However, I recognize that as I grew familiar with Linux in general, my objectivity as a reviewer from the point of view of the “average Joe switcher” has waned. That having been said, I think I can still say that with the upcoming 9.10 Karmic Koala release, Ubuntu is a truly viable option for many users. Will it launch to meteoric heights, above and beyond any previous release? No, probably not. But it could. Ubuntu 9.10 Karmic Koala is the best version of Ubuntu yet, and it just may be the thing that unhinges you in your desire to finally plunge headfirst into a dual-boot or exclusively Linux computing lifestyle.

Karmic Koala: The Rundown

Installation is almost identical to that of any previous Ubuntu release. Basically, the installer asks a few simple questions, then launches into the meat of the process with a screen with three options: one which shrinks down any existing OSs to make room for Ubuntu, one which installs Ubuntu as the only OS (purging anything else that might be on the disk), and the Custom option, which I always use. This requires a working knowledge of partitioning, but since I’ve been using Ubuntu since long before the first two options were present, I had already learned how to use the included GParted partitioning utility to divvy up my disk.

In my latest installation I decided to go whole hog and install Karmic as my sole OS. I also made a separate 50 GB partition for my /home directory. None of this is any more difficult than usual and simply requires that you can discern which drive is which in a list, tell the OS what to put where, and know that the two components you must include are the root (/) and swap partitions, the latter of which should be at least equivalent in size to the amount of RAM you have installed in your computer (or, in most cases, 1 GB should be plenty).

After a confirmation screen you’re off to the races and are treated to a slide show enumerating the benefits of Ubuntu. Using a flash drive installation completed in about ten minutes. If you would like to use a flash drive yourself, I suggest you download this utility if you’re using Windows. Ubuntu has a USB Startup Disk Creator of its own, but of course you have to be using Ubuntu in order to use it, so it’s a Catch 22.

The Desktop Environment

Look and feel

When you first reboot, you’ll be greeted by the desktop below.

Well, that’s not exactly it, but I’m not masochistic enough to undo all my customizations just for a screen shot. It’s your standard two-panel Gnome affair, minus the extra icons on the left and the Gnome Foot in the corner. Ubuntu is back, and browner than ever! There are so many debates about this subject, and I personally think all this brown looks like something the cat left on the stair, but it is what it is. It’s easy enough to change, and all the pictures that follow will be of my current theme, which I stuck together from several I downloaded from GNOME-Look.org.

The first thing you should notice, aside from that violent orange background, is that the icons are different. Gone are those godawful Human icons, and in their place is an elegant collection called Humanity, which were made by DanRabbit. Here’s a screen shot with some folders open to give you a better idea (by the way, I use Spatial Nautilus instead of the default Browser setting):

Ah, bliss. All I did was install the Shiki-Colors theme, select the default Humanity icons, and tweak the color of window backgrounds slightly, and I got my theme. Oh, and I replaced the Ubuntu Friendship Circle with the Gnome Foot. You can download an archive I’ve made with everything you need to recreate my theme (plus instructions) here.

Essentially, this isn’t that much different from previous releases, except that there is more of a focus on the yellow and brown tones and less on the orange. Though you can’t see it in the first screen shot, the window borders are chocolate brown, ala the following:

We’ll stick with “chocolate,” as the bathroom humor might get out of hand if we touch on the “other” interpretation. Despite my obvious dislike, this isn’t awful. It goes along with the default GDM and xsplash (that stuff you see when you boot up) well enough, and the Humanity icons are a real win when compared with the original Human ones. Overall, the fit and feel of this Ubuntu release are pretty high, even at the beta stage. There are some hiccups, though. For example, the “Applying changes” box for some inexplicable reason lacks an icon, resulting in an ugly “no icon” placeholder. Also, those who like translucent Panels will find the notification icons in Humanity unreadable. I expect the former condition to be worked out by the final release. The too-short, unreadable progress bar issue has already been dealt with.

