Gutsy Gibbon coming!

A new Ubuntu release is due in a couple of days - Gutsy Gibbon, Ubuntu 7.10 (10th month of year 2007). The RC is out and reviewed. It got good reviews as usual. I remember my first experience with Ubuntu. I blogged that back in November 27, 2006 - reproduced here:

It was the Thanksgiving weekend. After doing the compulsory chores of eating and drinking merrily, taking a day trip for picnicking etc. I had enough time to fiddle with my home machine - the main one which is running Fedora Core 4. I decided that it's time to upgrade it to FC 6 which has come out last month. Historically I have upgraded every other FC release: started with FC2, skipped FC3, upgraded to FC4, skipped FC5. Well that's not enough history but you get the idea.

I fired up by BitTorrent client - Azureus, downloaded the FC6 torrent file and started downloaded a 3.6 GB DVD image of FC6. Then I went to the Thanksgiving dinner to Dada-BoThan's place. Came back and the DVD image was sitting there, ready to be burnt. Double checked that the download was right by doing the SHA1 sum and matching the signature with the one provided on the FC site. Put a blank DVD into the drive, fired up k3b and started burning the image onto the disk. I decided that that was enough for the day and went to bed.

Next morning, the disk was ready. So far so good. Rebooted the machine. While the machine was rebooting, I changed the BIOS setting to have the machine booted from the DVD instead of from the hard drive. Sure enough, FC6 installation screen came up, hit enter and I was on my happy way to upgrading my machine. Well, not so fast. The media test (which is, by the way, optional step during installation) said the media is faulty. Hmmmm. Anyway, I took the risk and went ahead with the installation anyway. But, sure enough after a while installation freaked out saying it cannot read certain package from the disk. Hm, I thought, the SHA1 sum was right, so this must be the burning process. So I went back to my FC4, reburnt another image on another media. Same process of rebooting with the same result - media integrity test failed.

I did the next thing one supposed to do - googled to see if anybody else had the same problem. Sure enough, a lot did.

At that point, I had to leave since we had a picnic plan for the day. The forced leaving was good since I had got enough time to think about the situation. Sure I could leave the system with FC4. It is working quite ok for my purpose. I have tweaked it to have all my required applications running fine, the peripherals are working fine too. Why fix something that ain't broken? On the other hand, I have been itching to see all the new things that have happened in the brave new world of Linux and Open Source since the time of FC4. Should I spend rest of my weekend to figure out a way to get FC6 installed? It's an iffy path at best. The other option is to use some other distro: may be Ubuntu? OpenSUSE? CentOS?

I am using CentOS at my work. It's a solid distribution based on Redhat. I know it works well. A known devil is better than an unknown? But it's still based on Redhat, that means there is not much room to play around there since I know that distro quite well.

OpenSUSE? Not right now after the Novell-Microsoft deal. I am not sure whether Novell has sold its soul to the devil (as a lot of Open Source people are saying). I would rather wait to see what all these mean.

Ubuntu seems to be a nice choice. The distrowatch.com says it is the most popular distro right now. There are lot of buzz about Ubuntu in this part of the world too. They also released their latest 6.10 last month and there are some very good reviews.

On the downside, this means I have to backup a lot of stuff for just in case. But, my new 320 GB USB hard drive was delivered just last Wednesday, that means backing up is so easy now. Decision made: let's go Ubuntu way.

I came back home, downloaded the Ubuntu torrent, fired up Azurus and started downloading the CD. Very pleasantly surprised that the Ubuntu installation can be done with only one CD. Great! The image finished downloading in no time. Burnt it on a CD. And waited for my almost 50GB backup to finish.

Once backup is done, started installing Ubuntu. It doesn't have a graphical installer like FC does (anaconda), but it was enough for my purpose. Moreover, you don't have to select your packages at installation time. That was good since that way the installation process was quick and sweet.

Installation was done in about a few minutes, rebooted the system and the system came up much faster than FC4. Plugged in my USB harddrive, Ubuntu immediately recognizes it. It recognized the network automatically. And at the very first go, I am on internet which I connect through a DSL router. Next stop printer setup. I have a Brother DCP 1000. With FC I had to do some work to have my printer working. But with Ubuntu's printer setup applet, the system found my printer, though it thought that it is Brother DCP 1200. With a small googling I found the right driver for DCP 1000, set that in the properties applet for the printer (no need to download or install driver, the driver came with the distribution) and my printer was set up.

Next: sound. By default ALSA keeps the Wave Surround channel muted. Opened up the Sound Preference applet, unmuted Wave Surround channel and I have my sound (BTW, I have a SBLive! soundcard).

The only thing left to do was my VPN connection since I do my work-work from home a lot. VPN client installation on FC4 was also a bit involved. Good that I kept the note. Following that note I downloaded, compiled and installed the VPN client. It's working now, I can connect to work just like I did in FC4 with one difference: in Ubuntu I have to start the VPN client with sudo. Yet to find out why and more importantly how to solve this issue. But since I can work fine, the issue is not that pressing.

Now, I am a happy Ubuntu user (and an ex-FC user). I still have to set up my SFTP server, check how my Digital camera and camcorder works etc. But Synaptic, package management is very easy in Ubuntu. I am sure, these wont be that big a deal. But still, wish me luck.