Youtube Video : Ubuntu 7.04 Feisty Fawn

Category Linux, Soft, internet | Permalink | 1. May 2007

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For people wanting simplicity from their Linux distribution, Ubuntu 7.04 (Feisty Fawn) may well be the best release ever from any Linux company. While using Feisty Fawn from the late beta stage and right on up to upgrading to the final version, I kept thinking “Feisty is so easy, my mom could use this!” Not to say you can’t get more obtuse with command line syntaxes in Feisty, but for the folks that wants their Linux distro to work with a minimal amount of fuss, Feisty Fawn is a smashing success. The installation is really as easy as 1-2-3 and from there you can set up your desktop with a minimal (and I mean minimal) amount of fuss. In fact, I found setting up Feisty Fawn to be far easier than Windows Vista or XP in that department. There’s no need to hunt down drivers and software from the internet and things just work out of the box. Furthermore, if you don’t want to use the command line just about everything in Feisty can be done via gui apps.

If you have been following the Ubuntu releases, you probably know that Ubuntu’s previous release “Edgy Eft” was somewhat lackluster when compared to the their prior “Dapper” release. Improvements were so slight that it was often difficult to differentiate between the two releases. Well with Feisty Fawn you will notice improvements from the Ubuntu installer all the way to how restricted drivers are now installed via a simple gui app and the easy manner in which proprietary codecs are installed. Visually the default look of Ubuntu and its KDE counterpart, Kubuntu, hasn’t changed from “Edgy” but the modifications made under the hood sure has simplified Feisty Fawn.

The installation has seen some nice streamlined improvements from past installations, which made the seem like it took 15 minutes to finish. The most significant new feature during the installation would have been the “Migration Assistant.” If you have a dual boot setup, the Migration wizard will ask you if you would like to import desktop settings from Windows or any other Linux installation on your computer. I chose to migrate settings from a Edgy Eft partition. I then got a window giving me the option to import settings for Firefox, Evolution, and Gaim. I don’t use Evolution so I imported Firefox and Gaim. After the installation and upon starting up Firefox for the first time, all my bookmarks from the Edgy partition were perfectly imported into Feisty. Saved passwords for websites were not imported, which is good for security reasons I guess. Furthermore, Feisty Fawn had successfully imported all my various Gaim account settings. When launching Gaim for the first time, it was awesome having my AIM/Google Talk/MSN/ICQ accounts ready to be launched from the get go. Very good job Ubuntu! I would hope in future releases they could expand the Migration Assistant even more by adding more programs (Thunderbird/Amarok comes immediately to mind).

As stated earlier, the default desktop in Ubuntu has not changed much. Most notable decision would be that Gnome’s new Control Center is not enable by default. Personally, I think users should have a choice between the two different systems so I’m happy that Ubuntu allowed the Control Center to be enabled or disabled. With the default setting in System–>Preferences and System–>Administration the menu has a cascading structure which is highly efficient. For users that would prefer the control panel ala Windows XP you can enable it by right clicking on the system menu (top left where the Ubuntu logo sits) and then select “Edit Menus.” Once “Main Menu” is opened, select System–>Preferences on the left window pane and then check the “Control Center” box on the right window pane. Then hit the close button and you will see the control center option the next time you click System–>Preferences–>Control Center. I did find Control Center to open slowly and preferred the cascading menu system a lot more.

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