I’ve been trying out the last few Ubuntu releases. Ubuntu 7.10 looks even better and the installation was really easy.

Observations:

• I’ve some kind of keyboard issue. Sometimes it seems lazy (1-2 seconds delay), other times it gave me 3-5 repeats of the typed character (old logitech PS/2 keyboard).
• It couldn’t find my second monitor. Detection of the primary monitor, a Dell UltraSharp 2407WFP-HC, (including resolution and refresh rate) worked great. The new live resolution changes stuff, is great. Welcome to windows 2000! 😉
• Detection of any but the basic buttons on the mouse where, still, not detected (like “back”). Amazing. This is such basic functionality…
• My main applications is Adobe Lightroom. It’s a windows application, and Wine has had some bad issue with it. With this release it has gotten a lot better. It’s actually possible to start Lightroom, it just can’t load an existing image database (needs to be on a local drive, and I think it sees the wine mapped drives a network drives), and can’t display images when they have been imported. And it take a year to start – you can actually see it draw the GUI elements, it’s so slow.
• Disc partition tool takes 3-4 minutes to detect the two hard drives in my machine. Actually crashed once.
• Compiz Fusion looks nice, but seems rather useless, and all the window flip-flopping becomes tiring really fast.
• Hardware on my desk that’s useless under linux: Creative Web-Cam, Huey Pro screen calibration, Dell x51v PDA.
• NTFS R/W support works great!
• Looks good. Starting stuff like firefox etc. was fast.
• I had to open a shell terminal once – when I edited the grub boot managers menu, to changed the default item to windows. Didn’t edit xorg.conf once.
• Migration of windows users is a really cool idea. Could be taken further… (option; “share setting with windows”, or “copy from windows”. Use these setting in Wine for drive mappings, and for firefox/thunderbird settings including add-ons).

All in all, it looks good. I’m sure the minor issues could be solved. To bad about the “deal breaker” with Lightroom.