First Jaunty Tweaks

An update to my Hardy LTS desktop caused my nVidia drivers to puke again, and for some reason they refused to reinstall. It's all related to having installed this system first as a Gutsy install, and using the nVidia drivers downloaded from their website. Every time there was a kernel upgrade I'd have problems, and it started getting worse with package file conflicts recently.

My hard drive had also gotten a bit small for me, so I decided maybe it was time to go ahead with a fresh install of Jaunty (which I'd downloaded just before the drivers went wacko) and take the opportunity to throw in a new hard drive.

On my first install attempts the Jaunty CD would simply drop to a BusyBox console prompt and never install, without giving any indication of what the problem was. I did a bit of googling and found that this could be caused by a crappy SATA control chipset on the motherboard. I then wasted the next hour attempting to update my BIOS without Windows, a floppy drive or a USB stick. I finally was able to run the BIOS update by placing it on a CF-II camera card and using that. Unfortunately there was no improvement.

My next attempt was to download the "Alternate Install" CD and try it - it was more helpful because it gave me the error - turns out it wasn't the hard drive controller but the classic IDE controller on the motherboard - halfway through the install my DVD writer was vanishing. I simply swapped out the DVD Writer with a SATA DVD reader and the install went smoothly from the standard install disc.

I still haven't tried swapping my DVD writer back into play, but I'll get to that soon and see what happens.

First impressions? Wow, the boot time will amaze you! As everyone has already said, there's a lot of little updates to Jaunty - mostly on the backend, and not a lot of major changes to the complete user experience. OpenOffice 3 and the new notification system are nice. What I have noticed though is everything just seems... smoother. The fonts are cleaner and there's a lot of little fine touches that just "feel" better. For instance, changing your desktop background causes it to very quickly but smoothly fade from one background to the next. The entire experience is just... smoother.

So, on to the fresh-install tweaks. First, my old Adobe Air + Tweetdeck tutorial still applies in Jaunty (see the Tutorials menu above.) Of course you'll want to take the following steps:

For MP3 support, Java, Flash, etc:

sudo apt-get install ubuntu-restricted-extras

And to make Amarok play MP3's properly:

sudo apt-get install amarok libxine1-ffmpeg phonon-backend-xine phonon-backend-gstreamer

And on a side note, I would caution anyone against using the "Computer Cleaner" utility unless you know what you're doing. It will attempt to remove a lot of things that you might find you really wanted.