A good moment for a backup


After doing a full backup of my trusty Ubuntu 6.06 system at home I decided to give it a shot to the new Ubuntu 7.04 (aka Feisty Fawn). I just decided not to be on the cutting edge and I did the install only after other users were reporting successful installs. So far I've updated a couple of my systems, the first one, an ASUS pundit worked like a charm and the graphics card was detected ok. The second system, with an ASROCK mobo with an ATI Xpress 200 graphics card was not so lucky and though the install worked I needed to do some black magic to get the graphics working at the right resolution and, more important, to get 3D acceleration.

Why is 3D needed now? Well, it is not really needed but after so many comments about all the "experimental" graphic features nicely included in the last Ubuntu I decided it will be nice to try it out (don't worry I am not posting any video to youtube).

The bottom line is that the new 7.04 feels a better Ubuntu than ever before, with a simple installation even if you are a beginner and the eye candy with transparency, windows that wobble when you move them and the (compiz) rotating cube thing make it funnier too. I particularly like the effect by means of which a window you are dragging to the edge of the current viewport forces the desktop to rotate to the next virtual desktop. It is a cool metaphor to help you organize your desktop windows.

As with 6.06, you can get free Ubuntu 7.04 CD-ROMs delivered to your home (for free). It comes with OpenOffice 2.2, the GIMP and many other programs but, this time playing multimedia files, like mp3 or divx, while not out of the box, will work after you download some additional codecs the first time you try to play that type of files. It is done nice and easy. The other thing I that looked better but I failed to get working at first sight was Flash plug-in (the automated install triggered by my first visit to youtube failed). I needed to use synaptic to install the flashplugin-nonfree package.

My advice is that you should give this new Ubuntu a try (you can use the Live version of the install CD), I like it a lot, and many of the tools I use like Inkscape or Texmacs are now in their latest release in this distro.

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

VFD control with Arduino using RS485 link

How to get sinusoidal s-curve for a stepper motor

Stepper motor step signal timing calculation