A word or two about Ubuntu Gutsy (7.10)

Not wanting to repeat many a blog about the new Ubuntu release. I would only like to mention my specific experience, although initially not too impressed, after 24 hours of running and using it, I changed my mind completely.

I have a laptop and a desktop, both running 1.5 Ghz CPU's with 512 MB of RAM. Definitely not high performance machines, but rather solid work horses :-)

I started with my laptop last Friday. I decided to do a full network upgrade, rather then downloading the alternate install CD, and starting from there.

My laptop needed to download 1.1 GB, and took about 8 hours to do so. Everything went pretty smooth, no issues, just a couple of unclear questions, about replacing certain files.
A note here; the GUI pop-up had no or little information except the question: Replace or Keep. But if you move the GUI pop-up aside so you can see the info in the terminal, more informative text and additional options were displayed, allowing me to make a better decision.

Once everything was downloaded and installed, I was a bit disappointed with the look & feel, I expected something new, but rather Ubuntu decided on furthering the 'human' theme. After a couple of days of using it, I am actually happy that they took this route. I like the brown, its soothing and easy to work with. My CPU starting crunching quite solidly (almost worrying me), until I found the 'Indexing Preferences' setting, and tweaked it a bit. And now I feel my laptop is faster and a bit smoother then Ubuntu Feisty (7.04). So with the laptop, I only had happiness.

Now, my desktop was a different story. Seen as I was happy with my laptop's results last Saturday I also decided to upgrade my desktop. I got a bit of a discount on the files to download (roughly 800 MB, rather then 1.1 GB). Installing the files took a bit longer, and had to abandon it while in process. I had to leave the installation in mid-progress as it would not have been appreciated if I had chosen the feisty upgrade over my girlfriend's birthday party ;-)

Now this is not a good idea if you live in South Africa where you can't completely rely on the electricity supply 24/7. So I came home the next morning to realize we had had a power cut from 1 am to 10-ish am.

I started up my desktop, dreading the news of a failed install, and expecting the worst by having to cleanly install it. Well it did fail. I booted up almost completely, until the login screen. Then everything went black. Panic. Help. Thanks to my MS Windows instincts I pressed 'Esc' and a text based error message popped up leading to a terminal screen. Ok, now I had a chance. I started up my laptop, went to the Ubuntu Forum, did some searching and there was the answer:

sudo dpkg --configure -a

And that was it. It started processing the rest of the install and within 5 minutes I had my login screen back. And I was into Ubuntu. Then making sure all upgrades were properly installed by running the Update Manager. Saw that the power outage had probably corrupted or broken some additional packages, so I had to do a partial upgrade which went smooth, relatively quick and it was all done. Ready to explore & play.

Now I must say, that I had a similar experience with Win2K in the past, and I had to wipe the disk and start from scratch. And there we have it. Ubuntu has saved me, once more.

Now what do I like about Gutsy (I don't have a powerful enough video card to experience Compiz & Beryll);

• Tracker Search Tool is very impressive (although I can't wait until Thunderbird indexing will be enabled)
  
• My boot up time is much faster then under Feisty
• After the initial indexing of files, it seems as the whole OS is a bit faster
• It's always nice to get your main applications a face lift (Open Office, GIMP, etc)
• Thunderbird had a nice Lightning upgrade (now email and calendar are far more tightly integrated. A great step forward)
• It did not install Plone 3.0, and my Plone 2.5 instances were left untouched, saving much time re-setting my Bika demo sites.
  

My wish list (but not all of these are Ubuntu's responsibility)

• I feel that Evolution is still better integrated then Thunderbird. And I would like to see that changed. :-)
• Indexing of Thunderbird emails
• Keep improving the boot up speed
• Keep improving OS speed
• Tighter integration (out of the box) for PDA's and cellphones.
• More informative error (& installation) messages. Yes I am an end user, not a developer!

That's it. Now I just feel that the next 6 months won't pass fast enough for the next version of Ubuntu.