Using Ubuntu 9.04 beta

Code named "Jaunty Jackalope", the next Ubuntu GNU/Linux release 9.04 is scheduled to be officially released in April 2009 (hence the version number). On my work laptop I was still using the 8.04 release. An upgrade this weekend to 8.10 gave me problems with my video card and I decided to start with a fresh install and give the 9.04 beta a try.

In general, things just worked for me. No nasty surprises. The video card (nvidia) worked fine. So a big thumbs up for the Ubuntu community that again delivers quality!

How does it fare in my daily work? I develop Zope/Plone applications for Zest Software. The current stable Plone version (3.x) still needs python 2.4. The biggest change in this Ubuntu version then is that python 2.4 is not installed by default anymore and that several python packages only work for python 2.5 and 2.6. And they conflict with their python 2.4 counterparts. For example, the python imaging (PIL) and ldap modules gave me problems.

Installing the python2.4 package is no problem, just do sudo aptitude install python2.4.

To get PIL to work in my buildouts I created a new file pil.cfg with these contents:

[buildout]
extends = buildout.cfg

find-links +=
# For PIL (python-imaging):
    http://download.zope.org/distribution

# PIL(woTK) - python imaging - added to eggs.
eggs +=
    PILwoTK

Then I ran bin/buildout -c pil.cfg and it worked. (Well, you could just add those lines to your buildout.cfg, and I did something slightly different still, but you get the idea.)

For ldap I created a virtualenv. You may need to specify your python version in the virtualenv call, see virtualenv --help. After that it is just easy_install python-ldap. I got some errors when doing that, which indicated that I needed some more packages. These were the ones I missed and that I added with aptitude (or apt-get):

libldap2-dev
libsasl2-dev
libssl-dev

I could install PIL in a virtualenv too. Or I could add the virtualenv with PIL/ldap to the PATH or something like that. I'll see what works for me.