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 5740GUbuntu 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.
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.
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 : -
- Linux Kernel 2.6.32
- Gnome 2.30.0
- Firefox 3.6.3
- Open Office 3.2
- 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.
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 ?
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 ?
