Ubuntu 7.04 (Feisty Fawn) Beta

I installed the Ubuntu 7.04 (Feisty Fawn) Beta well actually I had tried one of the previous herds as well. The herd didn't work to well for me the operative word would be slow so I was skeptical how much improvement I would see with the beta version. However on my PC at least the difference is unbelievable. It is not only fast but almost everything and every update since installing it has worked flawlessly. I have so far only experienced two glitches with one being that enabling desktop effects (compiz) makes the machine unstable and using Totem for web based video is only acceptable at best as from time to time it will crash. The first I could care less about wobbly windows and multiple desktops on a cube mean little if anything to me and seem more like bloat than an actual feature. The second issue was easily remedied by installing MPlayer although I still let Totem do DVDs as that works very well. Upon first booting there was an icon in the system notification area of Gnome Panel something called the Restricted Drivers Administration. Clicking on it opened a dialog that allowed me to enable my wireless card and graphics driver. Doing a search for codecs in the Add/Remove applications got the system more multimedia ready but to play windows media files the w32codecs still had to be installed by hand and to play commercial DVDs an additional repository had to added to get libdvdcss2 installed. From the same repositry I also installed Google Earth and Adobe Acrobat Reader. Network connectivity is now handled by Network Manager which to my surprise just worked and worked flawlessly as compared to earlier attempts I had made trying to use the tool. As far as installing the OS went I went with the Alternate Install CD as I don't particularly care to have my Master Boot Record over written, I actually use a Windows tool for managing my multiboot needs. in addition to that for whatever reason I always have to set my IP address manually for the wired portion of my connectivity options when installing the the various releases of Ubuntu but the wireless portion always does everything correctly once the router is associated (i.e. in the past this meant once I got wpa-supplicant working). I don't really know why this is like this but it been this way for awhile even though everything is automatically assigned for either connection under Windows (i.e once I get through the connection wizard). Maybe I have a winrouter or something but Ubuntu will not pull an IP address or the router won't assign one for the wired portion of my network, however once one is manually assigned everything works fine network Windows shares are exposed, the router can be logged on to ...etc.

I of course have my favorite lineup of programs as I have always said for a Linux distro to work for me I want to be able to surf the web, listen to music online, watch video on the web, watch DVDs, email, print, scan and do lite image and text editing. Ubuntu 7.04 Beta delivers and then some. It is still an 80%/20% proposition meaning that the system is 80% percent finished after the inital install. That being said I can't really call Ubuntu a beginners distribution although the 20% part seems to be progressively easier to navigate with each subsequent release. The thing is though once it is all configured it becomes a very very user friendly OS maybe could even pass the grandma test. I really don't mean any disrespect with that comment as since I am using Ubuntu it could probably be referred to as grandpa safe. Suffice it to say that this release of Ubuntu is my favorite to date and for the heck of it I have Included some screen captures just like them big time sites do...