Mar 30, 2007

Yipeee!! Just one word - Fantabulous.

The most painless install ever. Well, actually, I haven’t yet completely migrated to Ubuntu, but I just might. Today, I downloaded the latest beta of Ubuntu codenamed"Feisty Fawn". The thing that amazed me was that it had to use a restricted driver to get my Wireless working, but it did detected it and also most other hardware on my laptop. Amazing how far linux has come in the last couple of years. No wonder, Ubuntu has captured significant market-share from other linux distros. Now what is required to push wide-scale adoption, is to make a slicker interface. I know there is Gnome and KDE, but we need to rethink requirements. Greedy as I am, I fail to be satisfied by “better than windows” performance. It would be great if the Ubuntu developer push the envelope further, and develop something that can compete with MAC OSX.

Beagle, Banshee and Mono integration would be great. Also, I sorely miss voip functionality that skype and gtalk provide. What is my alternative? Anyone out there with a good app for voip? A developer edition anyone?!

It is amazing how much a little money and the eye for perfection can achieve. Kudos to Mark shuttleworth and his millions! :). Here are some of the features of the new release:

  • A migration-assistant, which helps you move your data from your “old” OS into Ubuntu. Read old as Windows; Wink.
  • New Games: Sudoku and Chess
  • Disk Analyzer
  • VMI enabled kernel, for improved performance when running on VMware hypervisors
  • All new artwork
  • New Graphical Desktop Effects

Update: I just installed Ubuntu on my external USB drive using the QEMU processor emulator. There are several ways to run it off a USB drive.

  1. Create a vfat partition on the USB drive and install using the a special boot sequence as detailed here.
  2. Install on the USB drive and boot using GRUB - A how-to by DougLy.
  3. Run Ubuntu using QEMU. I went with this option, since I can switch between windows and linux without a reboot. Also, installing a small add-on , kQemu, increases the performance to almost that of a native install. There is a wonderful how-to here.
  4. run Ubuntu on Vmware. Do you want a how-to?

I need to have access to gtalk and skype for atleast the next few months, so that has prompted me to stick with an emulated version. I hope to move completely to Ubuntu around mid May. So let’s see what happens then!