eWEEK Labs Walk-Through: Ubuntu 7.04

When we popped Ubuntus installation disk into a Windows machine, the disk autoruns an Ubuntu greeter applet.

Courtesy of the OpenCD project, Ubuntus installer disk offers a handful of open-source Windows applications to allow Ubuntu newcomers to get their feet wet without leaving Windows.

The installer disk then offers up an overview of Ubuntu.

Ubuntus Web site hosts a document full of information for prospective Windows-to-Linux switchers.

Ubuntus install disk doubles as a system rescue disk.

The Ubuntu installer boots up into a LiveCD environment, enabling Windows users to try the OS out on their hardware without blowing away their Windows partition.

Ubuntus user migration tool, which is meant to locate user accounts and associated data and transfer this information to a new installation, looks promising but did not work for us.

The update manager on our Ubuntu 6.10 test machine let us know that a new version was available for upgrade.

We could peruse the release notes for the new version before initiating an upgrade.

Our Edgy Eft box began chugging through the network upgrade process.

Ubuntus updater gave us an idea of how long the upgrade would take.

We liked the way that Ubuntus updater listed for us the packages no longer supported in the new version.

We could opt to remove or hang on to packages made obsolete by the upgrade.

We experienced rather good download speeds from the Ubuntu network repositories from which we upgraded–before we knew it, it was time to reboot in to Feisty Fawn.

We were impressed with the work the Ubuntu project has done with NetworkManager, which better juggles static connections alongside DHCP links.

Ubuntu 7.04 now sports a Restricted Drivers tool that let us know we were using proprietary (and therefore not directly Ubuntu-supported) drivers. Here we can see that our Nvidia graphics card driver and our VMware Server host drivers are in use.

The Ubuntu team had worked to enable desktop eye candy out of the box for machines that would support it, but the feature remains optional.

We were pleased to see that Ubuntus package manager now allows users to choose a nearby mirror on their own. The software will also select for you what appears to be the best mirror.

We sorted available applications by their popularity, as reported from other Ubuntu users. This was a good way to locate worthwhile applications that might not have made it into the default Ubuntu install.

Overall, were impressed with the work that Ubuntu has done to smooth the wrinkles inherent in installing applications with different licensing rules.

VMware Server is one application available through Ubuntus commercial software repository.

We used VMware Server running on Ubuntu 7.04 to host some of our test instances.

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