Going Gibbon with Codeninja

As the latest in our continuing efforts to keep our listeners well informed about the latest in tech, last night I took the plunge into Ubuntu 7.10 “Gutsy Gibbon”. And so, without further ado, I present “24 Hours Hence, a trek with the Gibbon”

I’ve been using Ubuntu since Breezy, so the move to Gusty Gibbon yesterday was perhaps less of a heroic leap and more of an inevitable shuffle forward into Canonical’s next version of it’s wildly popular Debian based GNU/Linux distribution. A full day into this new release and I have found a few things that I like, a few minor annoyances, and am largely left with the satisfied feeling that the Ubuntu community has delivered us a very find update that, while not revolutionary, certainly adds a level of polish that can serve only to increase it’s appeal among Users and Enthusiasts alike.

In the spirit of the old adage “begin at the beginning” we’ll start my review of Ubuntu 7.10 at the start of the journey, the install process. Having had a system that had been upgrade from Dapper to Edgy, and then to Feisty, I had accumulated a lot of cruft, as is wont to happen on any system that has been running with regular usage for a while. I decided to replace my “Frankenbuntu” with a pristine install strait off the CD. As Canonicals servers were being hit hard, I decided to grab the i386 iso live cd/install from Bittorrent. With a large number of seeders already sharing out the latest version, it took about 2 hours to grab the 650 meg file with rtorrent. I used the time to back up all of my important data in case anything went awry in the installation process. Six freshly baked DVDs to add to my backup collection later, and I was ready to burn the ISO and get started.

The first thing I noticed when I booted up the LiveCD was that it seemed to take an extraordinarily long time to start. Although it’s been a while since I’ve booted up into a LiveCD, the 20 minutes it took to load up the desktop onto my 3.0ghz Pentium D with 2GB of ram seemed long to me. Once the load process had completed however, I was presented with mirror copies of a very nice looking gnome desktop running at the native 1600×1050 on both of my screens. I double clicked the “Install” icon on the desktop, selected my language and timezone preferences, and manually edited my partition table (although the option to automatically partition using the entire hard drive was available, I chose to manually edit my partitions so that I could format /boot and / while simply setting a mount point for the partition with my /home) then clicked next and turned in my chair to watch disk 4 of my recently acquired Sliders Seasons 1&2 DVD set. As I reached the middle of the third episode on the disk, about an hour and a half into the install, I started to get concerned at that the installer had hung at “82%” while attempting to update the apt sources. I was nearly ready to kill the process and attempt to restart the installation when it finally finished updating and happily marched onward to a 100% complete install. I removed the CD and rebooted.

Post-installation the boot process went as quickly as Feisty ever did, and before long I was looking back at my familiar Gnome desktop. Many applications were now missing from my menus, but Gnome 2.20.0 had gracefully loaded all of my preferences from Feisty and presented me with a familiar desktop. I immediately killed the desktop and dropped down into the dark and shadowy realm of the command line to start the process of making this distro my own. The next order of business was to get my eye-candy working. Although the restricted manager makes it easy to install binary video card drivers, I was unsure as to if it would have the latest drivers necessary to power my GeForce 8600, and I already had the nVidia driver package saved, having needed to install it under Feisty. The first order of business, of course, was to installed the necessary for building the driver, so I ran an aptitude install on the kernel source, kernel headers, kernel development, and build-essential packages. I ran into a wall. Owing, most likely, to the heavy burden placed on their servers from thousands (millions?) of eager Ubuntu users pounding their server like a butcher tenderizing a bit of round steak, the Ubuntu repositories were responding with the approximate speed of a woodpecker attempting to bore his way into an aluminum pole. About half-way into disk 5 of Sliders and the packages were installed.

The NVidia driver installation went smoothly, to my great relief considering the difficulty I had in getting software to properly build against Feisty’s kernel. I restarted GDM, logged in, and launched the NVidia Settings Manager to set up TwinView on my dual screens, and within a few minutes had 3200×1050 of dual widescreen bliss. The next order of business was compiz. Enabling desktop effects was as simple as going to the Settings menu, going to Preferences>Appearance, and selecting Visual Effects. At this point I had transparency and wobbly windows, and was sitting in compositing window manager bliss. That is, until I went to spin my desktop cube. Unlike Gnome, compiz did not retain the settings I had created running CompizFusion under Feisty, and what’s worse, the CompizConfig Settings Manager is not installed by default. Another small eternity waiting on the repositories to respond and I had managed to get compiz configured the way I like it.

Development tools installed and visual effects enabled, it was time to get down to the business of using this latest entry into the Ubuntu family. I brought up Firefox to do some surfing, and found that it too had read all of my settings, and loaded up all of my extensions, leaving me with a seamless experience. Evolution continued to chug away as well, presenting me with all of my email as though I had never done anything to interrupt it’s operation. Pidgin, too, loaded up my IM accounts and signed me on without hassle. Launching all of these applications did, however, introduce a new hassle that I had never experienced with Feisty. Although TwinView pretends that both screens form a single ultra-wide X display, under Feisty both KDE and Gnome had recognized that I had two distinct screens. This meant that I was able to maximize a window in one screen, and it would fill only that screen. I was also able to full screen video on one monitor, leaving the other free to work on. For mysterious reasons that I will have to investigate further, this seems to be broken under Gutsy, leaving me to manually size my windows, and constantly having to re-position dialogs and new windows that appear in the crease between my monitors.

Speaking of video, every time I do a new installation, I’m reminded of how difficult various proprietary media formats can be when installing Linux for the first time. Although attempts to play video with unsupported codecs did generally result in an offer to download and install the proper coded (along with a rather firmly stated warning about the non-free or questionably legal status of the codecs) it did remind me just what a pain multimedia can be.

Final Thoughts

Pros:

• Easiest installation process of any OS I’ve used (Linux, Windows, and Mac OS X all included)
• Sense of polish and overall quality
• Huge community with many resources for all levels of user
• repositories for just about anything you could want
• the power of debian, with the easy of…well just about anything that’s not debian

Cons:

• I’m not a huge fan of some default application choices
• No DVD version with more packages on the disk
• LiveCD takes FOREVER to boot up
• Repositories are slow when many people are updating (not a downside normally, but you might wait a couple weeks to install if your worried about this)
• Dual Screen window positioning weirdness
• No way to configure visual effects out-of-the-box, except enabling or disabling them

Final Verdict: Definitely worth the upgrade, although given the slowness of the servers you may want to wait a week or two before taking the plunge.