Open Addict First Look: Review of Ubunbu 7.10

In preparation for the upcoming final release of Ubuntu 7.10, I downloaded the final release candidate for the new distribution and gave it a spin. Is the new Ubuntu release better/faster/stronger than 7.04 or has Gutsy lost it's gusto? Read on to find out.

The test system used for this review is an in-house built lab system:

AMD X2 5000+ dual core AM2 CPU
2GB Dual-channel DDR memory
Gigabyte GA-M55plus-S3G motherboard
nVidia GeForce 6600GT 128MB PCI-Express video card
Envision 19" LCD Monitor


Output from lspci:

00:00.0 RAM memory: nVidia Corporation C51 Host Bridge (rev a2)
00:00.1 RAM memory: nVidia Corporation C51 Memory Controller 0 (rev a2)
00:00.2 RAM memory: nVidia Corporation C51 Memory Controller 1 (rev a2)
00:00.3 RAM memory: nVidia Corporation C51 Memory Controller 5 (rev a2)
00:00.4 RAM memory: nVidia Corporation C51 Memory Controller 4 (rev a2)
00:00.5 RAM memory: nVidia Corporation C51 Host Bridge (rev a2)
00:00.6 RAM memory: nVidia Corporation C51 Memory Controller 3 (rev a2)
00:00.7 RAM memory: nVidia Corporation C51 Memory Controller 2 (rev a2)
00:02.0 PCI bridge: nVidia Corporation C51 PCI Express Bridge (rev a1)
00:03.0 PCI bridge: nVidia Corporation C51 PCI Express Bridge (rev a1)
00:04.0 PCI bridge: nVidia Corporation C51 PCI Express Bridge (rev a1)
00:09.0 RAM memory: nVidia Corporation MCP51 Host Bridge (rev a2)
00:0a.0 ISA bridge: nVidia Corporation MCP51 LPC Bridge (rev a3)
00:0a.1 SMBus: nVidia Corporation MCP51 SMBus (rev a3)
00:0a.2 RAM memory: nVidia Corporation MCP51 Memory Controller 0 (rev a3)
00:0b.0 USB Controller: nVidia Corporation MCP51 USB Controller (rev a3)
00:0b.1 USB Controller: nVidia Corporation MCP51 USB Controller (rev a3)
00:0d.0 IDE interface: nVidia Corporation MCP51 IDE (rev a1)
00:0e.0 IDE interface: nVidia Corporation MCP51 Serial ATA Controller (rev a1)
00:0f.0 IDE interface: nVidia Corporation MCP51 Serial ATA Controller (rev a1)
00:10.0 PCI bridge: nVidia Corporation MCP51 PCI Bridge (rev a2)
00:10.1 Audio device: nVidia Corporation MCP51 High Definition Audio (rev a2)
00:14.0 Bridge: nVidia Corporation MCP51 Ethernet Controller (rev a3)
00:18.0 Host bridge: Advanced Micro Devices [AMD] K8 [Athlon64/Opteron] HyperTransport Technology Configuration
00:18.1 Host bridge: Advanced Micro Devices [AMD] K8 [Athlon64/Opteron] Address Map
00:18.2 Host bridge: Advanced Micro Devices [AMD] K8 [Athlon64/Opteron] DRAM Controller
00:18.3 Host bridge: Advanced Micro Devices [AMD] K8 [Athlon64/Opteron] Miscellaneous Control
01:09.0 Ethernet controller: Linksys Gigabit Network Adapter (rev 10)
01:0e.0 FireWire (IEEE 1394): Texas Instruments TSB43AB23 IEEE-1394a-2000 Controller (PHY/Link)
02:00.0 VGA compatible controller: nVidia Corporation NV43 [GeForce 6600 GT] (rev a2)


Initial Impressions
The Ubuntu 7.10 boot splash screen appears more polished and higher resolution from 7.04. The boot times were about the same compared to the previous release. There's some new default desktop artwork and the new Gnome 2.20.0 window manager is rock solid as it is beautiful. The system is responsive and very polished. Overall the desktop is more refined than the last release.

