The installer is largely unchanged from Hardy Heron, 8.04.  One new & welcome change is the newly integrated support for installation to dmraid devices.  These devices are largely SATA RAID controllers, such as the Intel Matrix controllers, largely software-driven.  I preferred this to the Linux RAID code, since replacing a drive/rebuilding a mirror seems more straight-forward this way.  As my server includes an Intel Matrix controller onboard, I went for this option.  It worked very well.  The device names are a bit long (/dev/mapper/isw_diaedigfhd_Volume03), but that’s fine.  I did a pretty basic layout, with 250MB of ext3 for /boot, a 4GB swap partition and the rest as JFS for /.

Also new in Intrepid is DKMS.  What’s that, you say?  Your lucky day, I say.  At least, if you use software that requires special kernel modules.  Back in the good old days, when you did something like that, every time you upgraded your kernel, you had to rebuild your custom kernel modules as well, a largely manual process.  DKMS takes the manual part out of the picture here.  You install a DKMS package, and when you update a kernel, the drivers from you DKMS packages are automagically built and installed.  I’m excited about the possibility of vmware module and DAHDI (the new name for zaptel) DKMS packages!

I’ve already installed VMware Server 2.0, which went well, aside from a bit of trouble compiling the vsock module.  I suspect this will get worked out before too long as well..

Intrepid Ibex, it’s worth the trip.  If you’re  looking to update an existing server, change your sources.list and dist-upgrade away.

So far, it’s pretty smooth.  Adamm’s even got a new kernel spun for Intrepid.  This time, I skipped over using the very good UNetbootin, in favor of connecting a USB DVD drive.  Mind you, my eee 1000 is no longer in a stock configuration, having changed out the wifi card in favor of an Intel Wifi Link 5300, so I don’t have to worry about the rt2860 driver.  That said, someone’s already created a package that uses dkms to install the driver on Intrepid.  For me, the driver is now in the box.  No more downloading snapshots of drivers and building them myself. Yay.

So, what’s working?  Everything.  No, really, at least hardware-wise.  In truth, I didn’t try the microphone, but I’d bet it works, since Adam knocked that one out in a previous kernel release for Hardy.  What’s not working?  Hotkeys.  Newer ACPI drivers, so different interface (no longer under /proc), so scripts && utilities need to be rebuilt/adjusted a bit.  That’s bound to happen over the next few weeks, as this release heads out the door.  I’ve hacked a bit on the scripts I was using for my Hardy install (courtesy of elmurato), and I’ve got CPU scaling and control of the webcam working with the hotkeys.  More to come later on that.

What’s new & cool?

Network Manager 0.7 – Now your 3G devices should work automatically.  At least mine (Pantech UM175) does.

Xorg 7.4 – Hotplug support for pretty much everything you’d want to throw at it.  Most users can run without an xorg.conf with this release.  Speaking as someone who’s spent years hacking away on XF86Config and xorg.conf files, that’s mighty cool.

DKMS – This one’s a monster.  So, you’ve got some kind of special bit of hardware that requires a special driver of some sort.  In Hardy & earlier, you’d have to install new packages for the driver each time, or rebuild it every time you installed a new kernel.  With DKMS, the modules are automagically recompiled for each new kernel version.

GNOME 2.24 – The latest & greatest.

So far, Intrepid’s behaving pretty well for me.  By the time it rolls at the end of the month, it should be pretty solid.  I do wish that the Ubuntu gang would swap out Usplash for Splashy though..  Oh well, I’ll wind up doing that myself in the end, I suppose..