Linux vs Linux

Ubuntu has been a community favourite since it appeared less than three years ago, and it’s not hard to see why, with it’s combination of ease of installation and use, and the hardcore credentials of its Debian base. How does Ubuntu 7.04, aka ‘Feisty Fawn’, stack up against earlier versions?

Installation

Ubuntu’s live CD-based installer is very cool.

Ubuntu installs from an impressive single CD, called the ‘desktop’ CD. Rather than booting directly into the installer, the desktop CD boots a full live CD version of Ubuntu, which you can use and test. If you decide to install it, a double click on the ‘Install’ icon on the desktop will launch the GUI-based installer. It’s generally quite easy to use, and has some nice touches, such as partition resizing support.

Feisty’s installer adds another neat touch: A user migration wizard. This scans your hard drive for existing installations of Linux or Windows, and offers to copy across certain user settings, like background images, bookmarks, and even documents.

The installer can migrate user settings from other operating systems.

If you have multiple users, they can be migrated to separate user accounts on your Ubuntu system.

The desktop installer CD has two issues that will make it unusable for some people: It only supports standard partitions, rather than LVM or RAID, and it has no package customisation options. If you need these features, you can drop in the ‘alternate’ CD, which uses a modified version of the Debian installer.

Desktop

Ubuntu’s default media player can download codecs for you as required.

You certainly wouldn’t mistake Ubuntu for anything else – its ‘human’ theme of brown and well, more brown is a bit of a trademark. All the good stuff is there though, with a super-fresh GNOME 2.18 desktop, Firefox 2 as the default browser, Evolution for email and OpenOffice.org 2.0 for the mundane work. Ubuntu includes just one application of each type in the base install, but you can easily add others.

The Restricted Drivers Manager gets 3D drivers installed quickly.

Out of the box, Ubuntu doesn’t include NVIDIA or ATI drivers, but you can install them easily with the ‘Restricted Drivers Manager’ tool. Similarly, Ubuntu doesn’t support MP3, but if you double click on an MP3 file, you’re automatically prompted to install the appropriate codec pack, which again takes just a few clicks. Once you have 3D drivers installed, you can easily enable desktop effects through the ‘Desktop Effects’ panel.

Package management
Because Ubuntu is Debian-based, it uses the ‘deb’ package format, and the APT system to easily install and upgrade packages. There’s a choice of interfaces available: Updates are handled with the neat and unobtrusive ‘Update Manager’, while new software can be added using the ‘Add/Remove’ tool. You can upgrade your system or install new packages with a single ‘apt-get’ command at the command line too. It’s handy that installing software is so easy, because there’s a tonne on
offer – more than 5,000 official packages, with another 16,000 in the unofficial,
community-maintained ‘universe’ and ‘multiverse’ repositories.

Ubuntu also makes upgrading to a new version remarkably simple. If you use the Update Manager, a message will appear inside it when a new release of Ubuntu is out, letting you upgrade over the ‘Net with just a few clicks.

Hardware support
Ubuntu has always been on the cutting-edge of hardware support, and Feisty continues the trend. Feisty has perhaps moved a bit too fast though – on our Intel P965 test system, a Sound Blaster Live! card was temperamental at best, and the JMicron IDE controller had issues with the beta release, though this was fixed for the final. The ‘desktop’ CD is great here though, as you can easily test your hardware compatibility before installing.

The Add/Remove tool gives you easy access to that enormous package list.