I decided about a week ago that when the latest release of Ubuntu came out that I would give it a whirl. I have had some experience with Linux in the past so I figured it would be a breeze. On Thursday I downloaded the latest release(7.10 Gutsy Gibbon) but I didn’t have any time to go about installing it. On Saturday I went to burn the image to a cd but it appears my cd burner doesn’t want to read or write anymore. I decided to give Wubi a go. I have heard so great things about it and some not so great things. Wubi creates a file on your Windows partition that will house your Ubuntu install. There are some downfalls such as slower disk speed access and it is very prone to hard reboots.

Overall the install with Wubi went well and soon I was cruising along. Personally I didn’t notice any slower disk speed on my 7200rpm hard drive but I wasn’t using it that long. I figured I might as well download the updates and then upgrade to 7.10(Wubi is still using 7.04 with 7.10 being alpha). This was a big mistake. If I had read the support forum beforehand I would’ve known not to upgrade my install like that. I was left with an unusable system. I decided that since I was going to use LVPM anyway, I might as well just use my disk with 7.04 on it.

To shorten this up a bit, I installed 7.04 and resized my hard drive. This drive was partitioned as NTFS and contained my media (videos, mp3s and all my backup data). The resize and install and upgrade went very smoothly and I was once again dual booting WinXP and Ubuntu.

In the next article I will address issues with Ubuntu, such as the monitor resolutions, package installations, compiz fusion, etc.

The development team for Ubuntu have announced their next release dubbed “Hardy Heron”. It will succeed Gutsy Gibbon (Ubuntu 7.10, due for release soon). It will be released in April 2008 and will bear the badge of Long Them Support (LTS), meaning it will be supported with security updates for five years on the server and three years on the desktop.

Read the official announcement here.

I haven’t used Ubuntu since my other hard drive died, but I am seriously considering reinstalling once 7.10 comes out. It has come a very long way and I truly feel it is very strong competition for Microsoft and Apple.

The latest version of Ubuntu has been officially released. The servers have been slow most of the day but the wait will be worth it. Get your copy here!

More on Ubuntu

The much anticipated release of Ubuntu 7.04 Feisty Fawn will be released to the masses Thursday. Ubuntu is the award-winning Linux distribution for the desktop, laptop, thin client and server which brings the best of the open source world every 6 months. Ubuntu 7.04 includes the ground-breaking Windows migration assistant, excellent wireless support and improved multi-media support.

If you have never tried out Linux before and are looking for an alternative to the way overpriced Windows Vista or Mac OS, should seriously think about checking out this release. Ubuntu is by far one of the most user friendly distros of Linux out there and best of all its free!

The Ubuntu developers have released a beta version of their next main upgrade “Feisty Fawn”. Keep in mind that this release is a beta and should not be used in production environments and the stable version will be released in April 2007. This new version will see a whole host of new features as well as the released GNOME 2.18 and the 2.6.20 kernal.

Download it here.