“Another six months, another release from the Ubuntu folks. The Ubuntu 7.04 release, better known as Ubuntu Feisty Fawn, is another cutting-edge, but not bleeding-edge, release that shows what Linux is capable of on the desktop. I’ve been running it since the early betas, and have found that it’s the best Ubuntu release yet.” Read more at Newsforge. And another article, Vista vs. Ubuntu and its rebuttal.
Yet Another Review of Ubuntu Feisty Fawn
About The Author
Eugenia Loli
Ex-programmer, ex-editor in chief at OSNews.com, now a visual artist/filmmaker.
Follow me on Twitter @EugeniaLoli
It doesn’t work for a fair number of people, myself included.
http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=423481&highlight=tty
http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=423589&highlight=tty
http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=423807&highlight=tty
http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=415041&highlight=tty
http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=421849&highlight=tty
http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=415009&highlight=tty
http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=421588&highlight=tty
There’s another gazillion where those came from, and that’s only computer-savvy people who are aware of the forums. It’s a serious issue and it was not caught before release – uncool. If it were just one or two people/niche hardware, that’d be one thing – but it’s a large problem that affects many, and makes the distro unusable.
So, tell me when they get their QC up to an acceptable level, and I’ll give them a shot again – it sure does look nice beyond this issue.
[Edit: I wanted to point out this is the exact same issue for many people, not various issues. This is why it’s a problem – it’s affecting a large number of people – for various reasons. The most interesting tidbit of information – for most of these people – the previous Ubuntu releases worked fine – so if they hit the upgrade button – their machines are now hosed.]
Edited 2007-04-27 19:15 UTC
Reminds me of the Mandrake 9 (I think it was 9.2) bug that trashed many DVD drives worldwide. At least this isn’t damaging any hardware. I’m not sure there is any good answer to this sort of problem other than a large army of good beta testers with a lot of diverse hardware. I wonder if any of the people that had these problems had tried the beta’s of feisty. I for one didn’t. I prefer to wait for the final, but that doesn’t help Ubuntu. Otherwise, Canonical would have to have a giant test lab with thousands of machines with every possible combination. Since this appears to be a kernel-level bug, I’m surprised it didn’t come up in the kernel testing.
You’ll love this. The problem wasn’t in the RCs. They made a change for the final release after the last RC that caused the issue. This is the QC issue I’m getting at, last minute changes blowing up the system.
I worked at a company that used to do this. We called it “Code and Burn”. We would literally make code changes hours prior to releasing the gold CD. One time we totally killed someone’s Windows NT machine. There wasn’t much I could do about it. Some people have a higher tolerance for risk. I believe there should be a strict checklist for software releases. Any change to what is on the release, even comments, starts the release process again. Better to be late. There will still be bugs, but don’t let it be because we short-circuited the release process.
Note: This is probably arm-chair quarterbacking at its best!
I wonder if the change was supposed to fix a problem from the release candidate, adn introduced this new problem.
Look, they’re human. They can, and do make mistakes, deal with it. Do you bother to post when Microsoft makes big f–kups like this I wonder?
Dave
You mean, the bug in LG’s firmware that was exposed by an upstream kernel patch Mandrake 9.2 happened to ship.
Sorry, I didn’t mean to besmirch Mandriva (I am a silver member, I also use Ubuntu). I realize it was due to a faulty flush command in the LG firmware, but apparently the windows drivers worked around it. I would go so far as to say that many of what end users experience as Linux bugs are due to just this kind of shoddy hardware. I am thinking of ACPI. What a broken standard!! Unfortunately, to end users the problem is Linux, since the people who write windows drivers works around all that mess, since the are the ones with the “inside” scoop. Wireless drivers and winmodems also come to mind.
I didn’t experience the LG “situtation”, but I did experience the issue where Ubuntu torched XWindows with an update. I almost wound up re-installing my OS on that one. Fortunately I found a fix ini the forums (what package to downgrade).
BTW, since the new 2007.1 has come out, I was wondering if the Update Notification icon now works. If so, I’ll be upgrading my Mandriva box this weekend!
