I am typing this in Ubuntu Lucid Lynx alpha and despite the problems I had with the Nvidia drivers and having to use the driver downloaded from the Nvidia website instead of the supplied driver which failed to install, I am happy with it so far, the grub2 menu is not as slow as the one supplied with the Ubuntu 9.10 release and I actually want to keep it now. As long as I can access my other operating system, I am happy. The boot up animation does not seem to display, but at least the desktop works.. But upon installing Audacious, I can play mp3’s right away and that is quite good, as I do not want to use something like Totem or Rhythmbox to do that. I am abandoning Windows and trying to get all of my stuff running in Linux so I am not dependent on the evil Microsoft corporation for software. Ubuntu has good software available and something like Emacs is better than Wordpad or Notepad. Which is available on Linux with Wine. But a real editor is needed when editing configuration files like /etc/sudoers or /etc/X11/xorg.conf and you cannot use notepad for that. I was using Linux Mint 7 before installing Ubuntu 10.04, but I have installed Ubuntu on to a separate hard disk and I can dual boot with Linux Mint and still be able to access my old software.
It has been a while since I typed a long blog post like this, but I am currently running sudo apt-get upgrade and that has to download quite a lot of data, about 347Mega Bytes so I am listening to music and typing this whilst I wait. But the OS is awesome, I could mount my NTFS partition with my media on it and access my aforementioned music and listen to it and use Firefox and now OpenOffice 3.1 to type this document. My USB Bluetooth dongle was autodetected by the OS and I used the Gnome applet in the system tray to configure it to browse my Samsung i560 mobile phone and I could copy files to and from the ‘phone with the Nautilus file manager. Awesome. On Windows XP you have to install software to enable something like this. I have had to re-start the apt-get upgrade due to a mysterious power failure that only affects certain power sockets in my room. My PC’s power board is now plugged into the en suite bathroom and everything is still working. I had to use the gas stove to boil water for a coffee, but at least I still have some power. And that is what matters. I will have this investigated tomorrow. I might have to reboot after upgrading most packages, but I will have a fast 3D accelerated desktop to come back to when I am done with that.
I think the Gnome 2.29 desktop is quite good to use for day to day tasks, the default image viewer that comes with Gnome is very good for zooming into large images as it smooths out the pixels. And having a 2.6.32 kernel in Ubuntu Lucid Lynx gives more hardware support and the latest kernel features to enjoy.