3 Cheers for 9.04!

Did a very smooth upgrade from Ubuntu Intrepid Ibex (8.10) to Jaunty Jackalope (9.04). So far, it's definitely better and has given no trouble at all.

• Cheer #1 — Sound is fixed! Yay! In 8.10, no matter how you configured sound, you might get it working, sort of, and then after 48 hours — no sound. Adobe Flash sound stopped. Realplayer sound stopped. Every other sound, including the Ubuntu login sound effects, stopped. And the Gnome Sound Recorder wouldn't work without a lot of re-settings (each time). The fix? You had to reboot (not just re-login). Now it all works, and works, and works, like the Energizer bunny.
• Cheer #2 — OpenOffice v3! (Actually 3.01.) I tried upgrading to v3 under 8.10, but nothing worked out. OOv2 with updates opened MS Word sort-of-XML .docx files, but OOv3 does a better job and starts faster. I'm not tied to OO for everything. Sometimes I use Gnumeric for spreadsheet, and Abiword for formatted word processing.
• Cheer #3 — Notifications! Instead of yellow popups with X-close widgets, we now have fade-in-out black-background popups. Seems like Pidgin IM, volume/mute and networking have out-of-the-box support for the new system. But for Thunderbird, see below.

Now that we're done upgrading, let's look at some details.

Sound

These days, streaming sound is delivered mainly via Adobe Flash and Realplayer. Ubuntu's PulseAudio system manages these inputs. You should be using PulseAudio, not anything older. The Jaunty upgrade seems to have forced this, which is good.

The only Adobe Flash package needed is adobe-flashplugin. In /usr/lib/mozilla/plugins, you should have a libflashplayer.so of some kind (actual file or symlink to the real file).

For Realplayer, you have to download v11 from real.com and follow the instructions. Then check again in /usr/lib/mozilla/plugins to see if you have something that looks like this:

nphelix.so -> /opt/real/RealPlayer/mozilla/nphelix.so

nphelix.xpt -> /opt/real/RealPlayer/mozilla/nphelix.xpt

That should theoretically work, but it's not enough. User adbs over in Ubuntu Forums gives these further instructions:

1. In the Realplayer go to Settings->Hardware. Under Audio Driver select OSS.
2. Edit /usr/bin/realplay (a shell script). Insert "padsp" before the $HELIX_LIBS/realplay.bin "$@" command:

padsp $HELIX_LIBS/realplay.bin "$@"

padsp is a wrapper for PulseAudio and this little mod to the realplay startup script makes it actually work! Thanks, adbs!

Here are some streaming-sound URLs that I like:

• music.aol.com — A boatload of free and excellent music channels. Scroll down about half-way and click Listen to AOL Radio Now. No login needed.
• www.democracynow.org — Excellent 1-hour daily newscast (sound and video).
• www.bbc.co.uk/worldservice/emp/pop.shtml?p=/worldservice/meta/tx/flash/live/eneuk.xml&l=en&t=audio — BBC World Service News 7x24
• www.bbc.co.uk/fivelive/live/surestream.ram — BBC 5-Live UK radio station, great hosts and interviews, no commercials.

If you can hear the sound from the all of the above, you're in good shape with Ubuntu sound.

And here's a detailed explanation of all the Linux sound stuff from markbuntu at Ubuntu Forums.

Notification

Some (many?) apps don't use the new Notify-OSD notification system. This is especially noticeable with Thunderbird. There are currently 2 TB addon's available for this:

Mozilla Notification Extensions 0.1.1

and

Ubuntu Notify 1.3

I could not get the first one to do anything. The second one works fine. Perhaps in the (very) long-awaited Thunderbird v3, this will be built in.

9.04 isn't an exciting all-new version of Ubuntu. But when you think about it, we didn't really want that, did we?