So, a new version of Ubuntu is up. Named: Natty Narwhal, or just Natty for short. I skipped the last 2010 version, 10.10 (Maverick) as I had problems running Kile on it. I have upgraded my desktop and my laptop, and left my server and media centre running 10.04 (Lucid). I had no issues on my desktop, a custom built computer from last year with an ASUS M4A89TD Pro mainboard, an AMD Phenom II Hex core CPU and a XFX Radeon HD5770 GFX card. I had no issues at all installing 11.04, neither did I have any problems with 10-04, only Windows7 gave me problems. On my laptop (HP ProBook 4515s) I do have some funky issues with LCD backlights. I also needed to add the option “nomodeset” to the grub loader, otherwise no problems there either.
11.04 comes with Firefox 4, which wasn’t in the Lucid-repository when I upgraded, and LibreOffice has replaced OpenOffice.org, otherwise I found all my regular software packages in working order, including Kile. Although I do have audio sync issues on VLC player on my laptop that I haven’t resolved yet, it was fine on Lucid.
Natty comes with a new desktop as well, which I did not like at all, but you can get the old one back by choosing “ubuntu-classic” at login.
Harddrive Encryption
One thing I did on my laptop was installing Ubuntu on a completely encrypted harddrive—completely except for /boot that is. I have not tried this before, so I am not sure when this feature was implemented, but you need to download the alternate install CD to get these extended partitioning options unless you want to do this manually. There is a guided option, but what the installer does is to create a small boot partition (I made mine 1GB, but the wizard made it 256 GB) with ext2 file system and a logical volume spanning the rest of the space. Then this partition is encrypted and handed over to the LVM where I partitioned it into a swap and a root partition. With this method you will only need to type the decryption passphrase once during boot.
Now the whole harddrive is encrypted with 256 bit AES encryption—good enough for the US government. I do however notice the demand on the CPU, most notable when playing a HD videofile when the data both needs to be decrypted and decoded and played. I don’t use my laptop for anything demanding, but it is worth noting that 256 bit encryption on the entire harddrive—including the system—is a strain on the CPU. You of course do not have to set the encryption to 256 bit though.
