so after a hard drive failure, I figured now would be the perfect time to give ubuntus' new prerelease a try: Ubuntu dapper flight 7.

so anyway, I burn the CD and slap it into my computer. I don't see the text console that normally shows up with ubuntu, I see a loading screen and then a desktop. Crap! I thought. Crap! I burned the friggen live CD.

WRONG

The ubuntu team has packages the live CD and the install together. You can mess around with the programs, or click the "install" icon on the desktop to begin your installation. I decided to click around a bit before I start installing. One of the first things you notice is that the whole desktop seems refreshed. Ubuntu has added a new style to their desktop, but maintaines the brown theme. The desktop has a very "glassy" feel to it. THere is an example folder with some text documents and a few images, as well as some other stuff I never had a chance to look at. Now onto the install!

so I start up the install, wich has seven steps. Some wich I cant remember. Pretty basic stuff, location, name, password, keyboard layout and partitioning. The partitioner is plesant to use, it looks similar to partition magic. After you have yoru drive layout set up the way I wanted (I opted for manual setup) it goes ahead and formats your partitions.

~to be continued as I finish this install~

so anyway, the files start copying over, and then the computer reboots into a fully functional system. I am very impresses with the ammount of polish that has gone into this release. Instead of using apt-get to install all of my media codec like I normally do, I decided to try out one of rthe many automated scripts to get everything done. I tried "easy ubuntu". I installed the latest version with subversion, and ran the script. I was able to install all of my video codecs, mp3 codecs, replace gstreamer with lib-xine, install flash (damn you macromedia, linux users need flash 8!) as well as a few other things.


I should note that this will be slightly delayed, some family issues came up and I had to return my 1705 to use the cash for some other stuff. This is being done off a PIII550 system now, but I have an fx5200 in the mail, as well as a 1.2 ghz processor and some memory.

ubuntu is definatly a great distro. upwards to just a week ago i had the latest daper installed, it was good less a few not really show-stopper bugs here and there. i love ubuntu, but its a tad slow (thank you i386 optimization what are they thinking!) so yeah...anywhoo, now i've hoped on gentoo to resolve my desire for speed (although i confirm that sourcemage is an EASIER source distribution than gentoo, and that ARCH although binary.... still gets the job done just fine and dandy, and pretty damn fast too. what made me hop on gentoo is that sourcemage still missing some important packages in its file manager, and that arch's e17 is broken, and i really really felt like giving e17 a run.

anywhoo....good luck with ubuntu.

-first things first, i absolutely recommend you REBUILD THE KERNEL.
-secondly, remove usplash and install fbsplash or gensplash to get a nicer spalsh screen for a more user-friendly appearance.
- next install ati/nvidia drivers
- setup xgl/compiz for more eye candy
- create a 2nd xserver for opengl games that lag in xgl
- have fun with it and be creative!

and if any hardware doesnt work out of the box, naturally make that work before all else.