Jaunty Jackalope is DOA

I just had an unhappy experience trying out Ubuntu 9.04 ("Jaunty Jackalope") on a Fry's Electronics RX-7335 laptop (2.4 GHz Celeron, 512 MB RAM, 30 GB hard drive) over a 54 Mbps 802.11g wireless Internet connection. I first booted from the LiveCD, and the Firefox 3.0.8 browser was going very slowly, taking about a minute to bring up Google, and more than ten minutes to bring up Weather Undergound. I thought it might be a memory swap problem running off the CD, so I foolishly installed 9.04 on the hard drive yesterday, wiping out the Ubuntu 8.10 installation. It was just as slow. Acquiring a network connection through the Netgear WG511T PCI card, talking to a Netgear WGR614 router, took on the order of 5 minutes, with several manual restarts when it failed to connect on the first and second attempts. By way of comparison, that same laptop, running with Ubuntu 8.10, connects to the Internet in 10-40 seconds, without help, on most days, and brings up Google in less than one second and Weather Underground in a shade under eight seconds. It ain't the fault of the hardware.

Since the release of Jaunty Jackalope last week, there are reports on the Ubuntu forums of users having problems getting Samba to work at all with 9.04 and USB devices that worked fine in earlier releases barely working or having stopped working. It may work with a hardwired connection to the LAN, but why bother? Jaunty Jackalope is not usable, in my opinion. I'll wait for release 9.10 this October before I try again and will stick with 8.10 "Intrepid Ibex" until then.