ben robison

Ubuntu Feisty Beta

So being a student I don’t have a lot of access to extra hardware to test out certain things, so I’ll freely admit that my testing of Feisty is patchy at best, because I’m limited to VMWare Fusion, but I’ll tell you what I’ve seen and beyond that, I’ve heard some good things.

I saw in the news a month or so ago that Ubuntu was not going to make proprietary drivers available in Feisty. This is what drove my whole gentoo experiment in the first place. The whole reason that I loved Ubuntu was the steady release and that everything worked.

You’ve all seen the tutorials floating around for getting XGL, AIGLX, Beryl, Compiz, etc. running on your favorite distro, but this is too much for me. I consider myself a geek, but I don’t like wasting my time. I’m pretty familiar with an apache.conf file, but beyond that, if it involves opening conf files or shell text editors, I’m done. I’ll find something else. I digress.

Ubuntu’s latest Feisty beta then came as a surprise. Inside System > Administration > Restricted Drivers Manager you control what restricted drivers your system uses. This is an auto-install of the proprietary drivers with an auto-detect included. You can also control Desktop Effects grom the gui (I forget where). If you use restricted drivers, Ubuntu will warn you that they do not support them, but they are available if you want to use them.

You can see my VMWare drivers in the Restricted Drivers Manager here.

What do you have that might need proprietary drivers? Graphics cards and wireless cards are at the top of my list, and apparently, Ubuntu is good at getting the right ones.

Then as I began posting this, I heard another bit of news that makes this even better. ATI has released their Catalyst Control Center for Linux. If you like hating on Microsoft and can’t afford Apple Computers, Linux is starting to shape up as a decent (and still free) option.

This is good news for Linux.