Joseph Brower

As most of us know, Ubuntu 8.10 was released yesterday and many
reviews have already been written. I figured one more can’t hurt.

The download experience was much better this time. This time I opted
to use the torrents to download both the 64 and 32 bit and had very
good speeds. I avereaged about 600 KBps during the few hours after
the release, so the torrent definitely had all of the seeders it
needed.

I burned both disks and gave the 32 bit version to my friend that
could use it and kept the 64 bit. This was the first time that I
would be using the 64 bit version on my own machine I’m excited to
see how well it functions, especially since I’m starting to get into
the video editing. Enough about my expectations, let’s see how this
actually performs.

My machine is a Athlon X2 with 2GB of RAM and an NVidia 7350 . I also
have a 22in Widescreen monitor.

Out of the box everything looks good. It started up faster than I
remember the last version doing. It also appears to have detected
everything perfectly, sound, ethernet, resolution of the monitor,
everything. The last version worked well, so it isn’t really a
surprise that this one did, but I still can’t complain.

The installer looks a lot better and feels much more responsive. I
really like how the new partitioner is all color coded. That should
be very useful for newcomers to Linux and for those that aren’t
familiar with what partitioning is. Everything just seems more
polished. After a few minutes the installation finished and I was
asked to restart to finish the installation.

I restarted and had a few updates to install and then I used the
driver manager to install what appears to be the latest NVidia driver.
After the install I was asked to restary again and now I had desktop
effects and full opengl acceleration.

Everything seems to be very solid overall, though I have found a few
problems. There are some graphical glitches regarding compiz..While
nothing major, it does make the system look a little rough around the
edges sometimes. It also has OpenOffice 2 and not 3. That is easily
remedied, and it is perfectly understandable, but still something
people should be aware of.

Overall my experience has been very positive with the biggest
diffculty being Skype. I hope someone finds this useful and that
everyone can forgive me for my unorganized post. I’ll be trying to
improve this blog over time. Have a Happy Halloween everyone!