Upgraded to Ubuntu 7.10 Gutsy Gibbon
Yesterday I finally made the upgrade to Ubuntu 7.10 Gutsy Gibbon. I was actually really behind, and still only had 6.06 installed. I have a Mac Pro that I do most of my work on, and then I have a laptop that dual boots Windows XP and Ubuntu so it’s not my primary machine and it totally slipped my mind. I actually tried to do the upgrade around six months ago to 7.04 but my apt-get database had somethings wrong with it and I didn’t get around to looking at the problem until today.
I’m not totally sure what the problem was, I got an error message whenever I ran sudo apt-get update and I couldn’t update or install any packages. So today I googled the message and found that I just had to delete a symlink and then it ran fine.
In all, it took three installations, and around 2300MB to download. I’m not sure if I could upgrade straight from 6.06 to 7.10, or if it would have made more sense to just uninstall and install 7.10, but I just went into update manager and hit the upgrade distribution button. That was it. From there it did some quick prep and then told me it had to download 700MB to download all of 6.10 (Edgy Eft). The entire time to download the 700MB and then install was about one and a half hours. I still did some work while it was installing which was great, and I loved the fact that I didn’t have to do anything once I hit that upgrade button. I’ve got a feeling upgrading to Vista from XP isn’t as simple.
So I repeated the process to upgrade from 6.10 to 7.04, and then again to 7.10 from 7.04. Always the same process, just hit the update button and then wait about an hour.
First Impressions of Ubuntu 7.10 Gutsy Gibbon
So my first impressions of Gutsy Gibbon are that it is quite an improvement. Not to say that 6.06 had any real issues, but the one thing that really bugged me was the wireless network configuration application. It was painfully slow, and it wouldn’t let me store more than one profile like Windows does to auto-connect to whichever network I’m close to. So I’d have to go into the config options and then change my SSID and password when I was at work and when I was at home. It was major pain. In 7.04, the new Gnome Network Manager was included and it makes connecting to wireless networks much easier.
Desktop Effects (Compiz Fusion)
This was the coolest new feature. It won’t necessarily help my productivity, but the new desktop effects definitely put Vista to shame, and give OS X a run for it’s money. The funny thing is that my laptop isn’t able to run Vista, but it can run Compiz with no slow down at all. It’s only about 2 years old, but the Vista upgrade adviser said if I install Vista, I won’t be able to use any of the new visual effects (which really aren’t that special when you’ve been running OS X for four years). I can’t really show a screen shot of it in action, but here’s a link to a demo. The new animations when you maximize the screen and move the window are really cool, and they’re really smooth on my AMD 2100 processor. Another cool feature is that when you click and drag on a maximized window, it will automatically resize the window and let you drag it around. It makes it much easier to move around windows and maximize/restore windows.
Deskbar - Kind of like Spotlight
The other thing I thought was really cool was the new deskbar feature. It is really similar to Spotlight for OS X. You type in a search and it will search your computer for files, web sites, and applications.
Graphical Configuration Tool
One thing that was really difficult for me in past versions of Ubuntu and other Linux distributions was setting up multiple monitors. I had to edit a text file, and couldn’t find any half decent documentation on it, and I didn’t have the time to spend trying to set it up, so I left it at a single monitor. Now there’s a GUI tool to configure multiple monitors which is great.
