On my work laptop (a Dell Inspiron 9400), I had been running Feisty Fawn Ubuntu. I thought it kind of sucked, and my wifi card had not worked since I upgraded past Dapper. Enough stuff was beginning to break that I was willing to just stick in a CD and reinstall. What I hadn’t realized when I began was that this is the week that Gutsy Gibbon is being released. What the hell, I thought, let’s roll the dice. I burned the CD and did the upgrade last night.
I really like it. It created a new partition to install, so nothing was wiped out from my previous version. I can mount it and look at anything I need, which came in handy reconfiguring printers and such. The wifi card came back to life after I installed the restricted Broadcom driver. I like that the VPN can be configured and invoked directly from the Network Manager applet, rather than some arcane command line setup or using the hokiness that is pptpconfig. The new graphics were actually quite beautiful and when I was running the laptop at home, they were fantastic. The only drag is that when I hooked in my Dell external monitor at work, it didn’t just work. Using the default config, I couldn’t do anything but clone to the external monitor. By replacing with my old xorg.conf, I was able to get a spanning desktop but it made the laptop’s 1920 by 1200 screen squish into a 1600 by 1200 resolution so everything looks funky right now. If and when I get that resolved, I’ll be delighted with this release. So far, everything jsut seems better than it used to be. Right on, Ubuntu!
As one for whom the most arcane of command line arcana has paid the bills for a lot of years, I’ll also raise a glass to Ubuntu. We have an old underpowered Dell laptop at work that has been given a new life thanks to Ubuntu. The desktop looks nice, the graphics are sharp, and most stuff just works.
If the Shadowman weren’t paying the freight around here now, I’d run Ubuntu on my personal laptop as well.
-k-