I am thinking of ACPI. What a broken standard!!
That’s interesting, I didn’t even know ACPI was a standard. All along I thought it was just a resolution on the part of the hardware vendors that they would support power management but never tell anyone but Microsoft how it works.
remember that news last week I think:
http://osnews.com/story.php/17689/Bill-Gates-on-Making-ACPI-Not-Wor…
Conspiracy theorists abound.
ACPI is a standard, the problem is that Intel only standardised and provided reference source code for the Auto Configuration (AC) but not the power (P), that was left up to vendors.
The cause is alot more boring than the Microsoft conspiracy; the power part was left up to the vendors, the net result, there was no real consistant implementation of the specification, resulting in what we have now.
Microsoft has as much to lose from this storm as Linux, and worse still, the ACPI implementations by various motherboard vendors range from outstanding to down right embarassing to the point it begs to question how on earth it was allowed to leave the factory in that state.
Hmm, Not sure I trust someone who gets the acronym wrong.
“Advanced Configuration and Power Interface”
Yeah, there is a *MASSIVE* difference there. Yeah, my *WHOLE* post was discredited by *ONE* mistake.
sdodson, I wouldn’t trust anyone who posts snide remarks to forums such as yourself.
«I was wondering if the Update Notification icon now works.»
It works and the service is now free !
but: beware of the US mirrors…maybe wait a little time before setting them. Use the french/european onces in between.
++
Now if everyone does the right thing and submits a properly detailed bug report, the guys at Ubuntu can trace and fix the problem. The interesting thing is that I don’t think beta versions of 7.04 were affected, so it’s something that’s happened in the final release.
I agree it’s a major bug, but I suspect you’ll see fixed and updated ISOs for people to download in the next week or 2.
Dave
> Now if everyone does the right thing and submits a
> properly detailed bug report, the guys at Ubuntu can
> trace and fix the problem.
I tried this once (for Feisty beta) and found it unnecessarily hard to file a bug report. I didn’t find good help where/how to file the report. After some searching, it was still unclear whether I should register the bug directly with Launchpad myself, or if I should explain it in some forum.
Option #1 isn’t really helpful. Being a computer geek myself, I can handle things like Launchpad, but some regular users cannot, although they have valuable information about bugs too. Also, registering and then filing the report in the correct section in LP are a lot of hurdles in the way of somebody who wants to *contribute*.
Option #2, the forums, aren’t the blue sky either. You are left alone figuring out in which subforum to post; you have to register there too (although regular users are more used to forums than to something like LP); it’s unclear whether the information reaches the developers; and finally all you read is about “support” (dammit, I don’t want my hand held, I want to give you the information *you* want). Again, a lot of hurdles for somebody who wants to *contribute*.
Make it clear on the main page (related to that release) where to file bug reports (put a link there), and don’t require registration!
well, on the forums you find the people with problems, it is the same for the newspapers…but for the majority, I do think it’s really a smooth release. And the most important, it is headed in the right direction, the direction of progress. Add a wonderful community support…
If they did indeed make a change just prior to “gold” and after the final RC, then that’s heading in the wrong direction. It should never happen.
It puts a very large question mark over the quality of each release until this practice stops.
On my Dell SC1420(3Gb Ram) with an NVidia 5200 Graphics Card, evey Ubuntu distro so far tries to start X, enables the Mouse and then hangs. This includes the latest Fiesty
ON the same system, Fedora, Centos & Knoppix all boot fine.
So, I’m going to challenge the Ubuntu geeks at the local LUG to get it working OOTB at the next meeting.
Please be aware that I’m not getting at the Ubuntu folks directly here.
To me, this is the BIGGEST weakness of EVERY Linux Distro. The detection of Graphics cards and monitos is at bet hit and miss. In the past year or so (since the for of XFree86 into xorg) it has been more Hit than Miss but there is still a very long way to go especially in areas like multiple monitors/projectors etc.
Things are improving but we are not there yet.
