30 days with Ubuntu 7.04 - Part VI

By Niall C. Brady, May/June 2007.
If you wish to re-publish this article (or parts of), then you are free to do so as long as it links back to here.

<< Part I (Days 1-5)

<< Part II (Days 6-10)

<< Part III (Days 11-15)

<< Part IV (Days 16-20)

<< Part V (Days 21-25)

Part VI (Days 26-30)

* more updates
* using a digital camera
* conclusion

>> Screenshots

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Yet more updates

I have another bunch of updates, and importantly, one of them was a new kernel update, I applied the updates and the update manager wants a restart. I am left wondering if the kernel update will break my wireless setup, but after the reboot I'm glad to see that the new kernel has not broken wireless, and I'm still connected to the internet. Nice. However, it appeared that my goodweather applet was now no longer working, it started up ok, but listed 'n/a' for all the values and was grey in appearance. I tried restarting the applet but it still didn't work. Finally I follow the instructions earlier on in this article, and download the goodweather applet again, install it and now it's working again. Odd...

Using a digital camera

I connected a Canon EOS 350D to the usb port on the side of the laptop, and powered the camera on. I was greeted with a 'camera found' wizard, and then strangely after accepting to import the photos, it showed me 'no camera detected', however the camera LED was flashing wildly so I guess it was still reading from it. Indeed, after a few minutes, it displayed another window showing me that it DID infact correctly identify the camera, and it showed me the photos on it, I selected all of the photos and created a directory to store them in, then started importing them.

Sadly, it popped up an error after starting the process, the error was PTP I/O error and it seems I'm not the only one seeing this bug. I decide to turn off the camera, and try again. While doing that I browsed the destination folder and it did suceed in copying quite a few photos, but clearly not all (408). Many were there by filename only and zero bytes in size.

Finally after trying again, it worked, and opened another browser window to show the results, all 408 photos imported successfully. Nice. :-)

Conclusion

30 days with Ubuntu, it sounds like a lot and it is. In those thirty days I not only learnt about Ubuntu as a distro but also got a better insight into why the hype is there in the first place.

My own feelings towards Ubuntu as a distro have changed within those 30 days, indeed it's now the 5th of June and I'm writing this on my Ubuntu laptop (I started this May 2nd). When I started this article, I wasn't sure what to expect, but what I did expect (from all the hype) was that Ubuntu would be a noob friendly distro, and in some areas it was but in others (notably DVD playback) it definetly was not. I can't understand how one part of the distro makes getting codecs easy (mp3 playback) yet another makes it nearly impossible (inserting a DVD movie gives you a cryptic error). That is a lack of consistancy and hopefully will be addressed in future releases.

However, Ubuntu has done a lot of things right, and those things need to be commended, it has great wiki support, great in-house support, the 'Migrate documents and settings' tool is obviously in its' infancy but shows great promise, and little things like NTFS support and Ubuntu updates are handled very nicely. Package management is first class with Synaptic and installation of the OS is a breeze with the LiveCD option. Last but not least, Ubuntu offers end users great choice in terms of getting the software in the first place, whether it's on a free CD that they ship to you (usually in a pack), or via traditional methods like other distros do.

You may recall that when I started this quest, that I put my Fedora Core release 6 hard disc away, and I'm sure you'll be wondering if I'll be going back to Fedora, and if so, why ?.

Truth be told, I already have (more or less), I've already installed F7 on two computers (it was released some days ago) and forgive me for bringing a car analogy into this but think of it like this. There are those who prefer Mercedes and those who prefer BMW's, I prefer Mercedes, always have and most likely always will. Fedora is my Mercedes, the F7 'look and feel' pulls me in and demands my attention. And hey, I'm a sucker for new releases.

So to conclude, does Ubuntu live up to all the hype ? in most ways yes, in others it does not. Ubuntu is not as easy as people are led to believe and the 'first time user' of linux who starts with Ubuntu after hearing about it on some news site may not get what they bargained for.

My respect for the distro has increased greatly however, and I will happily recommend both Ubuntu AND Fedora to linux noobs. Like cars, they both cater to different tastes, and after using Ubuntu 7.04 Feisty Fawn for 30 days, I have to say I was very impressed. Well done to the Ubuntu dev team.

9/10 from me, mainly down to DVD + wireless issues.

>> Screenshots

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Please send corrections/suggestions/spelling mistakes to anyweb First draft: June 04, 2007.