OneAndOneIs2

..because I'm not a fan of software doing things for you. But I'm actually impressed by Ubuntu's latest release.

Not by the upgrade from a previous version - regardless of what anybody else says, I've never yet seen a successful Ubuntu upgrade, and we've got in installed on three different machines. I think the crowing moment was when Lou tried to upgrade Kubuntu and the result was a machine that didn't have KDE installed.

So I wasn't at all surprised that my laptop failed to even start an upgrade. But hey, I had the install CD and a USB CD-ROM, let's see how it goes.

It failed to boot past the splash screen. But in a weird way. I burned a new CD and it booted no worries. There seems to be an issue with our CD-RW disks - Lou's PC just failed to boot Kubuntu off one, but the same ISO on a different disk worked fine.

Anyway... my laptop is the only machine I actually like having Ubuntu on, partly because it's an ATI graphics chipset and sod all computing power, but mostly because I just don't use it enough to bother configuring it all my way, so a distro that auto-configures everything fairly sanely is a good thing to have.

The install was fairly quick, all things considered. I put Xubuntu on it last time, but I'm now running just Ubuntu, and it's an improvement, if only in things like fonts in Firefox - With a 1024x768 screen, good small fonts are vital.

In previous version of Ubuntu, installing all the non-free things like graphics drivers and codecs have been simple but not trivial: You had to hit google, the forums, the wiki, whatever. Not too taxing, but you couldn't do it alone.

I tried to play an AVI file, and the movie player loaded and told me it didn't have the codecs. So far, so similar. Then it offered to download and install gstreamer, so I told it to go for it. Bang, all the non-free codecs are in place, absolutely no research needed on my part. That's pretty impressive.

The ATI graphics driver has a bad reputation, and it's enough of a pig that I've never gotten it working on this laptop before. So it's saying something for Ubuntu that the driver was installed and working before I even looked to see if it was available in Synaptic yet. It's saying even more that I have a desktop cube and wobbly windows, although it WAS a bit of a palaver getting both at the same time. It's experimental software, so I can't really complain. Frankly, even if I hadn't gotten any of the snazzy eye candy set up, it would still be worth having the feature turned on just to get the workload out of the CPU and into the GPU where it belongs.

Suspend to RAM still doesn't seem to want to work, tho I only tried it once so far, but hibernate to disk is still fine, and that's the one I really want/need..

So I've read the "Vista vs Feisty" articles, and seen that they reckon it's a tie. Impressive, since just a few years ago, "Linux will never make it onto the desktop" was the order of the day, and now there are people complaining when the reviews don't think a Linux desktop is better than the latest Windows.

Feisty is genuinely impressive. In about a quarter of the time a Vista install takes, it's given me modern Windows features and speed on a clapped-out secondhand laptop, and I didn't have to use ANY of my (fairly extensive, if I do say so myself) existing Linux knowledge to get it working. Didn't have to use the command line once. Didn't have to know what a package manager was. An idiot with no computer knowledge at all could have done it.

In other words: Look out Microsoft, Ubuntu is now ready for your most valued clients!