Ubuntu 7.04 (Feisty Fawn) Review

I promised a review on Ubuntu, and I am delivering it to you.

I have for the last couple of years wanted to switch to Linux.  There were three key reasons why I couldn’t switch until now:

1. My WinModem did not work with most newer Linux distributions that I tried.  This all cleared up when I signed up for Cable Broadband last month.
2. I needed Windows XP installed so that the rest of my family could use it and to do video editing.
3. I had no idea which one to choose.  Upon advice taken from a friend from the TLB days which I am in contact with (Justin Gerace), I chose Ubuntu and order my ShipIt cds.

I one night I accidentially corrupted my bootloader.  At the time my XP partition was a mess.  It was slow, it crashed frequently, I was at my wits end.  So I decided to use a Norton Ghost image that I made from my last clean install (recovering valuable family photos and the image using the Ubuntu Live CD mode), applied it to my hard drive, and used GParted to shrink that partition down and then installed Ubuntu.

Ubuntu has a very clean interface and which I grew to (before using ubuntu I was very skeptical of the GNOME interface).  Their repositories are full of useful software and it’s hardware support is fantastic.  There was only one device that needed manual configuration and that was my USB headset; everything else, even my Pinnacle PCTV Stereo PAL Analog PCI Tuner Card worked with both tvtime and XawTV.  Nearing the end of my last XP fresh install stint, the majority of the programs that I were using had Linux versions readily available or had alternatives (Firefox, OpenOffice, VirtualDub etc).  Also Wine in my opinion works best in Ubuntu.

One of the things that I did a lot of on Windows was transcoding video.  I have been using the mencoder program to do my transcoding, especially to XviD as my DVD player had DivX/XviD support.  You need to use the terminal to encode your video, but it works really well.  Five out of Six videos that I transcoded to XviD worked in my DVD player (the sixth one I don’t know why it didn’t work as it played in MPlayer).  It accepts quicktime video as it’s input which is really useful (I was converting the video to mpeg2 using devede then going to windows and encoding it to divx).

The one thing that sets aside Ubuntu from Debian is the amount of packages that they provide.  The advantage with Ubuntu is that they give you the essentials, and allows you to download everything else that you want; whilst Debian gives you all but the kitchen sink and provides a lot of packages by default that are useless (I haven’t use Debian, but from what I have heard that is the case).  For people like me that have very restricted internet usage caps (that’s Australian broadband for you), Ubuntu is a better choice.

Now just because everything that I have said about Ubuntu so far has been positive, that doesn’t mean that I have my own niggling issues with it.  For starters I find it a real pain in the ass to go through the system menus to access the administration programs.  But it isn’t Ubuntu’s fault, more a flaw on GNOME’s side.  A central Control Panel is desperately needed.  Also I find the Network Manager really bad.  I was never able to get my dial-up modem when I had it, and my WPA encrypted WiFi network working, only my ethernet connection.

I also had a lot of trouble getting bittorrent working properly.  I’ve tried Azureus, BitTornado, The Official Bittorrent Client, KTorrent,  QBittorrent, and all five have not worked on me; with the exception of QBittorrent which was the only one to work, but recently stopped working.  I have checked my router and everything should be connected properly.

I also found it really annoying to have to manually download and install the ‘restricted codecs’ like MP3 etc.  I think that Ogg Vorbis is much, much more better than MP3.  But it is the sacrifice you make when you use Open Source software.  It is worth it though.

To wrap up, I rate Ubuntu highly.  It is a very stable, and easy to use distro which is gaining popularity every day; especially that Dell is selling computers preinstalled with Ubuntu.  I encourage anyone looking for a good Linux distro to switch to Ubuntu.  You can download Ubuntu at www.ubuntu.com.  The next version of Ubuntu (7.10, Gutsy Gibbon) will be released in October (it must be my lucky month!  The release of Ubuntu, Leopard and my birthday!), which will see the inclusion of the Beryl/Compiz desktop effects included as standard.

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