Ubuntu 10.04 Review : The Perfect distro ?

Ubuntu 10.04 : The perfect distro?

“Ramping and bumping all around the Lynx has finally emerged. Ready to enthrall you with the utmost desktop experience, loaded with plethora of features and innovations the Lucid Lynx will try to transcend every hurdle that comes in its way. The new Ubuntu release is knocking the door, lets jump in to take a ride of this barbarian lynxâ€

After 2 years of exhaustive testing and development in non LTS release, Canonical let it loose on April 2010 the Long Term Supported (LTS) release dubbed as Ubuntu 10.04 Lucid Lynx. This LTS release will try to enchant the audience in every possible manner. Ubuntu 10.04 boasts the most feature laden release till date be it experimental or the eye candy aspect of the OS. With 10.04 Lucid Lynx, Canonical has tried to provide an unblemished version with refreshing new artwork. Brimmed with the bleeding edge software, Ubuntu tries to cope with the feisty Windows and Mac OSX. So without wasting anytime lets put this Lynx to some exhaustive test as we lay our hands on the spanking new offering from Canonical.
Riding the Lynx

Finally the release day came and that turned out to be tyrannical for Cannonical, Ubuntu hit a bug and at the 11th hour the developers had to postpone the release. However things were not as haphazard as it seems and without much delay the ISO's were made public the next day. Ubuntu comes jam packed with a ubiquitous 700Mb iso loaded with all the requisites needed for a complete desktop experience. Without looking forward I downloaded the X86/64 ISO and burned it at a lower speed in order to minimise the disk squadron. The following test setup used for reviewing Ubuntu 10.04 Lucid Lynx : -

Code:
[B]Desktop :[/B] AMD Phenom II X4 B50 @ 3.6ghz
Jetway HA07 790GX Motherboard with HD3300 integrated graphics 
Samsung S2233 SW monitor with 1080p resolution
HP AIO 1410
WD 640AAKS Hard Disk

[B]Laptop :[/B] Dell Inspiron 1410, Dell Studio 1450, Acer Aspire 5740G

Ubuntu booted nicely and to my surprise it was all pink, the rusty orangish look is gone and a soothing purple colour overlaps the lynx. The booting was nifty and the system was up and running without any human intervention. Ubuntu release notes boasts of speedy booting though that was not the case with the Live Cd. The booting was kind of sluggish and irresponsive.

On to the booting, the first thing that struck me was the implementation of plymouth. Plymouth is an advance boot strapping that provides flicker free boot experience courtesy Kernel Mode Setting (KMS). In addition to flicker free boot experience, plymouth offers diverse theming support for the boot screen. Ubuntu comes with a purple coloured boot screen and thankfully the screen isn't that gaudy. With plymouth up-front you will not be bored with the lethargic Live CD performance. Post booting I was enthralled by the pleasing artwork. The Lucid Lynx packs 2 refreshing and spanking new wallpaper to please you. The background is a blend of purple, black and white colour giving a pleasing look to the eyes. Very professional indeed. To cope up with the new purple background and plymouth, Ubuntu designing team had made some nifty changes on the GTK and Icon theme. Yep! Ubuntu 10.04 adds 2 new theme (Radiance and Ambience). The former is the lighter version and should be your cup of tea if your prefer light theme while the latter is the default theme and has a darker look. Ubuntu comes with a refined new Icon theme with purple blend to counterpart the innerving look of Lucid Lynx.

With Lucid Lynx, Canonical has completely overhauled Ubuntu, not only in terms of looks but now Ubuntu comes with whole new avatar with completely new branding. Ubuntu with 10.04 has gone through re-branding. Ubuntu now has a new logo, look and new software stack has up the ante and will try to turn the table towards the fiesty Windows and Mac OS.

As a part of the desktop usability program Ubuntu introduced Ayatana, debuted with Ubuntu Intrepid Ibex 9.10, with 10.04 the Ayatana project got refurbished and gratifying with the new release. The system panel (part of ayatana project) look more polished and the icons seems to be engraved onto it. The new theme included shifts the windows control option (close, minimize, maximize) options to the left. Quite Macish, the things doesn't seems to be going right for now. Ubuntu clearly tries to imitate Mac when it comes to look either with the Ayatan project or with the Windows decorations.

