Technical Zone

Download 9.04

X.Org server 1.6

The latest X.Org server, version 1.6, is available in Jaunty. A number of video cards have been transitioned to free drivers as part of this update.

The -ati driver has received numerous fixes and performance improvements. It now uses the EXA acceleration method by default. 2D acceleration support for the newest R6xx/R7xx family of cards is also available. 3D support is available up to R5xx cards for -ati. An updated -fglrx proprietary driver is available for R6xx/R7xx users who need 3D support.
New style for notifications and notification preferences

Included in Jaunty is a simple menu which can be used to set preferences for notification icons, such as where they pop up on the taskbar. Ubuntu 9.04 beta also includes a whole new notification system, as shown in the Flash movie here:

http://www.markshuttleworth.com/wp-content/uploads/2008/12/jaunty904_notifications_example1_web_092.swf

Boot performance

A number of improvements to the Ubuntu start-up process bring significantly improved boot performance to Ubuntu 9.04 Beta. Please open bugs if you experience any degradation, and tag them with boot-performance.
Linux kernel 2.6.28

Ubuntu 9.04 Beta includes the 2.6.28-11.37 kernel based on 2.6.28.8.
Ext4 filesystem support

Ubuntu 9.04 Beta supports the option of installing the new ext4 file system. ext3 will remain the default filesystem for Jaunty, and we will consider ext4 as the default for the next release based on user feedback. There has been extensive discussion about the reliability of applications running on ext4 in the face of sudden system outages. Applications that use the conventional approach of writing data to a temporary file and renaming it to its final location will have their reliability expectations met in Ubuntu 9.04 beta; further discussion is ongoing in the kernel community.

Ext4 support in GRUB was provided by Colin King. If you choose to upgrade your / or /boot filesystem in place from ext2 or ext3 to ext4 (as documented on the ext4 wiki), then you must also use the grub-install command after upgrading to Ubuntu 9.04 Beta to reinstall your boot loader. If you do not do this, then the version of GRUB installed in your boot sector will not be able to read the kernel from the ext4 filesystem and your system will fail to boot.

Ext4 support in gparted has been provided by Curtis Gedak.
Cloud computing

Ubuntu 9.04 Server Edition makes it easy to experiment with cloud computing. Eucalyptus, an open source technology which is included in Ubuntu as a technology preview, enables you to use your own servers to deploy, experiment and test your own private cloud that matches the Amazon EC2 API. You can dynamically create virtual machines, configure multiple clusters into a single Cloud and even provide an EBS (elastic block storage) equivalent and an S3 compatible storage manager.
Turn-key mail servers

The dovecot-postfix package in Ubuntu 9.04 Beta provides an easy-to-deploy mail server stack, with support for SMTP, POP3, and IMAP with TLS and SASL.

dovecot-postfix was packaged by Ante Karamatić.
Testing wanted

There are a number of specific areas of focus in Ubuntu 9.04 where the developers could use from more feedback from users. Read on to find ways that you can use the beta to help to improve the Ubuntu 9.04 final release.
Suspend/resume testing

The Ubuntu kernel team has been gathering information about what laptops do and don’t suspend and resume correctly. If you are running Ubuntu on a laptop and would like to participate to help make sure the kernel team has accurate information about Ubuntu’s support for your hardware, please see KernelTeam/SuspendResumeTesting.

Hotkey testing

Hotkey handling has been a source of difficulty in the past two Ubuntu releases. Significant improvement has been made to the range of hotkeys supported in Ubuntu 9.04, but more user feedback is still needed, to help identify those hotkeys that are not yet supported. If you have a keyboard with a hotkey that doesn’t function as you expect, please see Hotkeys/Troubleshooting for directions on reporting this problem in the right place.
Kerneloops

Gone with the wind

Let’s begin with what features are no longer a part of the operating system. Movie Maker, Windows Calendar, Windows Mail, and Windows Photo Gallery are gone. However, they can be installed or run from Windows Live. As you know, Mail, Photos, and Calendar are already an active part of Windows Live and have been for a while. Movie Maker is the new addition, and it is now available as a beta on the Windows Live site (http://download.live.com/moviemaker).

Turning off Windows features
As you know, the ability to disable certain features in Windows has been a part of the operating system for a long time. For example, the Windows XP Add/Remove Programs utility contained the Windows Components Wizard, which gave you the ability to remove a very limited number of components from the operating system.

In Windows Vista, the utility was renamed Windows Features and the user interface was streamlined with a single tree structure. And while it allowed you to disable more than XP (mainly because it had more optional features) it still did not allow you to remove features that Microsoft considered main features of the operating system.

In Windows 7, the Windows Features does allow you to remove several of those main features. And, as you can see in Figure A, the real stunner here is that you can now turn off Internet Explorer.

If you would rather use Firefox or Chrome as your main Web browser, you can just clear the Internet Explorer 8 check box to turn it off. And that’s just the beginning!

If you would rather use Nero to burn your DVDs, you can clear the Windows DVD Maker check box. If you don’t have a need for Windows Media Center, you can turn it off. If you prefer iTunes, disable Windows Media Player.

Hate Gadgets? Just clear the Windows Gadget Platform check box and never see them again. Want Google Desktop Search instead? Remove Windows Search. Standardized on the PDF format? Clear the XPS check boxes.

Wow! You really now have a choice!

What does turning off really mean?

As you can imagine, turning off is not the same as uninstalling. And, since the feature must be installed in order for you to be able to turn it off, this is not the same as picking and choosing during Setup. According to Microsoft’s Engineering Windows 7 Blog:

“If a feature is deselected, it is not available for use. This means the files (binaries and data) are not loaded by the operating system (for security-conscious customers) and not available to users on the computer.”

They further back up the advantage of turning off an installed feature as opposed to uninstalling it with:

“These same files are staged so that the features can easily be added back to the running OS without additional media.”
Some applets remain

Oh, I almost forgot… While you can turn off more than you would have imagined in Windows 7, Notepad, WordPad, Calculator, and Paint are not among the features you can turn off and will stay where they are. At least three of the four have new features and new interface designs.

AUSTIN, TEXAS — With Intel’s Nehalem-based Xeons gathering like a storm on the horizon, AMD today gave the first working demonstration of its potential counterpunch: a six-core Opteron processor code-named “Istanbul.” Istanbul is a fairly straightforward upgrade over current ‘Shanghai’ Opterons: a 45nm processor with 6MB of L3 cache that fits into a Socket F-style motherboards, only with six cores rather than four. As a result, the upcoming Istanbul-based Opterons will serve as drop-in upgrades for existing Socket F systems. The chips will take advantage of the same 2P, 4P, and 8P infrastructure as today’s Opterons, with HyperTransport and two channels of DDR2 memory per socket.



AMD has previously stated that Istanbul processors will become available in the second half of this year, and the firm hasn’t yet provided any more specific guidance about when to expect Istanbul-based systems. However, the presence of working silicon would seem to indicate that Istanbul Opterons could be introduced much earlier in that broad “second half” time-frame than originally anticipated.



AMD showed us several demonstrations of Istanbul silicon in action. The first was a simple showing of Task Manager on the Windows Server 2008 desktop, in which the utility showed activity indicators for each of the 24 cores in a quad-socket system.




Simple, yet impressive for what it indicated. The second demo was conducted on a dual-socket system with 12 cores. The main OS was Windows Server 2008, but the system also hosted three separate virtual machines: one each for Windows Server 2003, Red Hat Linux, and SLES 11 x64. Each VM had four cores dedicated to it.