5 posts tagged “feisty fawn”
With the release of the Feisty Fawn last week, I took the time to download and do an upgrade on my laptop.
First of all, I have learned a valuable lesson, never download a popular linux distro on the day it's release. From start to finish, it was 20 hours. I think it could have been a lot less, but I did have to go to sleep. Still, the upgrade was painless; all I had to do was plug in the ethernet cord and type in 'sudo "upgrade-manager -d" and let the machine do its thing.
I've been using it ever since and I am impressed. There has been no problems at all with any of my hardware, or existing software. I have also been impressed with some of the applications that are native to Feisty, namely the upgraded Open Office 2.2. That is quite a nice looking suite, what with the changes to the toolbar and everything.
The only downside is I cannot get Beryl to operate on my laptop, but I understand from doing some research, plus asking questions at the Beryl Forum, that the is a problem with the video card on the my machine. It has to do with the fact the video is part of the motherboard and there is no support. I am not complaining, since overall it is a stable OS on my older machine.
Other things happening, I am becoming a total twitterer, posting quick thoughts and experiences along the way. I got it on my cellphone now, so i can txt message people. My name there is paulthe.
I watched the first episode of the Lab with Leo Laporte. I am impressed with the studio, looks like Greedy put a lot of money into it. It was good to see some of the "Call for Help" alumni show up and talk about different things. I'm hoping it will have a long run.
Well, I'm off to Twitter.
One of the features that got me interested in Feisty Fawn was the special effects that were to be generated through Beryl. Beryl is a windows manager that allows a person to experience all sort of custom effects for the desktop. When I first saw the video
of the Ubuntu desktop with Beryl I believed this was something I had to try.I did learn I had to do more then simply download Feisty, there was some work required. I did find a site which gave point by point instructions on getting Beryl to work on my machine. My computer has a ATI Radeon video card so there was a few things needed to make it work. I did them and with some tweaking, I got the effects I want:
Overall, I am impressed, although I must admit I think it has slowed the computer down. This is probably more due to th age of the machine and the chipset rather then a problem with the graphics card.
Still it is something I am continuing to experiment and play with.
Well, I couldn't wait for the official release date. I thought about holding off until April 19th, but I simply couldn't. I had to download and install Feisty Fawn. It is still in Beta, but I thought I needed to see it in action and to being to appreciate this new version.
So I typed in the right command, and sat back and watched it all take place. There was a few things that hasn't been upgraded but overall I was pleased with the effort of it all.
It was late at night when it finally went into "restart" but i just had to try it. Of course immediately I went to the "Desktop Effects" button and gave my okay, so that I could play with the various open windows.
I've been reading up and I am looking forward to Avahi with my laptop. It claims to make finding the network easier as well as anything in the network, such as printers. This might be quite an interesting feature, one that will enhance my work with the laptop.
Of course, the eye candy is still in beta for me, I'm still studying up on it. If there any one else who has it up and running on their machine, do send me a note, I would like to discuss it with you.
The big news on the Ubuntu front is the release of the 7.04Beta. This is one of the final works out before the release of it in April.
Here is where the final bugs will be dealt with and we wait for that moment in April, the 19th according to the schedule when all who enjoy Ubuntu can download the necessary upgrades and have the system run on our computers.
According to the release notes, there's going to be some fun and interesting software included.
For the fun, it will include both Chess and Sudoku. Yea!
Interesting it will have Beryl, although the default will be not operational. It should be the interesting eye candy that is the great part of Vista.
I don't think I'll download the Beta. I will wait for the final product to be released.