Ubuntu Fiesty Fawn

I was a die hard fan of Suse Linux and was hesitant to try other Linux distributions.

Suse 10.1 worked flawlessly on my laptop and I was able to even get the Xgl working on my ATI Radeon X700 graphics card.

Post on Suse
Suse 10.1
Xgl Working on Suse
XGL on Suse – Photoset

The other Linux distribution that is very popular among geeks is Ubuntu. My friend Harish recently shifted to Ubuntu and this further motivated me to try out Ubuntu.

Unlike Suse distribution which is around 4GB, Ubuntu 7.04 codenamed Fiesty Fawn is a lightweight distro at 700MB.

Installation

1. When I booted up via the Installation CD, I was directly taken to the “live mode” of Ubuntu. The installer even detected the sound card and welcomed me with a audio clip 🙂
2. On the live mode, I was able to connect to Internet (via my secure D-Link Wireless Modem/Router)
3. Ubuntu even detected the SD card and displayed a shortcut for the same on the desktop.
4. The live mode is not a persistent mode and hence I proceeded with the actual “disk” installation. Again this was made easy by an “Install” shortcut on the desktop.
5. Best thing was that I could browse the Internet while the installation was in progress 🙂
6. The installation interface is not that great.
   • The time display was wrong even after setting the correct time zone
   • The Partition manager was very slow. After every change in the partition configuration, the installer used to scan the hard drive and this was awfully slow.
7. The installation also read the user profiles on the windows partition and asked if I was interested in importing the user profiles !

Post Installation

1. The Ubuntu startup screen with the Orange progress bar does look cool.
2. On starting up Ubuntu, there was a continuous dump of error message. The error was something like “mmcblk – error 1 – sending read/write“. After some time I realized the error was related to the SD card. Ubuntu had trouble reading the SD card (Note: Ubuntu had no issue reading the SD card in “live mode”)
3. In terms of software, Ubuntu does come bundled with all the goodies. There was even a free Sudoku game ! Cool eh 😀
4. Even though I didn’t install any video drivers for my ATI card, proper resolution was set for the wide screen display.
5. I turned on the Desktop effects and even this worked flawlessly. I had the “wobble” and “cube” effects working with no issues.

Screenshots (Click to view the enlarged image)

More screenshots can be found here
http://www.flickr.com/photos/venukb/sets/72157600269090101/

Try out Ubuntu if you haven’t. It does look like a good alternative to SuSE.