On my home machine I have been running Gentoo for years. Using Gentoo has been a real good, if some what painful way to learn how Linux works deep down inside and how open source applications come together to provide a complete solution . Over time though the productivity drain has just become too much. After my last kernel recompile my audio went. The latest alsa drivers would not work, so I thought - stuff it. Time to switch the last remaining computer to Ubuntu. Now I can have bleeding edge without the pain.
Hardy Heron to the rescue
Since Hardy Heron is around the corner I decided to download and install the latest Beta for the release and then just upgrade when the final release is made later this week. After a days experience all I can say is WOW.
Gnome user interface more of the same
My first impressions on booting up was a little disappointing. Every time you upgrade your system you expect to see major cool user interface changes and other eye candy, but since there is a release of Ubuntu every 6 months and, to a large degree user interface technology for the desktop, as it currently stands, is largely worked out, these expectations are unrealistic.
Incredible hardware detection
After my initial anti-climax I began to use the system and then the WOW factor started to take effect. My wireless network card, the RT2561/RT61 802.11g, worked out of the box so to speak. In Gentoo I had never got this to work with any reliability. The USB bluetooth adapter just worked too and so did sound.
Logitech QuickCam 4000
My logitech quickpro web cam, (Logitech QuickCam 4000 Pro USB webcam), about 4 years old, was also automatically picked up and worked with the new Gnome web cam tool called cheese.I used to have to compile the pwc driver separately for this under Gentoo but it loaded the correct module straight off the bat!
Skype with video
I downloaded Skype for Ubuntu 7.04+ and the web cam worked there too! It does seem to be unstable though with my screen locking up occasionally when skype was running. I hope this problem will be solved with the stable release.
Printer support top notch
Printer support has also come a long way. Simply click add printer and the wizard does the rest. In a few clicks I had my HP Officejet 4355 All-in-One working flawlessly. I was told by Ubuntu that my colour cartridge needs replacing :( soon. In the printer manager I selected to share the printer and my laptop was able to pick up the shared printer automatically.
Problems with Via video drivers :(
The only problem I had with hardware was a decent driver for the onboard video card, UniChrome Pro IGP [VIA P4M890 Chipset] . The unichrome driver claims to support this chipset but I had to resort to vesa to get any decent video. Also the default for the monitor refresh rates and screen resolution sucked. Maybe this will be better in the final release but I don't intend to reinstall. Although I will upgrade the laptop.
It also looks like there are major improvements to dual screen support. I will test this once I update my work laptop when the official release is out. On 7.10 dual head monitors worked, but it could do with some improvements, such as auto-detection of the external monitor being disconnected and there were some issues with the mouse curses on the second screen not being refreshed properly.
Firefox 3 is the most amazing browser ever!
On the software side the application that really blew me away was Firefox 3 . Although its still in beta It is super fast and responsive. The offline caching abilities are simply the greatest addition since tabbed browsing! It really has to be experienced to feel what a difference this simple innovation makes to using the web and web applications.
While writing this blog entry and trying out Skype with my brother in Canada the desktop froze up again. I thought, shucks I just lost 30 minutes of blog text. But when Firefox started up, after reboot and re-opened the previously session, it miraculously restored all the text I had typed! Now that is freaking cool.
Java IDEs
On the Java side Netbeans 6.0.1 comes standard. Eclipse is still on 3.2 but then 3.3 is just way to unstable! It was also great to be able to pull in Groovy straight from the repositories.
Ubuntu has a real winner here
What else is there to say :)
