Boy did they take their time! I waited till about 3.30 pm on Thursday 23rd and posted a complaint to the Ubuntu forums while I was waiting but, finally I looked in Synaptic and it was there - the new distribution upgrade to Ubuntu 9.04 Jaunty. I had given a 64 bit ISO of Jaunty a run a couple of hours earlier and I liked the experience though brief, so I was eager but, the thought of setting up my computer from scratch reminded me of the prudence of waiting a few hours for the upgrade. Anyway with a thumping heart "I bit the bullet" and installed. I kept hearing the voice in my head say "You had the perfect set-up, now you've invited trouble. You'll be sorry you did this. Prepare to reinstall and reformat and.....". 90 minutes later it was all done, the alert came up asking for a restart, I obeyed and, all was fine.

I'm very pleased with Jaunty, its much faster than Intrepid and God knows Intrepid was fast. The boot up times are quicker too. The fontmatrix has been vastly improved resulting in sharper looking fonts. The quality of the sound also seems to have been improved and the system sounds all work with no complaint at all. Listening to music seems a completely different experience. Eclipse/FlexBuilder woukd merrily as before. I had no reason to touch my Flash Media Server installation - it worked perfectly. Ok that was the good part. The screensaver engine has been improved - it seems to use so much less of the system memory. Screensavers which I never used because of their high memory consumption, rocket away at very low CPU load and display their graphics fast with no stuttering at all. Its difficult to believe its the same hardware.

There were a couple of irritations though - first I could not get Compiz to work - googling, I discovered that somehow or other my Dell graphics card had made it to the Compiz - blacklist and I had to look to the Ubuntu Forums to fix it. Fortunately it was not big deal to fix and I soon had that running as before. Next was the new Amarok 2. I had really looked forward to it but, in using it I felt very short changed. The Ubuntu offering is a horribly stripped down version - apparently its much better in KDE (I would not know, I hardly go there). You cannnot customize the colours, you cannot set the audio drivers to your choice version (ALSA being mine).No equalizer. It kept defaulting to Pulse and sometimes hijacking my system sound, and ab-initio it would not play MP3's and was stuttering the Shoutcast streams. Frightful!! Apparently you have to install phonon xine and check that the kubuntu restricted extras were installed. Having done that all seemed well.

sudo aptitude install libxine1-ffmpeg kubuntu-restricted-extras phonon-backend-xine

However I was not happy with Amarok 2 and started to search for a way to get back my ole Amarok 1.4. A number of ways were suggested none of which worked for me and then in all that trawing the name Exaile popped up at me. I installed it and Ama-who?? This is the player for me and it really looks good - still needs extra customization tools but, its brilliant. I cannot still get my Bluetooth to work but thats another story as I could not get it to work in Intrepid either. Still all in all the best offering yet from Ubuntu/Canonical - WELL DONE!!! Try Jaunty it ROCKS