After posting my short review of Ubuntu 9.04 a couple of days ago, I felt that I had not done justice to it, nor to the effort I’ve poured into learning it. This post will attempt to both provide interested parties (myself included) with a complete reference, and chronicle my missteps in a (hopefully temporary) migration to Ubuntu.

First, set up your partitioning. I’ve been dual-booting Fedora 10 and Mac OS X on my MacBook for a pretty good while, so this was already done. If your MacBook has only OS X, you’ll want to follow the guide here to set up dual-booting with BootCamp, or if you’re sure Ubuntu is for you, then follow this guide to set up for single-booting. As I mentioned, I had Fedora 11 in a separate partition already, so I didn’t need to do any partitioning. At this point, be sure that you install rEFIt in OS X for dual-booting. If you want Ubuntu (or whatever you’re putting on your MacBook) to boot by default, uncomment the “legacyfirst” item at the end of refit.conf.

After a dismal showing from Fedora 11 on my MacBook, I downloaded Ubuntu 9.04 last Friday. It is slick; they’ve got a lot of stuff working very well on the MacBook 5,1. I have a few gripes about Ubuntu so far, but I am using it until somebody figures out how to get multi-touch functionality for my MacBook in Fedora 11. So, here’s the good:

• Wireless works, out of the box. Even in the LiveCD.
• Trackpad works for single-touch right out of the box (like it did in Fedora 10); making multi-touch work only takes a few minutes following the guide.
• Firefox is a stable version.
• Sound is fixable.
• While flash and pulseaudio aren’t perfect, they’re a lot better than in Fedora.

And now, the bad: