Ye Olde HP. Prior to this, the HP had sort of been running ME on it's creaky old Celeron 766. (Now it happily records TV for me to watch wiht Mythbuntu 8.04.) As part of the quest to built the Myth box, I ended up building a file/print server and desktop on a mini ITX motherboard.

I love Mini ITX. It's small, it's quiet, and it's cheap. What more could anyone want? But when I built it, I couldn't for the life of me get the soundcard to work. The sound did work under a Damn Small Linux live CD, so I figured it was something with 8.04. A little googling revealed that there was a bug with the kernel used in 8.04 not playing nice with the chipset in the via motherboard. A lot more googling and mucking around with the 8.04 installation did nothing to being cheer to my now silent basement office (remember MIni ITX is quiet...).

So I gave up, like any real man would. However, when I saw the announcement for the 8.10 releae, I thought, 'Maybe....'

I was going to wait for the final release, but with the Beta coming out last week, I just couldn't wait any longer. I first downloaded the ISO and tried the live CD, and lo and behold, Rythmbox played me some web streams. So I was going to do a fresh install, but got help up at the partitioner, which told me I couldn't have any more logical partitions. Rather than try to fix that issue, I backed out to the 8.04 installation and went for a simple distro upgrade, using these instructions. Yes, those are the instructions for upgrading to 8.04, not 8.10, but the key thing is to open the update manager with the command they give you. (Also to backup all your data first).

Anyways, under 8.10, I have noticed the following improvements:

Music Playback works for my motherboard and chipset.
Firefly Media Server (aka mt-daapd) now scans the collection automagically.

I will post other improvements as I notice them. Feel to ask questions or leave comments.