One real gripe of mine concerns dark themes. OpenOffice.org looks quite horrid with Shiki-Colors, and since Ubuntu ships several dark themes as defaults (even if they’re not activated by default), I seriously would have hoped something better could have been done about theme integration. As it stands, this screen shot should tell you everything you need to know:

Yeah, okay. Is it Arbitrary Day or something over in Menu Designer Nook? And notice the too-thick and too-dark borders around items in the Status and Ruler Bars. The theme integration is handled by the openoffice.org-gtk package, and removing it drops you back to an even uglier UI with absolutely no Gnome integration. Dark themes are fairly young on Ubuntu (they first got some official love in Jaunty), so perhaps in time this will be sorted out. Until then, I’ll live with this but grumble loudly about it the whole way.

Firefox is another instance of bad consequences tied to a dark theme. The Awesome Bar will produce a dark dropdown menu, which looks awful. However, the solution (for Shiki-Colors, at least) is documented here and works swimmingly.

Applications and Gnome 2.28

Karmic ships with Firefox 3.5, OpenOffice.org 3.1, GIMP 2.6, and a new version of the popular Add/Remove Applications called Ubuntu Software Center. All other applications not specific to Ubuntu or culled from third parties are of the Gnome 2.28 vintage, and the repositories reflect this. Notably, the popular IM client Pidgin has been replaced with the Gnome default, Empathy. This has caused quite a lot of controversy, and after a rather hellish experience with Empathy recursively opening itself ere a hard reset, I decided I wanted nothing more to do with it. I installed Pidgin from the Software Center but plan on giving Empathy another look come the final release of Karmic.

The remainder of the software suite should feel very familiar to Ubuntu natives, but for the uninitiated I’ll run down the basic list:

Internet Browsing: Firefox 3.5
IM: Empathy 2.28.0
Video/Quick Music Playback: Totem 2.28.1
Music Management: Rhythmbox 0.12.5
Photo Management: F-Spot 0.6.1.3
Photo Manipulation/Editing: GIMP 2.6
E-Mail/Calendaring: Evolution 2.28.0
BitTorrent: Transmission 1.75
Office Software: OpenOffice.org 3.1
Disc Burning: Brasero 2.28.0

There are of course others for scanning, terminal services, and the like, but most users will be concerned with the above list. I’ve given each of these (except for Empathy) a cursory glance, and here’s what I’ve found:

1. Firefox works as well as ever, with the slight dark theme incompatibility ironed out via the instructions listed earlier. Still the best browser out there, on account of the Add-ons community.
2. Empathy, as mentioned before, didn’t get any formal testing yet.
3. Totem tends to hang on shutdown, often requiring a Force Quit (or even a kill at the command line). Other than that, once stocked with codecs, it plays everything I throw at it.
4. Rhythmbox is a capable music manager, along the lines of iTunes or Winamp. Until recently there was a bug by which it couldn’t play back audio CDs, but this has been dealt with in a recent update.
5. F-Spot is a simple program and does its job well enough. I tend toward gThumb instead, but F-Spot is fine.
6. GIMP is an interesting creature. All through this review I’ve prepared screen shots using it, and it has done everything I have asked it. I never found myself wanting of a more powerful tool (e.g. Photoshop), but my needs are fairly basic. I still hate the floating palettes (didn’t they learn anything from Office 2004 for Mac?), but the software works just fine.
7. When I use it, Evolution performs admirably. It knows (based on the domain) that I have a Gmail address and automatically configures its settings for IMAP in the startup routine that runs the first time I run the program. I’ve never had any problems with this program, and it works well enough in Karmic—granted, I don’t have particularly deep needs.
8. Transmission works fine. A decent, lightweight BitTorrent client.
9. OpenOffice, despite the appearance issues with dark themes, works perfectly for me so far. The fact that it’s in Karmic won’t be your determiner—either you like it and it works for you, or else you’ll run Office 2007 via Wine or VirtualBox. The choice is yours.
10. I haven’t used Brasero yet in Karmic, but in the past it has proved to be a capable program. So unless it’s totally broken in Karmic (which I’ll never know since I haven’t bought blank CD-Rs in about two years) it should accomplish whatever burning task you’d like to accomplish (except obviously something like Blu-Ray).