The hardware support has come a long way, the inclusion of the latest open source software paved the way for Ubuntu acceptance. In all the setup tested Ubuntu worked right out of the box with all the bells and whistle on. Except for the Dell Studio and Acer laptop. Ubuntu failed to configure audio for the former while compiz wasn't working in the Acer laptop. The compiz issue isn't Ubuntu fault either, the lacklustre AMD driver has made another hole in Ubuntu blueprints. The delayed support for Evergreen series of card and Xorg 1.7 (included in 10.04) both in Open source and proprietary driver stack of ATI made an eyesore point in Ubuntu acceptance. However the release of Catalyst 10.4 added the much need support for Xorg 1.7.

Overall the list of improvements rocked me to the core and without mulling over the Live Cd I fired the installer. The installer hasn't gone through much changes, however it did comes with very handy improvements that adds an extra layer of security to the OS. The installer now allows you to encrypt your home folder during installation. One much needed feature and adds a security layer to your personnel documents and settings. People with the portables should give this a try since it hinders people to look up into your system without your permission.

The installation slides have gone through major face-lift, again matching the Ambience theme, overall giving a nice blissful installation experience. The installation was swift and suave, in almost every machine the installation ended up in mere 8minutes. In the end the installation ended up without any hassle and I was prompted to reboot or use the Live disc. Since I was getting hasty I opted to reboot and gave up on the sluggish Live CD.

Roaring high the Lynx Cry

Booting the Lynx post installation was a different story all together. The Lynx booted like a breeze and within no time I was up and ready at the login screen. However the transition from the Log In screen to desktop took a considerable amount of time. The first login was kind of same except there were no icons in the desktop. Pretty weird ! Anyways I added some icons using the gconf-editor. The desktop feels very fast and clean thanks to the commendable engineering work done all around. With the release of Ubuntu 10.04, Canonical has taken a step forward making the Linux desktop more feature rich and user friendly, brimming with new features Ubuntu just tries to provide an unblemished desktop experience. One of the very such feature is cloud and social network integration. Ubuntu 10.04 further proofs the cloud integration with unique feature letting users seamlessly sync the data for online storage or sync their favourite social networking sites and get in touch with their one's.

Ubuntu One, the proprietary offering from Ubuntu is one such cloud option that comes with Lucid Lynx. There are many other cloud storage option available off the shelves, the thing that Ubuntu One apart is the ability to sync notes from tomboy, bookmarks from firefox and contacts from Evolution in addition to data syncing. By default users get a free 2 Gb storage space which they can increase if they want to. Inorder to sync bookmarks you have to install a Firefox plugin that will make all these transaction possible.
Ubuntu%20One%20Bookmark%20Sync.png

Apart from the cloud offering that sets Ubuntu apart from other linux offering, Ubuntu has created a new dimesion in Linux distro by inaugurating the Ubuntu One Music Store. Canonical introduced the music store inorder to provide a viable alternative to itunes, one of the prodigious steps taken to revive the Linux desktop experience. Users can gain access to the music store by using the in house music player i.e. Rhythmbox or can use it by installing an extra plugin in Banshee. The music potuppouri isn't that diverse, considering that Ubuntu is new to this business, it will take some time to get them settled with the music collection. Tracks from famous artists were not listed while I was able to find some tracks from unknown artists. If you want to experience something new you can play the demo of the song without purchasing. Pretty nifty indeed. Though the music store has great features it has some odds in its way. The first thing is that all the song downloaded will be copied in the Ubuntu One folder, means that you can only download song upto 2gb, ones you are out of space you either forced to pay for Ubuntu one storage or move the song from the Ubuntu One folder. The next big setback was the support for proprietary codec. Even though Ubuntu doesn't include/support mp3 codecs by default, Ubuntu music store forces you to install the mp3 codec. The icing was that it even guides you to install it not only this you will not be able to surf through the store until and unless you have mp3 codec up and running. Pretty weird for someone who doesn't ship mp3 codec by default.

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Over the past few years the social networking websites has blown us away by the sheer number of innovations and way of socialising with others. Hanging out with pals and acquittances is no issues, with a mere click away you can find out everything about your knowns. Ubuntu joined the social bandwagon by providing social software's like Gwibber and Empathy. The software are stitched in the Messaging menu. The messaging menu can be accessed from the mail icon in the system panel. A part of the ayatana projectm the menu is a life saver. Not only it categorise internet application and makes the panel clutter free but it also allows you to launch the application from the menu itself. The only change in the menu prior to Ubuntu 9.10 is the notification colour. Previously the menu turns dark when a new message appears in any of the clients but now it turns green when a new message appears. Still not noticeable enough, I still miss quite a few messages while working.


