Originally published at Random Geekage You can comment here or there.

Ubuntu 8.10 codenamed Intrepid Ibex was released yesterday. DIligently, I launched the update manager to begin the update process. As usual, a ton of stuff to download. Mostly happened without a hitch.

Flash player was the hitch. Took over 2 hours to download 3.8mb. That is pretty bad. Once it was finally installed, all was good. Upgrading a running system is always gonna be interesting. Things change before you. Like Firefox. I launched it and found that it looked shinier than it used to. Some of the panels had a glossy effect to them. Not sure if it is a theme but it looks good. A yellow bar appeared suggesting that I find out about my rights by clicking on the button. That launches a new tab with the url of about:rights which basically says you can modify and redistribute the firefox code but not the icons. Another bar appeared a while after asking me to restart firefox due to some other upgrades which is a nice feature.

Gnome, in my chosen theme, looks pretty shiny as well. Nautilus has tabs! That is awesome. No more multiple windows!

Transmission (bittorrent client) has also had a polish. The web interface is no longer a seperate addon but is built in which could be useful for folk wanting to check up on their downloads from elsewhere.

I do have a criticism of Transmission though. There is no tray icon to minimise to. I have to keep the main window up to download which is not a good thing. Not sure if it is a bug or not. Thats about the only bad thing I have found so far.

Pidgin has also been improved a bit. Has support for the Live Messenger personal message things. Still no webcam support.

One of the new features is a usb stick creator which allows you (as the name says) to create a bootable pendrive with ubuntu on it. Aparrently lets you store documents and whatnot on it, might be useful. Wonder if it will let you use non ubuntu isos.

Overall, the upgrade has been good. Not had a proper poke around yet but nothing major has broken.