Today I was fed a series of updates for Karmic. At first things went wacko, but only because I'd installed a test version of the NVidia drivers on my system while trying to fix the problems myself. After I reinstalled the standard driver and logged back in things seem much better. My Compiz crashes appear gone.

More importantly, the flash click interactive bug is fixed - when Karmic first hit the streets, on 64 bit with Flash and advanced desktop effects you couldn't interact with most flash animations and videos with the mouse (without having to pull some tricks.) Thankfully that issue is gone.

Also, it appears they've fixed the flash performance issues - hulu.com works great in full screen now without having to increase my CPU speed to max manually.

Very nicely done, Canonical. Very nicely done indeed.

After upgrading to Karmic, I had no sound in Amarok. I tried to force myself to use Rhythmbox, the "official" player for Ubuntu, but I just can't stand it, especially for Internet streams.

So, here's the fix to make Amarok work properly:

sudo apt-get install phonon-backend-xine

Followed by:

sudo apt-get remove phonon-backend-gstreamer

Of course that's the console way - you could also open the Synaptic package manager from the System + Administration menu and install and remove the packages with point-n-click. Just look for "phonon-backend-xine", install it, then look for "phonon-backend-gstreamer" and remove it.

I don't know if this will affect a new installation of Ubuntu 9.10 or not.

Some people may not know, but Canonical, the company that manages development of the open-source Linux based operating system "Ubuntu", tags their releases a couple of ways. First, the release number is determined by the month and year it's released. For instance, Ubuntu 8.10 was released in October of 2008. They also tag an animal name with each release: "Gutsy Gibbon", "Hoary Hedgehog", "Intrepid Ibex", "Jaunty Jackalope" (due in April) and now "Karmic Koala" for October.

The kismet part is that "Karmic Koala" will be the first release to include Eucalyptus, which one can only hope was not named specifically for the Ubuntu release.

Eucalyptus is an open-source cloud computing platform that allows you to build your own cloud infrastructure similar to Amazon's EC2. With it, you can dynamically assign resources as your computing needs grow and shrink.

One of the big fears of cloud computing has been what happens when the cloud goes down? What if a fiber line is cut and your office can't reach Amazon's or Google's servers anymore? What if Amazon wakes up and decides one day they don't want to host cloud applications anymore? With Eucalyptus you can have your own cloud, running in your own datacenter.