Edgy. Eft. Review. “Dapper Drake was a huge step forward since Breezy Badger. Edgy Eft doesn’t impress as much but still brings its lot of innovations and improvements over its predecessor; its artwork is a tiny bit better, its software selection is more up to date, its package manager is better than ever and its new upstart makes it really fast to boot. Of course it doesn’t have the desktop and the artwork of Fedora Core 6, or the integrated 3D effects of Mandriva 2007, but it’s still in my opinion the best Linux distribution there is and as with every single one of its releases, it just proved it once more.”
I can’t say I’ve ever really liked the Fedora Core Artwork, it’s very retro.
Although I think 6 might be a slight improvement.
I thought the new Ubuntu Artwork was quite good, but I unfortunately stopped using Ubuntu a little while ago because of the problems with upgrading between new versions, and I see they had quite a big problem this time around too.
Especially when they say it’s great for a server, and a simple upgrade can blow apart a network card which took goodness knows how long to fix.
Couple updates before the current, was rendering some peoples systems un-bootable, this latest was causing problems everywhere too.
It’s got potential, and from fresh installs each time it’s a great OS, but I believe they need to work on their dist-upgrade stuff.
Very true. I tried doing an upgrade on my laptop. The new UUID stuff that assigns to hard drives and partitions didn’t upgrade my swap partition correctly.
This screwed up hibernation/suspend very badly.
In trying to fix it, using pointers I found on the Ubuntu website it managed to somehow screw up the UUID assignments and write the contents of RAM (1 gigabyte) to the first 1 gigabyte of the data portion of the disk instead of the swap partition, corrupting a ton of data. Probably my fault, but it still shouldn’t have screwed up in the first place.
I just blew it away (I try not to keep anything mission critical on the laptop, just bad business for a number of reasons) and reinstalled, which seemed to make things run much smoother anyway.
Otherwise I’m happy.
I’m currently running Edgy on my two year old Dell Inspiron 1000 notebook and my brand new Dell E520 Pentium D desktop. I have to say I really like it quite a bit.
I learned long ago not to mess around with upgrades. I keep a file server here, and just copy the contents of the home folders over to that, and just install fresh. While that isn’t as convenient as an upgrade would be, it does get rid of cruft, and generally make the system run better.
I fired up Edgy and it’s fantastic. It loads in about a third of the time of XP and it’s smooth.
Gripe – INCLUDE the Network Manager so WPA/WPA2 are supported “Out Of The Box.”
Couldn’t agree more. It’s pain to try and get it setup otherwise, as you have to lug your computer to your access point and plug physically in in order to get wireless networking running. It’s a real pain when one of my computers is a full desktop, and I have not way of
I personally use WPA on a Buffalo router, loaded with dd-wrt. Works like a charm and now the firmware web-gui works under firefox/linux. http://dd-wrt.com/
NM doesn’t work for a lot of WLAN cards and it also doesn’t work properly if you ever need to use a static IP. Once these issues are fixed it will be there by default.
Ubuntu is best linux distro i ever tried, and currently it’s my main OS (while i am waiting for Haiku
.
Unfortunately they started to change it’s look into some kind of i-love-xp-aqua-look-ripoff-with-changed-colors (i liked old brown colors, and “simple” look instead of this shiny everywhere one). So now, after i install it, i change theme and icon set (Buuf icon set) and all is ok.
But it’s not a system for low ram computer. Today i tried to run LiveCD (to test, and maybe install) it on 128 ram p2 (or was it p3?) and it was nightmare. It worked but even moving mouse around was causing cd-rom reading, and opening networking setup took about 10-15 minutes (including opening menu, submenu, etc..).
I bet it would work much better after install, but that (and reading what to do to use winmodem for dial-up) scared me enough to leave old win98 there
From the web site: http://mirrors.dotsrc.org/ubuntu-cd/6.10/
‘The desktop CD allows you to try Ubuntu without changing your computer at all, and at your option to install it permanently later. This type of CD is what most people will want to use. You will need at least 192MB of RAM to install from this CD.‘
‘The alternate install CD allows you to perform certain specialist installations of Ubuntu. It provides for the following situations:
-creating pre-configured OEM systems;
-setting up automated deployments;
-upgrading from older installations without network access;
-LVM and/or RAID partitioning;
-installing GRUB to a location other than the Master Boot Record;
-installs on systems with less than about 192MB of RAM.‘
Well.. it runs on system with less than 192MB of RAM. It’s just horribly slow.
I wonder why they can’t make one LiveCD? Is it so hard to check how much RAM machine has and then decide which installer to run (i guess they still have old installer somewhere)? Or if it’s too complicated then maybe add another option on bootscreen (“run old installer”
?
BTW on my laptop first two options of LiveCD (can’t remember how they are called, but they mean “regular” and “crappy gfx” more or less) do not differ at all. So maybe use one of them to run old installer?
They do only make one LiveCD, the other CD is just a non-gui installer.
Wouldn’t it be better if LiveCD could be run in “non-gui installer” mode? That would be good not only for low RAM systems, but also for someone who has to install it on more than one or two machines, is sure that Ubuntu will work on each of them, and doesn’t want to waste time on booting whole OS just to click “install” icon.
Of course other CD is for that, but i think it would be just easier for all to have one CD for both ways of installing.
ubuntu devs – please kill the annoying login music. this is not one of the elements of windows you should be copying
Couldn’t agree more. The start up and shutdown sounds on Edgy Eft are just terrible. After installing Ubuntu on first start up I heard the noise and thought WTF was that?
I didn’t think Dapper was any great shakes, but I’ve found Edgy very nice, especially for the newer user. I’m way too much of an Arch fanboy to ever take that off my workstation, but I may just leave Kubuntu on my lappy. Very nice, IMNSHO.
Well, I absolutely adore Ubuntu. It has everything I need and VMware player is a charm when having to use some WinXP application without hassle. But what I would like to comment on are some thoughts about the looks and feel of this OS. I found myself enjoying esthetically pleasing desktops after using the computer for 20+ years. I really wouldn’t like Ubuntu becoming some kind of Spartan looking OS with boring themes and depressing colours. I am a visual person. And I believe most of the (new) users are. It is important for developers to keep this in mind. I also enjoy audio effects. I like the sound when I turn on my computer, when using Gaim, I enjoy different, cute audio which make using computer less boring than it already is. If somebody does not like the sounds, turn them off. But please, let us, all the rest, make everyday tasks less boring than they already are. Ubuntu is not perfect in this regard but it is getting better and better. Even my wife with a wonderful sense for beauty (she married me, did’n she?) likes using this system.