The empathy Im client lets you chat with plethora of Im at an instance. Social networking junkies will be pleased with the gwibber social client. The client lets you post updates at your favourite social website in a mere click. Some of the popular listed websites are Facebook, Twitter and Identi.ca. However I was not very pleased with the client as it failed to load updates and even post them at my account. After banging my head around for solution I gave up on Gwibber and currently using Pino and Chrome Bird for my twitter needs.

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The ayatana project brings forth a new way to manage your online status. A menu that lets you change your online status, posts messages online manage your social, Im and Ubuntu one settings. Yes all that in a single menu the “Me Menuâ€. The Me menu comes with the user picture on top and a Status message bar, using this message bar you can publish status to your favourite social websites supported by Gwibber. Ubuntu has also revamped the notification system with more compact and better looking notifications

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Hardware Support

The new offering tries to abridge the gap between other proprietary OS by providing support for plethora of devices out of the box. The inlcusion of the latest drivers just let Ubuntu achive that, however there are areas that needs to be worked upon. Though Ubuntu booted nicely in every system, it failed to configure the audio in the Dell Studio 1450, and composite effects were not working in the Acer 5740G. The latter is the result of lacklustre driver support by AMD.

By the time of the release the open source driver stack for AMD doesn't have composite support for Evergreen series of card. Howevere things were working perfectly once I installed the proprietary Catalyst drivers. Another set back was the non working bluetooth in the Studio laptop, I just coulnd't get it working though the bluetooth worked flawlessly in Acer and Inspiron model.




Ubuntu was able to set the resolution correctly in all the system used for testing. Printer support is of top notch , but the show stopper was the ipod support right out of the box. Now you don't have to mull over some third party ipod manager inorder to sync songs, rythmbox does the job well. But still lack of a stand-alone feature rich ipod manager is becoming an eye sore for ipod users.

Software and Applications
The lucid lynx comes with the leading edge software to provide a better desktop experience overall. With the latest software Ubuntu tries to provide the best hardware support inaddtion to a balanced software libre. Lets take a look at the list of software Ubuntu Lucid comes with : -
  1. Linux Kernel 2.6.32
  2. Gnome 2.30.0
  3. Firefox 3.6.3
  4. Open Office 3.2
  5. X-Server 1.7

The inclusion of Xserver 1.7 though was not very shocking however changes in the Xserver when AMD didn't had support for it can become detrimental for many AMD users. However AMD turn the table by releasing the Catalyst driver at the same time of the Ubuntu release, providing full support for Amd users with HD4 and 5 series graphics card.

The next in the line is the Add/remove program. Ubuntu comes with a completely new Add/Remove manager now dubbed as Ubuntu Software Centre. Completely rehauled and rewritten, the software centre now allows you to manager repos though software sources. Not only this the centre lets you install multiple application in one go. Yep unlike other linux package wrappers, the software centre lets you just do it. All it does is schedule the multiple task and once the current task gets completed it pushes the other scheduled task to become active. The interface is lucid and easy to work with, however things are pretty rugged at ends.


Even though the center has a great addition to Ubuntu it lacks stability all around. The centre hangs now and them and is not as responsive as the good ol' synaptic package manager. Whatever said the software centre takes the hassle away of complex interface and boggling options.


The Lynx brought some disappointing changes with it. Ubuntu has now removed Gimp from its software libre that comes pre-installed. Ubuntu claims that Fspot can handle Photo handling which I beg to differ. Fspot is not even close to Gimp, it cannot even resize images as efficiently Gimp or even any other software can do. By removing Gimp, Ubuntu has added a Video editor Pitivi and many social clients. Even though getting a replacement for Gimp is not sustainable. The video editor included isn't that great either, I still can't get hold of it. I will rather prefer KdenLive and other video editor available off the shelves. Perhaps Ubuntu is trying to imitate Windows software collection ! Ubuntu also comes with the latest Firefox browser that provides stunning browsing speed on top of new theme engine named Personas.



Ubuntu includes a Disk Manager developed by Red Hat, this handy tool is a life safer for people who want to check their hard disk status, the inclusion surely is a great step ahead and a must have tool to check your hard disk life. The tool works as wrapper for SMART (Self Monitoring and Reporting Tool), which fetch all the necessary info about your hard disk and display in a streamlined manner.



