Ubuntu Edgy Eft was released on Thursday, and today I thought I would check it out. To sum it up: I'm impressed.
The hardware detection was immaculate. The only thing that I had an issue was the bcm43xx driver for my wireless card. This was using the reverse-engineered driver and the only reason that it didn't work was because it didn't have the firmware (which they're not allowed to redistribute)- so I just copied the firmware from /lib/firmware on the hard drive to the ramdisk, restarted the module and bingo- it worked! I haven't been able to get this working on my Debian installation yet, but I'd prefer to use ndiswrapper than not having wireless- so to be honest, I haven't tried that much! My preferred resolution (1600x1200) was activated immediately and I was even able to download and install apps from universe and they ran perfectly too! The thing that is hard to compete with is the simplicity- everything was just so easy for everyone!
I am very impressed and the Ubuntu team have done a great job! This really will be the start-point for more people using Linux. Although I'm not going to jump to start using Ubuntu now, I will certainly consider dual-booting it with Debian next time I re-install Debian.
I went to LinuxWorld Expo on Wednesday. It was really interesting and I enjoyed it, although I did spend a little too much time there. The emDebian stand was interesting and I chatted about HTC phones running Linux for a while. The Hula stand showed me a nice installation of Hula. I was impressed with this and have tried getting it working on my server, failing so far on the fact that I need to use apache2 and this is broken at the moment. There were other interesting stands, but you know 'em. I listened to Jono Bacon's talk on Ubuntu in the community, or something like that. It was alright, but a little tedious as I already knew about Ubuntu! In fact, this week has made me appreciate Ubuntu a lot more. Another thing that I thought was interesting at the expo was the fact that some stands had people who didn't really know much about the project, or direct competitors, which was a little odd. An amusing thing was the corporate stands- as soon as they saw I was representing no company they realised I must be a student and promptly ignored me! I got several bits of free stuff, including: