Jaunty Jackalope!!

well its been long since I last posted here..
what brings me back here?? well I have been trying Ubuntu 8.10 on my laptop and am definitely pleased with its performance!!
so I thought of sharing things I liked and disliked about it.

Firstly, lets clear out some things about the configuration of my laptop (just because this WILL help in keeping things within perspective)
Core2Duo processor (santa rosa platform)
2GB RAM
NVIDIA 8400M GT (256MB)
160GB HD

this config is what I would say 'OKish' :)
Orright..
I was searching for better options to performance. I was curious about Linux and so I'd asked a friend for a copy of it..(this was probably 2 years back) and he gave me a copy of Ubuntu6.04 codenamed DAPPER DRAKE!!
I tried running it from a live CD but could not. (I have not yet figured that out!! probably CD got corrupted??)
I wanted to run it and experiment with it but simply couldn't.
After a series of failed attempts and burning quite a few copies in a CD to try again, I left the attempts for some other time..

now after almost 2 years the same name crossed my mind..only in a new avatar!!
Jaunty Jackalope!!
I did extensive research and found it extremely impressive. With still a month left for the stable version to come out, I decided to wait.
BUT
After all that I had read and heard, could not wait more than 4 days. So I decided to try out Ubuntu 8.10 Intrepid Ibex (since I'm a new linux user, I decided to play safe and use latest stable version which was 8.10, and wait for a stable release of Jaunty)

here's the thing: I dualbooted my laptop.
Out of 160GB in my HD, I alloted just 5GB of partition to entire Ubuntu OS!! (since I was unsure of whether I could take all that GEEK Fire's heat....sorry I meant GREEK lol)
Since I work on Houdini for my CG work and Nuke for compositing, I just wanted to try out whether these apps would work in Ubuntu (else shifting to Ubuntu would be plain useless....atleast for me)
I'm damn impressed with the performance!!

Nuke used to take ATLEAST 10secs to load on my Windows and it took only 3-4 secs in Ubuntu. (that also because of the notifications I get about nuke running in PLE mode)

It loads up in around 30secs from grub screen till login!
What about shutting down?? It shuts down almost INSTANTANEOUSLY!! (it takes a meagre 6 secs for this..inspite of just 5GB of disk space alloted to it!)
windows takes ATLEAST 20-35 secs for the same.

All this makes me jump with excitement...WHY?? Houdini 10 has been scaled up performance wise (according to the website, H10 will be better at performance along with newer features and options!) and all I needed was a faster OS.

With news of Jaunty bringing on the Blitzkrieg (its loading at a reported 17secs on few machines, of my friends) and scaled performances of Houdini10, I can only be looking out for more!

Now for the parts I did not like about it:

Nuke shows a buggy viewport with patches of coloured squares on it. (the display otherwise on the desktop is simply FANTASTIC! but in Nuke's veiw port, it screws up)
Installation of drivers and few softwares can be real pain sometimes in Linux, (for new users like me)..I wanted to install different version of NVIDIA graphics but the process was pretty time consuming considering I'd need to do extensive research before starting with it.

I hope the above mentioned display issue I have (only in Nuke) would probably be fixed in Jaunty :)
Today, I gotta test Houdini9.5's compatibility with Ubuntu..
Will update later....
phew!! long post :)