I would suggest you download the following to supplement the above:

VLC Media Player
Sound Juicer
FileZilla FTP
Pidgin (?)

VLC doesn’t quite match up to Rhythmbox when playing CDs—its playback ranges from almost smooth to like an old portable CD player with the anti-shock shut off. Tragically, VLC absolutely could not handle playing at the same time as Evolution checked the mail servers—it started skipping and, comically, it rose an entire semitone in pitch! It stayed like this until dismissed and restarted once Evolution was done. I can only assume that if you do anything similarly “strenuous”, such as checking for updates, uploading/downloading a torrent or using FTP, you’ll get the same problem. Yecch! Maybe it just doesn’t like Peter Gabriel? Understandable, but probably not the issue. Still, I guess if you need to access the audio on a CD VLC will work. You can rip using VLC but it’s an awkward, one-track-at-a-time affair, with no progress feedback other than the sound of your disc drive.

On the other hand, VLC has a much better reputation with video playback, and many have turned to it when Totem threw up the Dickens. It’s a good tool to have as it often works (at least to some extent) even when other players get broken or encounter weird corner case media files.

Sound Juicer is a very simple Gnome program which allows for extraction of multiple CD audio tracks in one session. It’s a lot more intuitive than the VLC method. If you want to just rip from a CD and don’t want to deal with the Rhythmbox interface, this will work well. In order to get WAV encoding to work properly, I had to modify the “Voice, Lossless” preset and save it as “CD Quality (WAV)”. Here’s the GStreamer pipeline in order to get normal WAV output:

audio/x-raw-int,rate=44100,channels=2 ! wavenc name=enc

Tick the “Active?” box to make this new profile show up in the drop-down menu, and make sure Rhythmbox isn’t open when you’re extracting, or else the results will be screwy.

FileZilla probably isn’t the best FTP available for Linux, but it’s one of the better free ones for Windows and I got used to it, hence its presence on this list. Shop around. Find what you like.

Pidgin is just a suggestion based on the state of Empathy at the moment—it doesn’t completely replicate all the features of Pidgin, so for now you might want to stick with the latter (unless all you do is chat, without any of the deeper functions of IM, such as file transfer).

Ubuntu Software Center

What used to be called Add/Remove Applications is now the Ubuntu Software Center. Here’s a screen shot:

It started off as Software Store, but some felt that name implied too heavily that the software offered was not free, which they felt ran counter to the FLOSS philosophy. So Mark Shuttleworth personally advocated the change from “Store” to “Center,” assuaging the cries of many. The idea is that, eventually, all package management (including duties currently handled by Synaptic) will be migrated to this tool. Further, though not planned for in the 9.10 release, eventually Canonical (the sponsor company of Ubuntu) would like to open the Center to developers offering for-pay applications.

This move has been met with much outcry, particularly from those who take the open source philosophy seriously. They fear that, ostensibly, the free (as in beer and liberty) aspect of software will disappear as more and more developers charge for their work. They feel this will erode the principles upon which FLOSS functions and eventually transform Ubuntu (and other Linux variants) into little more than cheap versions of proprietary OSs. On the other hand, others argue that a for-pay section will attract developers to the platform who would otherwise not consider it, including game and multimedia giants; having Linux ports of such software, they argue, will increase the adoption rate of Linux and its viability as a platform.

