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Ubuntu Feisty Fawn First Impressions

I installed Ubuntu’s latest alpha release, the Feisty Fawn Herd 3, this morning on my development machine. Herd 2 had a bug that wouldn’t install, but Herd 3 installed like a champ.

I’m not going to put up any screenshots – since the release on Thursday, there are plenty of sites that have screenshots up.

Some random thoughts and first impressions:

  • Network Manager comes installed default now. The icon on the taskbar caught be my surprise. I installed on a desktop with a wired connection, but now I’m itching to go install Herd 3 on my extra laptop.
  • Control Center is more intuitive than I expected. For whatever reason, I had in my head that Control Center was just going to be a knockoff of Window’s Control Panel, but it’s not. I like how it groups Hardware, System and Other. The Filter box works very well as well.
  • The Ubuntu color scheme is the same as usual. It is what it is.

  • I installed Compiz from the Ubuntu repositories instead of Beryl, which I’m running on my Edgy Eft / main desktop. I wanted to give Compiz a try and see how it’s different. The best way I can explain it, after only using it for an hour or two now, and not knowing the in’s and out’s of Compiz, is that it seems more vanilla than Beryl. With Beryl being actively developed by the community (not that Compiz isn’t) Beryl seems to have much more eye candy and bells and whistles. I don’t have the stability problem or resources issues others have complained about on Edgy, and Compiz seems to do fine on my Feisty box using the Nvidia binary drivers in the Ubuntu repository. However, installing Compiz out of the box, including the packages compiz, compiz-gnome, and desktop-effects, along with the required dependencies, I had no window borders. The first thread on the Feisty Fawn forums on Ubuntuforums.org didn’t fix it, nor did a post 3 pages in. One post did link to the Compiz forums, and doing the following got it to work:

    sudo nvidia-xconfig --composite<br /> sudo nvidia-xconfig --render-accel<br /> sudo nvidia-xconfig --allow-glx-with-composite<br /> sudo nvidia-xconfig --add-argb-glx-visuals

  • Banshee’s latest release, 0.11.5, is included and feels quite snappy.

  • Other than that, it doesn’t seem too different from Edgy (yet), but there’s still 2 months of development time to go.

Ubuntu 6.10 Burning Problem

Since I built my new computer a few months back, and installed Ubuntu 6.10 Edgy Eft, I have only been able to burn using sudo. My old machine burned fine without sudo, so I was guessing it was because I’m using a SATA DVD-RW drive.

I found this tip on the Ubuntu forums and it fixed my burning problem – Gnomebaker has no problem working as a normal user after applying this fix.

Step 1:

As root (or in a terminal type: sudo gedit /etc/udev/rules.d/15-local.rules This will create a new file called 15-local.rules. Add a new rule in the file:

# SCSI devices<br /> BUS=="scsi", KERNEL=="sg[0-9]", NAME="%k", GROUP="cdrom"

Step 2:

Reboot.

Step 3:

In a terminal type the following (hit enter after each):

sudo chmod 4755 /usr/bin/cdrecord<br /> sudo chmod 4755 /usr/bin/cdrecord.mmap<br /> sudo chmod 4755 /usr/bin/X11/cdrecord.mmap<br /> sudo chmod 4755 /usr/bin/cdrdao<br /> sudo chmod 4755 /usr/bin/X11/cdrdao

That should fix it, especially if you’re running Gnomebaker. If you’re running K3B, run K3Bsetup and hit the above link for more if you’re a KDE user.

Thanks to wilko on the Ubuntu Forums for posting this fix.

  • in Links
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  • in Links
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Games Delayed

Two of the more high profile games to be released this year, with already announced Linux versions, have been delayed. Both stories courtesy of Blue’s News.

Activision’s latest quarterly statement highlights ET: Quake Wars has been delayed to their fiscal 2008 year, which runs from April 2007 to March 2008.

Unreal Tournament 2007 has undergone a name change to Unreal Tournament 3, with part of the name change reflecting the title’s delay until later in 2007, when it was originally scheduled for 2006.

I’ve built my new machine with a fancy Core Duo, and can’t wait to play both with native Linux binaries this year. Let’s hope for no more delays!

PC World reviews Linux audio players

PC World takes a look at the current state of music playback in Linux, reviewing the different music managers available. The features the reviewer was looking for include browsing and searching, playlists, rip and burning, tag editing and playing internet radio streams.

Rhythmbox (B), Banshee (B-), Listen (C+), Amarok (B), and Exaile (C-) are reviewed, with Amarok being the only KDE app tested as the reviewer, like myself, is a GNOME user.

Matthew Newton, the reviewer, notes that he’ll keep an eye on Banshee as the development is much faster paced than Rhythmbox, but has had problems with Banshee’s stability. I’ve run development and stable versions of Banshee, both from the Ubuntu repositories and compiling my own, without the problems he references.

There’s no question that music management in Linux is still early, and is one of the killer applications that will need to be developed quickly to help with user adoption to Linux.