The groaning lynx ?
Ubuntu 10.04 has not doubt turns the table towards the proprietary world by providing a complete and refreshing new distro. Delivering rock solid performance that comes with the latest techno trends supporting video editing, social integration. Online storage sycn and many more. With immense work all around Ubuntu Lucid Lynx sure does provide a pleasing experience. However things are still not perfect, considering the lack of sound and bluetooth support in Studio laptop led me down. Even though Lucid Lynx proudly ride the LTS bandwagon it still looks an experimental release to me. LTS means a long term release with more stable software overall. The inclusion of the experimental utilities like Plymouth, Software centre might add to the downside of this LTS release.

Things are more profound at the other end. With the release Ubuntu has also got a manual which guide the beginner with the basics of linux. The only sad part is the it is not include in the CD. In the end Ubuntu has done it again, for me 10.04 is the next best release after the Fiesty Fawn 7.40. and to those who are still waiting for giving Linux a try, Ubuntu is the must have option to begin with.

Afterall those years spent with other distro, I think I am buntu again with the Lynx. I am having fun riding the Lynx, are you ready for it ?
 
Wow, really liked the review :)

About Ubuntu 10.04, The interface is impressive.

How is Repositery for this release?
 
slow.poisson said:
hows ubuntu compatibility on macbook pro 2010 ? couldnt find much info . hows linux compatibility with macbook??
I don't have access to Mac's so I can't comment. But since Ubuntu comes with such vast and updated driver stack I don't think there should be much problem with Mac installation.
 
nice review.

i just installed it four days ago and it's my first linux distro so right now i am mighty impressed. it does have it's learning curve but nothing too complicated.though for a noob like me the ubuntu software manager is a boon as i just couldn't get the hang of the synaptics manager. also as a new to linux user installing softwares not shown in the software manager was a pita. though i was able to install songbird as it's package had only one exe file, xbmc gave me problems as it had more than one exe files. in the end i had to go to terminal and use some commands that i got from the net which downloaded the whole package again and installed it.
 
In Lucid Lynx did I first experience this :

My Wireless Network (in my notebook was automatically detected and) worked out of the box in Lucid Lynx, while I had to manually configure the wireless settings in Windows 7..

This is the first time I 'm experiencing this. Usually it's the other way round. That is, Windows automatically retrieves the wireless settings, whereas nerdy folk manually update them in LINUX.

Advantage Linux. I'm impressed.
 
Hey Darky, do you think I will face any problem installing this, because i already have Windows XP + Windows 7. I am afraid to experiment as I have original OS. Should I use Wubi or install it by booting from the DVD ?
 
^ You seem to be new to the Linux world. NOTHING will go wrong if you install Linux per the instructions that come on screen. I have Win XP, Win 7 and Ubuntu and all of them work perfectly fine. No issues whatsoever.

If you are really worried, try the Live CD option, explore ubuntu, and once you feel comfortable, go ahead and install it - preferably on a dedicated drive.
 
saqib_khan said:
Hey Darky, do you think I will face any problem installing this, because i already have Windows XP + Windows 7. I am afraid to experiment as I have original OS. Should I use Wubi or install it by booting from the DVD ?

depends if you don't want to screw your Xp+7 then download a virtualization software such a vmware or virtual box and install ubuntu on that ... You get to experience ubuntu without the fear of screwing your xp+7 :)
 
saqib_khan said:
Hey Darky, do you think I will face any problem installing this, because i already have Windows XP + Windows 7. I am afraid to experiment as I have original OS. Should I use Wubi or install it by booting from the DVD ?

I've Linux,Windows XP and Windows 7 on my same hard-disk! I use Windowx XP and 7 for gaming and Linux for surfing and other works.. :)
 
Thank you all for replying. I have some more question (as always). I dont want to use VirtualBox as I dont think that will benefit me much. E.g. if I ever get a virus attack, then my Windows will not work properly, then I wont be able to run Linux also. Therefore I would prefer installing Linux on a separtate partition. Now if I install it on a separate partition, I will get GRUB and this way I will be able to run all 3 OS, right ? Is this so simple, or would I require to do something more also.
 
@ saqib_khan

Its as simple as you said.. Just install these three operating system in three different partitions and it will work perfectly fine.. :)
 
Hah, I'm going to just get Linux Mint 9 anyway which is based on Ubuntu. It was pretty stupid on the part of Canonical to not include Gimp. Well, Mint has GIMP installed out of the box. :cool2:
Good Review though.
 
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