Last week, the beta version of Ubuntu Gutsy Gibbon was released, so I decided to blow away the slightly messy installation of Feisty on my laptop, and make a clean start with the new OS.
It’s a beta, of course, so I wasn’t expecting an entirely smooth ride. I didn’t entirely anticipate the installation crashing out or freezing repeatedly, and thus rendering my laptop unbootable, but I suppose I should know by now that my hardware isn’t particularly Linux compatible.
Anyway, with much help from Andrew and Martin, I finally got the text-mode installer to boot using the VGA compatibility cheat codes, and 20 minutes later, I rebooted into Gutsy.
First impressions were good - the inclusion of ntfs-3g by default is a boon for users like me with NTFS partitions who dual-boot Windows, and the graphics are all a bit shinier. We were very impressed with the speed at which my laptop suspended to RAM, too, though sadly it still doesn’t manage to resume.
I’ll be making a serious effort to use Ubuntu more over the next couple of months - for nearly everything I do on my computer these days, I reckon it’s just as good or better than Windows XP, though undoubtedly still rough around certain edges.
I’ll let you know how I get on. I suppose I should update the somewhat dated LaptopTestingTeam wiki page for my laptop, too.