I think people should be warned about the experiences of the author. The author uses some pretty hefty, high-end computers:
“I looked at the x86 version of Ubuntu and Kubuntu, on three machines — an IBM Intellistation Z Pro dual 2.66GHz Xeon with 2.5GB of RAM with an Nvidia Quadro 4 video card, a homebrew AMD Athlon 64 X2 4200+ with 4GB of RAM and a newer Nvidia card (GeForce 7900), and an IBM ThinkPad T43 with 1GB of RAM”
I don’t think most people using Feisty on a desktop have 4GB RAM.
Ubuntu sucks. They try to be the best, but f–k everything with all the changes they made.
Boot Slackware 11.0 on it and you’ll see that all work fine. I don’t know about the Quadro card, but Slackware-current uses Xorg 7.3rc5 and i think it’s supported. Or just install the nvidia binary driver
Edited 2007-04-27 20:35
HERE! HERE! For those who have problems get thee to a vendor of Slackware immediately and you too shalt have a stable, secure and robust system thanks to Pat Volkerding i.e. The Man.
Get Slackware! It rocks!!!
If you’re going to troll please get your facts straight first. There is no Xorg 7.3 yet, not even rcs or betas.
I’m running it on a not quite so beefy machine, Pentium D 820 (2×2.8Ghz), 1.5GB RAM, GeForce 7600GT.
It works great! Install was a breeze as was most of the post-install (NVidia drivers, apps, Beryl, etc). The only thing that caused a bit of an issue was getting my dual monitor setup working properly.
The system is fast, fairly light on resources (351MB RAM usage ATM with Firefox, gEdit and 2 idle Terminals).
Beryl provides eye-candy far ahead of what Vista and much less resource hungry both in RAM and CPU. Makes you wonder what Vista is doing when it takes 60+% CPU to move a window and 90+% to play a full-screen video.
(Ubuntu with Beryl takes ~10% to move a window (with wobbly windows) and ~%60 to run a full-screen video.)
Beryl provides eye-candy far ahead of what Vista and much less resource hungry both in RAM and CPU. Makes you wonder what Vista is doing when it takes 60+% CPU to move a window and 90+% to play a full-screen video.
(Ubuntu with Beryl takes ~10% to move a window (with wobbly windows) and ~%60 to run a full-screen video.)
I can’t speak specifically for Beryl as I haven’t used it, but those numbers seem ridiculously high.
Moving a window shouldn’t register any increase in CPU usage at all and doesn’t on my Vista machine. As for video, I just ran a full screen high definition video and wmplayer.exe never jumped above 10% CPU usage. I imagine Linux should show similar results.
I think you may have a hardware problem.
Edited 2007-04-28 21:36
I’m convinced more than ever i will not run any windows machine at home for a long time to come.Ubuntu linux has distilled a total package deal that has far more to offer than Vista at the moment except perhaps Aqua.
Maybe i would consider a microsoft OS when they would make a bold move apple made when releasing OSX.
Still not quite there yet for me. It still doesn’t like blue tooth mouse and keyboard (Which for some reason seems to work during startup). I scrounged a wired keyboard out of my closet and was going to jump on the internet to just see if it was a quick fix… and realized that it didn’t initialize my wireless network card. Tried to manually initialize it, no-go, bad driver.
So that ended my Ubuntu experience. I don’t have the time to muck around with Linux all day, nor do I want to spend hours scouring the internet for every little fix just to get the mouse/keyboard/wireless NIC to work. I always thought Linksys was so Linux-friendly.
I guess I’ll wait around for another release. Lately though I am more interested in Haiku than Linux.
Lately though I am more interested in Haiku than Linux.
So you want to trade an OS that might be ready for you in 2008 for an OS than might be ready for you in 2012?
There’s a difference between an OS designed for a server with a UI tacked on and an OS designed from the ground up to be a desktop system. From the progress reports – Haiku seems to be moving forward in terms of “desktop readiness” much more quickly than the various Linux distributions. I’d say the only exception would be hardware support, and once they have a stable R1 release – that will probably get attacked pretty heavily. Remember, Haiku isn’t restricted by the GPL. That’s going to give them a lot of potential driver sources they might otherwise not enjoy.
