Ubuntu Jaunty Jackalope

(I am catching up on all the things that I've been meaning to blog about in the past few months.)

There are good reasons already to upgrade to the Jaunty Jackalope (development release). Either for good, or just to install the following two packages:

(1) git 1.6.x (release announcement).

(2) Firefox 3.1 beta. I have to say, I wasn't sold on Firefox 3.0. But Firefox 3.1 has convinced me to switch back from Epiphany. First, it is blazing fast. Second, in continual usage for several weeks now, it seems to be pretty crash-proof. Third, it actually has a bookmarks system that I would use. When Google can get you what you want 0.5 seconds after you type it in, you really have to rethink the idea of poking around through menus to find your favorite sites. Anyway, my gratitude goes to everyone involved.

Epiphany had also been starting to get on my nerves lately. It seems to crash at least once every other day. The address bar is really laggy sometimes (if you've ever used SSH over a high-latency connection, you know how irritating this is). And it is not as fast as Firefox 3.1, at least yet.

Jaunty is interesting for another reason. In this release, Ubuntu is attempting to make bzr repositories available for the packaging+source of every single package. I am looking forward to seeing what people will do with this. If it could make it easier for casual developers to get the source for a package, poke around to fix a bug, isolate their patches and send them to Ubuntu (or upstream), it could be a huge force multiplier.

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