Feisty Fawn has Landed!

20Apr07

In case you’ve been under a rock, the new version of Ubuntu has just been released (Feisty Fawn, 7.04). I’ve been using the development version on my Desktop for the past few months, and it was very interesting to watch it mature. I just upgraded my laptop, although it took about 8 hours to download at 50 KB/s They’re seriously getting pounded right now. It’s almost enough to warrant BitTorrent as a way to distribute the upgrades. But I digress… it’s installed now and it’s very nice. Now that I have the new NVidia driver, I may be able to try out some Beryl bling…

One of the most obvious improvements in this release is a method of automatically installing multimedia codecs after playing an unsupported media file, which will be very good for new users who don’t know how to do that. Also included by default is NetworkManager, which makes managing wireless connections a breeze, especially for laptop users. Not only does it automatically manage both wired and wireless connections, but it also supports WEP and WPA encryption (if anyone has needed to manually use wpa_supplicant in Linux for WPA support, this will come as a more-than-welcome improvement). Of course, also included is new versions of all the programs, a new version of Gnome, and a slightly new theme.

Another thing that I’ve been following since it first appeard in the development branch is the Restricted Drivers Manager, which will let you know what non-free drivers you are using and allows you easilly to enable/disable them (for example, on mine, the NVidia driver shows up on the list; things such as the Intel IPW3945 driver will also appear). This tool will be handy in the next release of Ubuntu, which is bound to include proprietary video card drivers by default, as a way of disabling them if a user doesn’t want them.

Right now, my only issue with Feisty, which isn’t even Ubuntu’s fault, is that Democracy Player will not currently run. The PCF guys are aware of this, and they will be releasing 0.9.6 soon, which will support Feisty.

In another 2-3 months, I’ll probably put Gutsy Gibbon on my desktop, as I normally do with development releases

Technorati Tags: ubuntu, feisty, 7.04, linux

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