Ubuntu Software Center is not slow at downloading, it’s just that the restricted extras are a somewhat big download, and the servers might be too crowded with people upgrading the system.

Is Wine still supported?

Regarding the speed of Ubuntu servers, I recently found that an update was coming in at double digit speed. I opened Synaptic>Settings>Repositories, then opened download from>other>Select Best Server. It then tested all 200+ servers and gave me the fastest one, which I then selected. I just finished a Firefox update that came in at my max speed of 366 KB/s. You’re probably all aware of this, but sometimes a reminder useful. I’m still happily using 8.10 and will continue with it until they force my hand by discontinuing support in April. Some months back I did a search for ext4 and found that there were reports of problems with it. That may have been fixed by now. I have to look into it again. And thanks for the review!

My apologies for the site/forum burps. I’ve had some hosting problems these last two days. They moved me to another server but there still seem to be some bugs happening. Thanks for everybody’s patience while these problems get fixed.

All of your forums are acting up today Jim, getting fatal memory allocation errors. The blog here is also getting intermittent database errors as it was the other day. Hope all of that can be resolved soon, since there is a lot of interest this week!

A few other things worth mentioning…

This version finally makes the switch to GRUB 2 (http://www.gnu.org/software/grub/grub-2.en.html), which is a vastly improved version of GRUB.

The move to the EXT4 filesystem by default means that this version will support the “TRIM” function needed to keep SSDs healthy. Not all SSDs support it yet, but they eventually will.

The sound drivers (ALSA, Pulseaudio) and the 2.6.31 kernel now provide some much-improved audio support. Those using the newer, higher-end cards like the ASUS Xonar series have had to jump through some hoops to use those cards with Linux up to now. Ubuntu 9.10 fires ‘em right up.

I upgraded again today from the 9.10 release candidate to the final and it still worked out well. The one issue I had previously with the NTP Time Server is now gone, so that solves the one issue I had experienced since before the 9.04 release (all during its testing cycle and through these past six months).

With the exception of the LTS (Long Term Support) releases, which tend to have superior testing and support, this is one of the finest releases, certainly in functionality, and the quality, from my perspective, is improved over the previous release. Well worth trying out!