Review of Ubuntu 5.04 Hoary Hedgehog Part 1

I've heard lots of good things about Ubuntu, so when I received the CDs from shipit.ubuntu.com, I decided to give it a try.

I booted the LiveCD to see what it was like. It started up a bit slower than Knoppix but did present me with locale choices, which I appreciated, being from Canada.

When it started, it was in 640x480 and I couldn't adjust that through the Screen Resolution applet. I tinkered but couldn't fix it, so I quit.

I split my XP parbreastion with Parbreastion Magic and allocated 5 GB for Ubuntu. I popped in the install CD and rebooted.

The Ununtu installer is text-based and very friendly. I opted for the advanced parbreastioning and wasn't too thrilled with their parbreastioning tool. I'd rather use cfdisk. Anyway, I got it all set up and it installed the base packages. While it installed, I was able to fool around on the second virtual terminal.

After a reboot, I was pleased to see that GRUB had configured itself to boot XP as well. I booted Ubuntu and it installed more packages.

Ubuntu started up X and lo and behold... 640x480 again. The sound worked great, which is a gripe I've had with other distros that mute the sound by default. I went into the Add-Remove Software and didn't find what I needed, so I recalled a tool called synaptic and ran that. It wasn't in the menus, though, so I don't know how Joe User would find it.

Inside synaptic, I found the nvidia-glx and nvidia-settings packages and Keep in mind I'm working at 640x480 and anti-aliased fonts are blurry as hell at that resolution, when they're below 9 point. Kudos to www.ubuntulinux.org for having a lot of information.

After the reboot, I got my nvidia logo, but *still* 640x480. So I checked I checked myetc-X11-xorg.conf and sure enough, no refresh rates were specified. Once more I went to the Ubuntu forums (in a blurry 640x480) and found that I needed to run `dpkg-reconfigure xserver-xorg'. What the hell, I did that, let it probe my card and then I did an Expert configuration of my monitor and entered 30-70 for the horizontal and 50-120 for the vertical. Reboot, and it's *still* 640x480. I checked my xorg.conf and it didn't mention my refresh rates *at all*. I almost gave up at that point but I re-ran the dpkg-reconfigure and selected VESA for the driver and re-entered my refresh rates. Then, without rebooting, I checked my xorg.conf and it *did* mention the refresh rates. I copied the HorizSync and VertRefresh options and restored my old xorg.conf and pasted those in the monitor section, then re-ran the the video works and it's beautiful. The fonts look the same -- if not better -- than in Windows XP.

For my next test, I popped in a USB flash drive and it appeared on my desktop after about 5 seconds. Not as snappy as XP, but good enough. I opened it up and there were some Office documents, which all opened in OO.org. (This isn't the thread to discuss file format conversion.)

Everything is nice and clean in Ubuntu. Menu entries contain English names instead of the application name. The sound is great and doesn't pop and skip like it did in FC3. I haven't tried MP3s yet but I'll get to that in Part 2, along with my digital camera, printer and scanner. I'll also try out the IM software.

All in all, I'm impressed with Ubuntu, considering its age. I don't know why I didn't get the refresh rates in my xorg.conf but by the number of posts out there regarding Ubuntu and 640x480, it's a common problem. The synaptic tool is excellent and performs very quickly, like the desktop itself.

-- Linux 2.4.22-1.2199.4.legacy.nptl athlon GNU-Linux 10:15:00 up 20 days, 13:52, 5 users, load average: 0.01, 0.03, 0.00