TechieMoe.com

Introduction:

It is with grudging acceptance that I admit I was actually looking forward to looking at this latest version of Ubuntu. I didn't like it at first, and it took a few iterations before they settled down enough for me, but I can say now that as of 6.10 I actually liked Ubuntu.

I'll pause a moment and let that sink in. I try not to hold grudges against distributions I've panned in the past. Every distribution has its bad days.

This latest installment of the ludicrously-named zoo looks to be more of the same, which honestly wouldn't be a bad thing if it kept the polish Ubuntu had with their last version. Sadly, this fawn needs a good hunter to put it down.

Install:

I had to jump through some pretty serious hoops to get Feisty to even boot properly in my Parallels VM. I had to boot with acpi=off, hw-detect=off, and start_pcmcia=false.

I got this useful little nugget from the Parallels forums. Without these boot parameters the LiveCD would give me a blank screen and just hang.

Out of curiosity I booted my 7.04 disc on my work computer (a Pentium 4 desktop) and it booted just fine. I also tried booting it on my MacBook Pro (Intel Core Duo) and received an error about the X server not wanting to start.

This is the first time I've had any trouble booting an Ubuntu disc on any of my several computers (or the VM), so I was curious what had changed. Some research shed a little light on a possible culprit: bugs in the way Feisty handles the ATI hardware in my laptop.

Apparently there's *something* in there that my MacBook Pro and Parallels VM do not like. I find this rather frustrating because I found solace in the fact that when my MacBook Pro became too old to use the latest version of Mac OS X, I could always install Ubuntu on it.

For now it looks like unless either Apple or the Ubuntu project make some modifications in the future that won't be possible. I don't hold out much hope for Apple's side.

I did a little digging and found a workaround for my X server problem on my Macbook Pro. It involves downloading the alternate install CD and reinstalling a module. It's a hack to fix a bug that shouldn't have been left in a production release to begin with.

Once I got it to boot, the install whirred and beeped and showed me no progress in the progress bar. It was making all the right noises, so I just assumed it was a display bug and let it keep going.

Eventually the install finished and I was asked to reboot. This is not the first time I've run into progress bar issues with my VM so I just assumed it wasn't anything peculiar with the distro itself.

The first thing I noticed was that my wired network required me to select it manually, just like in Debian 4, so that issue is either with my VM or some piece of software commonly used by both distros. Either way, it's annoying.

There aren't a lot of obvious improvements to the graphical environment over 6.10. The login screen was slightly different, but that's about it. Oh, and those infernal bongos were back.

I did notice, to my delight, that the file browser windows actually show up as browser windows rather than that trans-anal puss drizzle "spatial browsing" the GNOME group tried to push on everyone as "better." To be honest, I don't remember if this was present in the previous "Dapper Drake" or "Edgy Eft" releases. I just noticed it here.

I wasn't able to test multimedia support because my disc that contains all my test media would not mount, either automatically or manually. When I tried to mount it manually I received a special device /dev/scd0 does not exist error.

Considering I'd had other problems with my VM and this version of Ubuntu, I decided to check and see if this was yet another documented problem. Turns out it is.

Some of you out there would argue that I shouldn't use a VM for testing things like this. I would say that no previous version of Ubuntu has ever had this many problems on either my Apple notebook proper (running as a LiveCD) or my Parallels VM, so I don't consider this MY fault.

Software Selection:

The usual FOGG apps are present. It's nice to see that Ubuntu uses the proper Mozilla Firefox apps and didn't buy into the GNU menagerie (Iceweasel, et al).

As usual the default software selection is pretty light, but they do have most major tasks covered with at least one program.

With Synaptic you can add a lot more, including the proper Java VM, Eclipse IDE, and enough GPL games to keep you busy for a while. This of course relies on your access to broadband internet.

Who's it best for?

Obviously if you were planning on installing this distro in a VM or on Apple hardware, you might want to hold off on Feisty. To the best of my knowledge the issues I had did not exist in the last LTS (6.06 "Dapper") release.

If you don't have an internet connection or yours is slow, I'd recommend finding a friend willing to download the DVD of Ubuntu Ultimate, which has a ton of software added on to it. It's also (as of the date of this rant) still based on that last relatively stable release, 6.10.

One thing that further vexes me is that both of the major errors I found were officially documented as far as 3 test versions before the final release of feisty, so either Apple/VM customers weren't a high priority or the QA team for feisty was too busy coming up with another assinine name for their next release to bother.

I am very disappointed in this unusually buggy and not at all up to par version of Ubuntu and I hope greatly that either a maintenance release is made soon or the next version has some much more strict quality assurance.

I'd really hate to have to make up some new scatalogical references about this distribution after such a good run in their last few versions.