Three Hours with Feisty Fawn…

Today the newest version of Ubuntu Linux, titled “Feisty Fawn” dropped. I couldn’t help but jump at the opportunity to upgrade my upstairs desktop and see if the newest version of this distribution helped matters much.

The short answer is: a little, but not much.

First thing’s first, I attempted to run the LiveCD on my Dell Laptop to see how it looked. Immediate failure. It appears that whatever they did between the last distribution and the current one hates my graphics card that I have on my laptop.

I have found a few tutorials on how to resolve the issue, but since I don’t intend on running Ubuntu on my laptop (yet) I didn’t even bother giving it any extra time spent.

So I ventured upstairs to install it on my desktop. Installation was uneventful and very simple. The interface popped right up on this machine, happily.

I was secretly hoping that their new proprietary driver manager was going to help me get my network card, printer, and video card worked out but unfortunately that was not the case. HOWEVER… I was able to find a quickie script that someone had written (encapsulated in a .deb file for easy installation) that set up my network card for me. It worked LIKE A DREAM, and immediately I was browsing the web. I even enabled the MAC address filtering on my router to secure my network again, which worked flawlessly.

The printer! They added drivers for my printer by default, it detected immediately and I was in business. Actually easier than Windows, major props there. I shared my printer, enabled some configuration settings and before I knew it I was able to print from my laptop to the printer on the Ubuntu machine. Problem #2 solved!

The graphics card remains the only issue. I began to venture down the road of determining that the right drivers were installed (they are), however something in the configuration is disallowing me to change the system to any resolution other than 800×600. That, and anything OpenGL enabled appears to be crashing, so something probably needs to be installed or reconfigured. I would’ve hoped that the Voodoo driver would’ve been picked up by the new proprietary driver manager, but no dice.

I have elected to fight this battle another time, this is already far and away more success than I have had with previous Ubuntu or recent Fedora Core installations so I am a pretty happy camper.

I’m burning a few spare disks to take to work with me in the morning in case any of the other dorks in my section want to try it out. I will be interested to hear what successes and failures they have.

Welcome to the world, Feisty Fawn!