William Brown Street

Installation

This time I opted again for a fresh installation of Ubuntu, as this time the upgrade was combined with an Hard Disk upgrade. Again I used the external CD/DVD drive connected via USB. The installation of Gutsy BETA went smoothly. I made three partitions, manually. The first one for the root ("/") and setting it to 15GB. The home is the largest partition, 140GB and finally for swap 5GB. The installation took less then 30 minutes. Booting for the first time, I was kind of shocked as the Ethernet device was not setup correctly. But on the second boot, the device appeared and was working correctly.

Overview

Network

Networking was easy. Everything worked out of the box. On the first boot the wired network is not detected. And it seems that each time a new kernel is installed on the first boot the wired network device is not detected. The PRO/Wireless 3945ABG works great, and I didn't have to modify any configuration file. Together with NetworkManager, I believe connecting to a WLAN is so easy. 

However I cannot use anymore the OPENVPN plugin for NetworkManager. I set the configuration as with Feisty, the Icon of the NetworkManager shows that it is connect to VPN, however I don't get a connection? I don't know yet where the error might be, it may also be that the DNS is not working. I am on this issue…

Sleep/Hibernate

Sleep has always been difficult to set up, so I was really surprised when I tried the sleep function and it worked! Without any additional fiddling, sleep is very stable and much faster then with Feisty. To set the x60 to sleep, it takes less then 5 seconds. The wake up is done in less then 5 seconds too. So this is the first thing I think Gutsy made a big step forward. Hibernate is working too, without any additional configuration.

Dual Screen 

I have tried the new Dialog to configure xorg.conf file. And it did not work. I really didn't expect it to work properly. Because from previous experience I know that changing the xorg.conf file is absolutely not straight forward, especially when Desktop Effects are involved. This is means I will have to manually edit the configuration file for fixing multi display setup. More to come soon…

Battery Life

The battery life has not improved and with 2 hours of battery life(without standard configuration), Ubuntu Gutsy stays far away from Windows power management. I am still hoping that in the future there will be more effort put into power management. Of course I will try to get more life, so stay tuned on my blog. 

Bluetooth

Bluetooth is great with Gutsy. There are some Bug fixes I used to have with Edgy and Feisty. I followed my own guide about how to setup bluetooth with Gutsy.(here) So file transfer works, use the w810i as remote control for presentations, … The gnome-phone-manger is still not working and has the same bug as before. I believe it's the same version of the package.

Software and Codecs

I didn't use Automatix or EasyUbuntu to setup the codecs and stuff. First of all just know what you want. The easiest way to install the codecs and other stuff for multimedia follow the ubuntuguide.org. I installed the following packages.

1. Handling RAR files, packagesName: unrar
2. Plugin for Firefox for JAVA, packagesName: sun-java6-jre sun-java6-plugin sun-java6-fonts
3. Multimedia Codecs, packages: ubuntu-restricted-extras w32codecs libxine-extracodecs gstreamer0.10-plugins-base gstreamer0.10-plugins-good gstreamer0.10-plugins-bad gstreamer0.10-pitfdll
4. Play back DVD, check out here: http://ubuntuguide.org/wiki/Ubuntu:Feisty#How_to_install_DVD_playback_capability
5. Play movies in Firefox, packages: totem-gstreamer-firefox-plugin

I did not choose to install flash with a package. Actually flash development for linux is going fast. The available Alphas of flash often include bug fixes. Therefore i recommend to install the latest available release candidate of flash. Get it here. Just download and run the script ./install-flashplayer.sh. Be sure to remove all flash instances before installing a new one. Check for available flashplayers, 'locate libflashplayer.so' and rename all these files to mv libflashplayer.so libflashplayer.so_OLD. And then launch the install script.

Check this post out to make the widgets of Firefox fit better with Ubuntu. here

This is basically all you need to enjoy UBUNTU. 

IPod

Ipod is working with Ubuntu. The album Cover art is not displaying, but music can be transfered to and from the Ipod to your Ubuntu. (http://www.williambrownstreet.net/wordpress/?p=92 )

SonyEricsson W810i

It works just as fine as with Feisty.(here,or )

What's great?

Well first of all Gutsy looks great and also feels really good. It is as usual great for using. There are some new features which are really cool and useful. People who are new to Linux should definitely go with Ubuntu. (I have lately tried SUSE 10.3. And really I don't like it.) Ubuntu tries to keep the Gnome strategy, keeping things simple and not offering too much configuration option a normal user never needs.

Sleep and Hibernate are working out of the box, which is for me a very important point. Before Linux can compete with Windows or OSX, Linux must get the hardware to run correctly not only 90%, but 100%. Therefore I believe all my hardware works now properly under Ubuntu(some devices need extra configuration, like fingerprint reader,…) which means now Linux can compete with Windows(or OSX)

A new feature is for example I really like: when you use 'sudo'  and your asked the password it now prints a [sudo] tag before the password: item. So now you know which password is meant to be entered. Often I was confused when I used sudo ssh… which password was actually asked.

Another feature  I have been missing for some time is that Evolution displays a system tray icon that you received new E-Mails. This is now finally available.(On Click the systray item does nothing…This could be improved to go to Evolution and the Inbox where emails arrived)

Would I recommend to Upgrade to Gutsy? Well Yes and No. If you have a system where you got everything you need, and are not so horny for the new features, then stay with your system and wait for Ubuntu 8.04 Long-time Support. If you really want to get the best ubuntu experience …upgrade. 

Regression? 

The first time I install the BETA Version of Ubuntu and I don't find any regression. If the Ubuntu team continues to do such a great job, my blogging will be useless someday…