Anyone using Ubuntu 9.04?

[Jarod Wilson]

Bill Bogstad wrote:
> On Tue, Apr 28, 2009 at 7:55 PM, David Kramer <david-8uUts6sDVDvs2Lz0fTdYFQ at public.gmane.org> wrote:
>> I read one disturbing thing from
>> http://www.eweek.com/c/a/Linux-and-Open-Source/Ubuntu-904-the-Jaunty-Jackalope-Sports-Modest-Software-Improvements-But-Big-Plans-535187/?kc=EWKNLLIN04282009STR1
>>
>> "Also along the lines of making its graphics configuration less arcane,
>> 9.04 is the first Ubuntu release to do away with the Vulcan-death-grip
>> Ctrl-Alt-Backspace key combination that you can use on most Linux
>> distributions to dislodge misbehaving graphical applications by killing
>> your X server session. Once upon a time, this came in handy fairly
>> often, and the fact that it's become an anachronism is a mark of Linux's
>> maturity."
>>
>> Huh??!!  WTF would they remove the ability to kill the X server?  I
>> don't care how damn stable they say it is, sometimes you get a
>> hard-to-kill process and you just want to nuke from orbit without a
>> complete restart.  Sometimes when I lose sound and I don't know what's
>> got a hold of the device, that's my only recourse.  Can someone confirm
>> this blasphemy for me?
> 
> Err the official release notes for 9.04 say it's true (about half way
> down the page)
> 
> http://www.ubuntu.com/getubuntu/releasenotes/904

Much ado about absolutely nothing. The default is now to not enable 
ctrl-alt-backspace. You can easily turn it back on if you must have it, 
either by a line in an xorg.conf or a xkb setting, iirc. Also, its an 
upstream X change, not an Ubuntu change, Fedora 11 will feature the same 
behavior.

I believe the forthcoming OpenSUSE version patched around the upstream 
change different, instead making the first press of ctrl-alt-backspace 
sound a system bell, then if you hit it again, it does what its always done.

>> ext4 sounds too risky for me,

Nah, its not so bad, been running it non-stop for over a year on 
multiple systems. There have been occasional issues, but nothing that 
significant for most use cases that hasn't been fixed rather quickly. 
Fedora 11 is shipping w/ext4 as its default file system, and its held up 
quite well through the development cycle. Helps that Red Hat actually 
employs people who work on file system code to be confident in making it 
the default though... (sorry, couldn't resist).

>> though better handling of big files would
>> be handy on my MythTV drives.
> 
> I've been using XFS for that for almost two? years now.

ext4 is pretty low-risk for MythTV-type data, but one of our file system 
hackers at Red Hat who works on both ext4 and xfs and is a mythtv user 
himself still recommends xfs over ext4 for a mythtv storage volume, but 
only by a slight bit these days.

--jarod