In any event, in actual usage I would say this system is a step back from the previous one. Instead of a dual-pane window (like Synaptic) wherein one can click on results and view information simultaneously, the browser-style navigation in Software Center replaces the results window with whatever you click on, meaning if it isn’t want you want or if you want to look at other choices, you have to go back a screen by hitting the rather unintuitive (and unchanging, regardless of search) “Get Free Software” button at the top left. I applaud the Ubuntu devs for attempting such a bold consolidation of functionality, but the arrangement bugs me. I liked the dual-pane style a lot better, even if each pane’s space was a bit small. That’s what scroll bars are for. I’m sure this will all get worked out in the end.

Stability and performance

Granted, I’m testing this on a fresh install and have been running it thus for about two days, so I haven’t exactly had much time invested in this system. On the other hand, I’ve been testing Karmic since Alpha 4 and, with the exception of a hideous train wreck at the end of Alpha 5 that left everybody’s systems borked, things have been remarkably smooth. I stayed installed and updated all through Alpha 6 with nary a serious problem. There were some minor issues, though. Totem is occasionally problematic, sometimes hanging at shutdown and requiring a Force Quit (I mentioned this above). I had a rather scary bout with Empathy (also mentioned) that forced a hard reset. One time I rebooted, only to find that Compiz wasn’t working and that it refused to be started manually (ironically, performance with Metacity sucked). A reboot allowed me to manually restart Compiz and all was well. Incidentally, as of the latest updates it’s doing this sporadically once every two reboots or so, though I’m always able to revive Compiz. Since Karmic Beta is merely a snapshot in time of the last few days of Alpha 6, the entire development cycle can be considered relevant to the assessment of the beta.

Applications (aside from Totem) have been remarkably stable. I can’t remember any application ever crashing or hanging the system, which is wonderful. Nautilus dropped a few times early on, but that was all the way back in Alpha 5. I’ve been conducting heavy file management, including that thing you’re not supposed to do (gksudo nautilus), and nothing has failed in ages. I feel like Karmic is incredibly resilient and robust, which makes me look back (not so) fondly upon 7.10 Gutsy Gibbon, which caused me quite a few problems and eventually drove me to become a beta adopter for 8.04 Hardy Heron.

Performance-wise, Karmic feels pretty snappy. I’m using an Intel Core Duo 1.83 Ghz T2400-based machine, which is ancient by this time (it was new in early 2006), and most tasks feel very responsive. The Gnome menu, incidentally, can be sluggish to open sometimes, especially upon first booting up. Other than that, I’ve never felt as though I were waiting on my system when I shouldn’t be, which is far more than I can say about any version of Windows I’ve had installed (I beta-tested Windows 7 on here). Truth be told, Ubuntu has always felt great on this computer—Karmic continues that tradition.

Ist es Gemütlich?

The English language does not have an equivalent for the German word gemütlich, which is a shame because it’s the perfect word to describe the concept I’m trying to convey. Basically, this word refers to a sense of cosiness or comfort with one’s surroundings; if someplace is gemütlich it feels relaxing and not overbearing to the person experiencing it. This might be an odd way of evaluating an operating system, but to me it makes perfect sense. An OS is a lot more like a location in which I spend a lot of time than a bunch of 1s and 0s. So, after everything else, I can ask this question. The answer, as it has been since Hardy, is yes. Granted, I’ve been using Linux for a while so I know how to nest here, but Karmic honestly feels like a pair of old sneakers to me—comfortable and stable, yet still very capable. There have been a few missteps—this is a beta, after all—but overall once these bugs have been nailed, Karmic is going to be a phenomenal release.

Now that the CD playback issue seems to have been taken care of, my real qualms with Karmic are reduced to stuff like the bad dark theme appearance of OpenOffice.org, which can be forgiven, especially since the GTK+ 2 toolkit will be replaced by GTK+ 3 within the next year—this new framework is much more flexible than the current one, and many annoying little theming issues should be solved at this point.

Overall, I’ve said it enough times already: Karmic is shaping up to be a winner. There are some issues to iron out, but when that happens, Karmic will certainly be a force to be reckoned with and might just make a few converts out of long-time Windows and OS X users.