Apparently it just doesn’t work.

There’s a bug in the uvcvideo driver that kills the other USB ports, and causes suspend and hibernate to fail. You can apparently fix this by being ninja and hitting fn+f6 before it loads, but I’m not that good, so I just blacklisted uvcvideo. If you’re having the same problem, you can stop the driver from loading by blacklisting it.
sudo gedit /etc/modprobe.d/blacklist.conf
and add the line
blacklist uvcvideo
anywhere in the file (to the end would be easiest, so if there is a fix you’ll be able to find it & unblacklist it). Of course, this disables the webcam. On one hand I’d been using 8.04, which also lacked (native) driver support for the webcam, so I don’t feel like I’m missing anything really (after I reinstalled the OS I didn’t bother recompiling the driver, so I’ve been without it for a while). Still rather annoying, and I can’t tell if they’re working to fix it or not -but I certainly hope so.

The other main issue I had was a very, very annoying bug in the screen brightness. On startup, and whenever I adjusted the brightness, it would oscillate between the set brightness and a level or two below, making the screen flicker. There was apparently some magic where you could hold your right mouse button down for a while & it’d stop, but I’m not doing that every time. The fix mentioned in the release notes worked for me, which was to “edit /etc/default/grub and add nomodeset to GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX, then run sudo update-grub“. Restarted, and there was no flickering. I could change my brightness, and no flickering. What a relief. I have yet to figure out if doing this has any negative effects.

Other than that I really like this release. I have native wireless again! [after a glitch, I had downgraded from 9.04 to 8.04, which didn't.] It does seem faster, though maybe not as fast as I’d heard. It also seems like my battery has slightly better life, not sure if that’s either true or related, however - I only installed it yesterday, after all. I’ve got a few screenshots, if anyone is interested. On a purely aesthetic note I’m very happy with the installed themes, it took very little tweaking for me to find something I liked. And usually I have to go an play with the panel backgrounds, edit the gtk config file…

Not sure if these are actually interesting to anyone, but… First is my empty desktop (well, the USB drive I was using to transfer the screenshots to this computer is there, but otherwise). Next is the file browser, a few changes but nothing amazing. Third is fake-using GIMP - obviously when I have a 1600×900 monitor I don’t really *want* to use GIMP on a netbook, but it’s not impossible at all. Finally, we have the Ubuntu Software Center, which I’m not that impressed with. I mean, I understand the reasoning behind consolidating package management and all, so I guess that’s cool. And not everything can be shiny. It is super easy to use, just like Add/Remove Applications. I guess I’ve crossed some sort of elitist line, or something, since I prefer command line. But I can say that about a few things (like command line twitter, that was odd).

So there’s my view on things. A bit of trouble to start with, but overall shiny. I’ve got Geany, Exaile, and a LAMP setup, so I’ll be happy.