29th October 2009 was one of the most anticipated days in the whole computing and Linux community, with a lot of hype being generated by Canonical for its flagship Linux distro, Ubuntu Linux. With Microsoft’s Windows 7 and Apple’s Mac OS X releasing in the fall along with Ubuntu 9.10, the OS market was in for a 3-way match. Like most others I also waited for Ubuntu to launch, being stuck in my brand new Compaq CQ40 laptop with the ghastly Windows Vista.
Installation
I finally found the link on 30th October. Downloading it took ages, due to all the traffic (an unbelievable 8 hours). Then quickly I downloaded the UNetBootIn program for Windows (2 A.M. in the morning and no blank CD at hand), installed it on my USB stick and booted it. The boot screen it presented was reminiscent of previous Ubuntu versions I’ve used (8.04 and 8.10). Canonical had changed the default usplash theme into a very Apple-esque style, a pulsing white Ubuntu logo. Booting into it, it showed a very cool Orange desktop, and the now familiar Ubuntu installer icon. Most of the hardware worked out-of-the-box, including my bluetooth adapter, the Alps touchpad, RealTek Ethernet, (Debian couldn’t run this baby.) No wireless networking and compositing graphics, though. The “Hardware Drivers” detected it though. And my final hardware test that only Debian could pass, a rare Chinese USB modem was detected by Ubuntu 9.10, though it could not run it through Network-Manager. I had to use pppconfig to set it up. Finally, being satisfied with the hardware options, I installed it on my hard disk. Forgetting that I had only two partitions, one of 11 GB and the rest being approximately 300 GB. I had to reinstall Windows Vista changing my partitions to my preference. (Need Vista, most of my hardware like sound-card and SD-MMC reader has no driver, so XP doesn’t work. Plus Linux still doesn’t run Need For Speed and GTA.) I rebooted my USB drive with Ubuntu and installed. The standard Ubuntu installer is still there, with the added advantage of being twice faster. (Could be due to I’m running it from a USB stick). The installer though has a minor bug. During selecting the clock, the distro changes the setting of my hardware clock, considering the BIOS clock time to be based as USA Eastern. No hitches other than that.
First Look
Ubuntu made me realize the potential of my AMD AthlonX2, with 3GB of RAM (standard fare). But still, for me, coming from a PC having only a Intel Pentium 4 with 256 MB of RAM, it looks damn fast. I plugged in my LAN wire provided by my college and quickly installed the Broadcom wireless drivers and the ATI Radeon drivers for my graphics card. Voila, desktop compositing and squiggly windows in a single click! Ubuntu comes with a neat load of features. The audio backend is less buggy than 8.10 (nice work by the PulseAudio team). The audio properties window also has a “overdrive” system, where the volume can be increased up to 150%. In my laptop the function keys also work nice, and the notifications look cool. The default list of programs are well a standard that Ubuntu has set for other distros to follow. OpenOffice.org 3.1, Gimp, Totem, F-Spot are standard fare. The new ones include Empathy IM client, Ubuntu One and Ubuntu Software Center. I don’t know why Ubuntu decided to add Empathy, removing the trusted Pidgin IM client. They could have worked with Pidgin to integrate it better with Gnome. Anyways, Empathy sucks! The help is useless. I could not get onto Yahoo! Chat rooms with Empathy, it asked for servers. Pidgin got that in a flash. Ubuntu Software Center is just a modified version of “Add/Remove Programs” in previous Ubuntu versions. Ubuntu One is a cloud storage support, free up to 2 GB, something that currently Microsoft Windows does not provide (Windows 7 does have such an option though but it’s not cheap.) Time to have some fun!
Fun Time
With the basics set up, it was time to set up my PC the way I like. I installed the codecs for most of the audio/video formats (gstreamer good, bad and ugly) as well as the Avant Windows Navigator, set it up to look cooler, with a MAC OS X style look, and changed some other options. Still I had not yet touched the command line, installing everything from Synaptic. I decided to try the command line a bit,
$ sudo apt-get install vlc dosbox fluidsynth qsynth timidity fluid-soundfont-gm fluid-soundfont-gs
OpenOffice opens Microsoft Office 2007 documents by default, the ‘de-facto’ standard nowadays in corporate places. Feeling a bit sorry and nostalgic about Windows, and the old days, I installed Windows 3.11 (something I found on a certain abandonware site, won’t tell which one. More about that later.) running on top of Ubuntu and Dosbox.
Things I missed in Ubuntu
There is nothing I can say I dislike about Ubuntu 9.10 though I miss certain things that I found better in other Linux distros (their USP I guess). First of all, though it is simplified for a ordinary user to use, it does not have a proper Control Panel, ala Windows. SuSE has their YaST, which currently is open source, so it’s high time Canonical incorporated something like that in Ubuntu. If you need more control in Ubuntu, you have to hit the Terminal, something that scares the hell out of novice people. The RTFM approach might work for Gentoo, but never for Ubuntu. Secondly, the brown/orange theme, though being very cool, looks sickening after some time (personal opinion, nothing to do with Ubuntu!). On a scale of 10 I would rate it 9/10, it is a very cool distro, something I would like to keep on my laptop until Ubuntu 10.4 comes out.
