TechieMoe.com

Introduction:

Ultimate Edition (formerly known as Ubuntu Ultimate Edition) was apparently started as a re-packaging of Ubuntu for Christmas, odd as that may sound. I don't know all the details behind it (and the website doesn't say much), but I'd imagine it somehow inolved elves.

Since then it's become an odd sort of amalgamation of programs based on the latest Ubuntu and the software preferences of the maintainers. I was intrigued by this distro despite having a website that scorches the eyes, so I decided to try it out.

Install:

The installer is pretty much just a re-themed version of the Ubuntu 8.04 installer. There's not much to be said about it. It works as advertised.

Reboot brought me to a login screen with some music. Logon showed me the desktop, with more music. When running the "Upgrade" (see below) it asked if I'd like to listen to music. I'm seeing a pattern here.

When you first boot there's an icon on your desktop that says "Upgrade." If you have a working internet connection this will allow you to add on packages depending on either a pre-set list (for instance "Gamer's Edition") or on your own (Custom).

I took a look at what all got installed when I chose "Gamer's Edition" and realized quickly that it wasn't for me. It's also not for you if you don't have very fast broadband and several hours to spare because the games it downloads (OpenArena, Saurbraten, Glest, etc) are not small files.

That's not to say they're bad games. Quite a few of the games on the list (Battle for Wesnoth and Nexuiz, for instance) are games I like to play. However I'm not always in the mood to download two or three hundred-megabyte-plus games all in one shot. I think it would be nice to have the option to pause and resume.

There seems to be a trend lately in UI themes, and that theme is black. Black everything. It's evident in Windows Vista, the default theme of KDE 4, and several other Linux desktops I've come across in the past few months, including this one.

I'll be the first to admit I was skeptical. Now, I like a nice dark theme as much as anyone. One of the first themes I add on a plain Ubuntu install is "darklooks." My eyes thank me. However I wasn't sure how the shiny piano-black theme was going to work for me at first.

If you can get past the obvious similarity to Vista, I think it might actually grow on you. It did for me. I found myself not really paying attention to the theme after a while, and that's a good sign.

Software Selection:

Ultimate Edition comes with a massive amount of software installed. Some of it (such as multimedia codecs) is useful. A lot of it (such as GDesklets) is not. I found myself skimming through Synaptic on my laptop and removing around 200 packages to get things the way I wanted.

The usual Firefox, OpenOffice, Pidgin and GIMP were installed, along with several HTML editors (Screem, KompoZer, Amaya), several media players (Mplayer, Totem, VLC), and a dozen different CD and DVD video encoders/extractors/creators. Just about every menu in the applications drop-down was full of something.

EnvyNG was also available for those with internet to smooth the install process of 3D drivers. WINE 0.9.59 was included along with WINE-Doors. I played with it just to see what it did. With an internet connection it will set up a sort of Synaptic-like interface where you can search for various MS Windows programs and install them.

One utility I found useful was Ubuntu Tweak. It does what it sounds like, lets you tweak Ubuntu. I used it to change some of the applications that are launched when I log in. I also told it to lock down my panels so I wouldn't accidentally remove the trash when trying to empty it. I do that a lot.

Conclusion:

For Rig 2 with no internet, it was a pretty close approximation to what I want. Lack of Java was annoying, but not a deal-breaker.

For both rigs I ended up having to do a lot of post-install cleanup to get rid of stuff I don't use. I do this for regular Ubuntu as well, but with the extra stuff UE puts on there it took longer than I would have liked.

I'm conflicted about this distribution. It adds some really neat stuff on top of a regular Ubuntu install, but I'm not sure if the effort to remove the things I *don't* want out-weighs the effort of getting things I *do* want in standard Ubuntu.

Configuration issues aside, Ultimate Edition is an interesting project that I plan on following in the future. It's a strong contender for my desktop due to the inclusion of several packages I'd otherwise need a net connection to fetch.

With some customization options on what software gets installed, it could easily be my distribution of choice, for desktop and laptop.