The install process is very similar to 7.04. After you boot the Live CD there's a desktop icon for installing Ubuntu to your hard drive. I encountered a bug with the networking subsystem which took me a few reboots and a workaround to finally get Ubuntu installed. For some reason, I could not manually configure the network card. DHCP is enabled by default and when the system booted up, it pulled an incorrect DNS entry from my firewall. No matter what I tried, I couldn't get Ubuntu to use a manual DNS entry and eventually had to correct the issue on the firewall. What's the big deal? Well, at one point the Ubuntu installer attempts to update new packages via the network. There's no "cancel" or "skip" button on the Ubuntu installer at this point, so if your network isn't up or unreachable, you're going to be stuck on this screen. The only option is to close the installer completely and start over from scratch. Not a very elegant solution.

Once that networking issue was resolved, Ubuntu 7.10 installed quickly and easily. If you can install 7.04 you should have no problems installing 7.10. Upon reboot into the newly installed operating system, there were a good number of update patches needed and they were downloaded and installed without fuss. Kudos to the Ubuntu team for making it amazingly simple to keep your system patched and running in top shape.

Overall, the hardware in the test system was correctly identified and the SATA hard drives were supported perfectly. Ubuntu has excellent hardware detection and everything worked without having to install any third-party drivers with the exception of the nVidia graphics card. There was a "restricted drivers" icon in the system tray area upon first boot which informed me that the video card could use the nVidia drivers, but could not be officially supported by Ubuntu. No big deal. If you want good 3-D video acceleration you've got to install the nVidia drivers for your nVidia card.

Installing a printer is much easier than Microsoft Windows. The test printer I used was a USB HP Deskjet 3740 that I picked up in a local computer store. Plugging the printer into Ubuntu and choosing the correct driver had me printing in less than 5 minutes. By contrast, plugging the same printer into Microsoft Windows XP brought up the driver search tool. After specifying to search for the driver online, Windows was unable to find a driver and could not install my printer. I was either forced to find my driver CD or download the drivers from HP's website. These extra steps makes installing printers and other hardware much, much simpler in Ubuntu than Windows. Kudos to Linux!

There's a new fast user switching tool which allows you to, well, quickly switch between system users. The utility worked correctly and easily. Home users might not use this feature much but businesses could see a need for this type of tool. It is integrated into Gnome perfectly and is really simple to operate like most Gnome applets. It is an applet and can be removed from the task bar, if it's not something you need.

Another big change over 7.04 is Compiz is enabled by default. However, the Compiz Settings Manager is not installed by default. No problem, a simple installation will give you the ability to tweak your 3-d desktop settings.

sudo apt-get install install compizconfig-settings-manager

Hopefully this will be corrected in the final Ubuntu 7.10 release. It's not a show stopper, but kind of confusing when you're looking around for the Compiz settings.

Performance
Let's take a look at some general, arbitrary performance metrics of the Ubuntu 7.10 (kernel 2.6.22-14-generic) and 7.04 (kernel 2.6.20-15-generic) Live CD's on the test system. Running processes consume CPU cycles and memory, which affect overall system performance and how quickly and responsive new applications perform. The tar archive test we performed is in no way a scientific test but it does give you an idea of how process overhead could affect application performance.

Upon boot, the newer Ubuntu 7.10 release used 142MB of memory. Both CPU's on the test system hovered around 2% utilization. Ubuntu 7.10 had 110 processes running or sleeping for the Live CD. Creating a 227MB tar archive took 16 seconds using 10 copies of a 20.7MB test file. The command used was:

tar -czvf test_package.tar.gz *.zip

The older Ubuntu 7.04 Live CD release used 185MB of memory. Both CPU's on the test system hovered around 2% utilization. The 7.04 release had 111 processes running or sleeping. Creating the same 227MB tar archive took an average of 15 seconds.

Installed Software
Other really nice inclusions are GIMP 2.4.0-rc3 which has several pieces of code completely rewritten. For your word processing tasks, Open Office 2.3.0 is included. Evolution 2.12.0 is the default e-mail suite and Firefox 2.0.0.6 is the default web browser.

To install extra software, the usual Synaptic Package Manager GUI application makes installing software a breeze. As usual, each application I installed through Synaptic installed flawlessly.

Final Thoughts
I double dare anyone who thinks Linux is not ready for the desktop of average Joe to use Ubuntu 7.10 for 30 days. By far, Ubuntu is the nicest, most polished, easiest to use Linux distribution I've ever had the opportunity to work with. Everything just works. Everything is polished and beautiful. Software is painfully simple to install. Hardware is a breeze to install. What's not to love about Ubuntu? This latest release is more of the same Ubuntu goodness. Can you tell I love this distro?

Leave your comments/corrections/updates below.