I never said anything about trading anything. I just said I was interested in it. I just like the way they are heading with that system. (ie. there aren’t 10 thousand mediocre programs that do the same thing.)
Linux hasn’t offered me anything in awhile, of course neither has windows (hence not upgrading to vista). Sure you got programs that make the desktop all pretty, but hey so does Vista, and I’m not buying that either. I’m just looking for something that will install and go with minimal effort. Which means a little more hardware support on the get go and less time spent digging through *.conf files.
Every Ubuntu update, since at least since Breezy, has come with a handful of issues that eventually get ironed out. This one’s no different. I used Feisty beta for a while, but Xorg 7.2 and fglrx don’t play nice, and this couldn’t get fixed by the release; not that it’s Ubuntu’s fault, it’s ATI’s. But I had trouble with my ATI card on Edgy at first, and now it works like a dream. So I went back to Edgy, and am perfectly happy.
It’s a trade-off, an incredible release cycle for a little stability. It still runs better than my Windows installation, and it certainly gets out faster than any MS or Apple OS. But I wouldn’t mind seeing a kind of “service pack” update for the most recent vintage along with the new release. Rather than forcing an update to Feisty and risk other instability, offer Gnome 2.18 and OOo 2.2 in perfectly stable Edgy and Dapper as well.
I had tried the last RC and it installed and ran wonderfully, I really liked it. But after I tried installing the final release, it stops booting when it gets to the scsi devices section(sda). Nothng, it just hangs there.
I was installing to the internal HD. I have an external HDD, but the RC worked fine.
Edited 2007-04-27 22:54
I just installed it on my macbook and am surprised by how well it works. It did require some tweaking, but it is on apple hardware and windows required more tweaking to work.
It has been a few years since I tried linux, so the difference is really noticeable to me. Wireless networking worked out of the box, just enter my wpa password in the dialog and go. Even the special keys for adjusting volume and screen brightness worked.
For my usage all they need is an iLife competitor to catch up to osx. For the base os utilities like the file manager they seem to be better already.
BEST DISTRO EVER!
I let my grandpa use Ubuntu and he found it way easier than Windows. Font sizes were much better adjustable and the programs were easier labeled (by function instead of name).
I setup his system, but of course I’d have to setup his system even if he used Windows. When both configured optimally, Ubuntu is way better for grandparents than Windows – I didn’t say that, my grandpa did, even after he took Windows classes.
Btw this (from the InformationWeek article) conclusion is totally stupid:
You don’t have to build stuff from source code. That’s just lame. And editing a configuration file or using the command line isn’t something people get forced into doing anymore. But heck, it’s how you use Ubuntu and it’s not some major usability issue. By teaching people to do this, you teach them some valuable principles. As opposed to the Windows point-and-click hell. I don’t get why every linux review has to end with such lame conclusions. “OMG! I FOUND A TERMINAL! WHAT AN OUTRAGE!”
Edited 2007-04-28 12:52
Same here, Ubuntu is my grandfather’s OS of choice. He’s 70-80something, has sight problems and is using computer for almost a year now. I’ve installed both Ubuntu 6.06 and Windows XP SP2 on his computer but usability and accessibility is much better in Ubuntu. Even Solitare in Gnome is way better because it can scale cards while Microsoft Solitare has very small ones. Of course I had to explain a lot of stuff, it’s his first computer after all. He still calls Ubuntu “Windux” though
Edited 2007-04-28 16:43 UTC
I’m a linux user since 1997.Feisty Fawn fits my bill.
on the Vista vs. Ubuntu article he dosn’t mention the cost of the OS. I’m not talking about freedom or any of that hippy freedom stuff, I’m talking about pounds, shilling and pence. He installed Vista on 3 different computers did he pay 3 licence fees?
I’ve dabbled with Kubuntu and Ubuntu but have never been pleased with the forced heaviness of their desktops, prefer the cleaner Gnome desktop, but still unhappy with the slowness. The final…installing and using Xubuntu instead, enjoying it, though still need to get the DVD playback going.
Standing by for LTS…