Sunday, November 11, 2007

Ubuntu 7.10 - Gutsy Gibbon

The latest version of Ubuntu was released but I didn't jump on the wagon right away to upgrade. I felt that nothing in the newer version had anything new I needed and that it wouldn't make a difference for me. Well, much to my surprise I was wrong. The new version doesn't have any major changes, just a lot of little ones.

So, the new version adds in all the latest programs like Firefox 2.0, Pidgin 2.2.1, OpenOffice 2.3 and Gnome 2.2 containing all of its goodness. In the new Gnome many enhancements were made to improve performance, features and usability.

One of the changes in Gnome is its interface. They have updated the themes a little bit and the way you select the theme. Now, you have all the theme related stuff (theme, background, font, interface, visual effects) in one place separated by tabs. The standard themes are nice (I like the new Clearlooks in dark blue) but you can always download or customize your own. There has been a change to the visual effects part. In Ubuntu 7.04 they added the ability to turn on and off special effects (compiz) by opening the "special effects" application. Now this has been moved into this new tabbed interface. For the special effects, there are three options. You can have no special effects, some effects (transparency and such) or full blown effects (wobbly windows).

One new application is the "Screens & Graphics" program in Ubuntu. This program allows you to easily setup your video card driver and monitors through a simple GUI interface. Now, I tried and tried, but I couldn't get this interface to get things setup for me. I have a unique monitor though that doesn't get properly detected so I'm not surprised to see an issue here so I manually went and setup my monitor the old fashioned way.

They have also upgraded Gaim where it is now the new Pidgin (the replacement for Gaim). The new interface was adapted nicely to the Ubuntu theme. I didn't like the new Pidgin at first when I used it in Windows but they have made several changes to its Linux counterpart and I must say, it fits in very nicely. Its default settings are very light and don't consume unneeded space.

For networking there has also been a big improvement. Ubuntu now has a nice GUI interface that easily lets you allow which network you want to connect to. It now integrates with wpa_supplicant so you just plug into the GUI interface the information (passcode, type and such) and it will then connect. It worked very nicely, though its nowhere near perfect yet but it is a step in the right direction.

Those are the major enhancements. Most of the other changes are small but nice. One major thing I noticed in the upgrade was the performance. My installation of Ubuntu on my computer was actually Ubuntu 5.10. I have upgraded the distribution 5 times now. I'm not sure at what point Firefox started performing slowly for me, but I had noticed recently that Google Docs and flash videos sometimes slowed down the system and if I tried to multi-task with one of these open and running the whole system would come to a halt. I found though, once I upgraded to the new Ubuntu 7.10 I was flying along in Firefox. It performs now like I upgraded my computer or something. I'm interested now to boot up the previous version and see if was just a bad upgrade or if it is the version of Firefox. Ultimately, it doesn't matter, all that matters is the new version with Firefox is fast and reliable.

All in all, the new version of Ubuntu is very usable, and they have added a few new utilities that will make it easier for the average user, but there is still some work to be done.

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