Ok, I finally got a few minutes to start testing Oneiric Beta 1 on my HP Elitebook 8440p. Since it is the computer that I use on my daily job, I preferred to launch it using a USB key and not to jeopardize my Natty’s working installation.
It is not by lack of faith toward my fellow developers, but rather because I would hate to be unable to serve our customers following known bugs being applied to my gear. So here are my first thought. I will follow up by visiting the “known bug” section to see if the things that I encountered have already been fixed.
And since I’m using a live USB setup, my first test is on the packages found on the Beta1 DVD image. I didn’t get to run an update to get fresher packages yet.
Video
My first great pleasure is to realize that I no longer have to rely on the Nvidia proprietary drivers to get started. Of course, I only get access to Unity 2D, but at least I have an environment that is very similar to the 3D version (I really can’t see the difference). But I’m not a big user of animations and things like that. Another great thing is that I only had to go to the “Display” section, activate my second 19″ screen, put the appropriate screen definition and the second display started to work.
One thing though : the Dash menu which used to appear on the far left of the leftmost screen in Natty (normal behavior) now appears on the left of the laptop’s screen (my 2nd screen is at the left of the laptop) so the Dash selection area is in the middle of my workspace.
Peripherals
Wireless works out of the box, but this is nothing new. Same with the built-in webcam. As I already indicated, Dual-screen is also working out of the box, but apparently without the 3D acceleration.
User Interface
The first thing I noticed after typing the “Super” key and typing “term” to get a CLI environment is that, after hitting <TAB> to select the terminal Icon, I no longer have a graphical return (i.e. the icon doesn’t get highlighted). It still seems to work as if I hit <Return>, the terminal does get launched. Maybe a side effect of using Unity 2D.
As with the Dash menu, the lens do appear on the right screen (laptop screen) unlike with Natty. One thing that is no longer working is the workspace switcher. Clicking on it in the Dash does display all four workspaces, but when I select any workspace, it always brings me back to the first one. Might be some wrong setup.
Software
So far, I have had a few crashes (software library, Compiz manager) but most things seem to work. The software library crashes have forced me to drop back to CLI to get things installed. UbuntuOne works flawlessly
It is now time to go back to my daytime job, which is fixing our customer’s problems. Hopefully, I’ll have some more time to explore Oneiric before it ships out. But I really like my first impression.