It’s already old news, but Intrepid Ibex has been release. Get it while it’s hot. It’s worth the download.
Look at my Current install page for an overview of what I install after the default install.
I’m rather surprised that a lot of desktop solutions still use a huge amount of vertical space on the screen. Especially since most monitors are more wide then high. Why isn’t it possible to put a lot of toolbars and related stuff (menus, status bars) on the side of windows?
There is a nice little Firefox plugin that helps a bit: TinyMenu. It’s pretty good, it decreases the Firefox menu to a single entry so that you can combine it with other entries on a toolbar. It saves my 1 toolbar vertical screen real estate.
The beta is realy remarkebly good. Suspend works like it should now, and the while system feels more snappy and stable then Hardy ever did for me.
I don’t get the rave about the NewHuman theme. For me it shows all the same problems as the other dark themes: some applications (try CompizConfig) just don’t work with it.
But overall the release looks promising. I’m really looking forward to the final!
I’ve found an article that gives some tips how you can improve the speed of your desktop ubuntu. Usually these tips can break your system, actually some of these tips also can. I’ve applied the following and it works fine. My system feels a bit faster.
1. Prelink
sudo apt-get -y install prelink
Change a line inside the configuration file /etc/default/prelink from
PRELINKING=unknown
to
PRELINKING=yes
We will do our first prelinking by executing following command
sudo /etc/cron.daily/prelink
2. Preload
sudo apt-get -y install preload
3. Concurrency
sudo vim /etc/init.d/rc
and find the line CONCURRENCY=none and change it to: CONCURRENCY=shell
I’m a real fan of Ubuntu, but I’m willing to try someting else when it’s better.
I’ve downloaded Fedora 9 Gnome and KDE4. The Gnome version is boring, but it works fine. The KDE4 version is brilliant. I must say that I’ve always been using Gnome, but KDE4 is really good. It looks much more modern then Gnome and the features (plasmoids for example) are much more up to date.
But then, I was testing Fedora.
With linux I run into my laziness. Windows is easy: you buy a laptop, boot it, it works. That simple. But then you have a system based on crap technology and you very little customizing possibilities and I like customizing… I installed Ubuntu Hardy Heron and it worked perfect from the beginning, nearly all my hardware was supported, or I could get it to work. With Fedora not everything works, and it looks like it’s going to be a lot of work to get it to work.
The fn-keys don’t work. This is a common problem with the Sony laptops. Ubuntu solved this, Fedora didn’t. That sucks. I’m not able to set the brightness in Fedora, this bothers me because the display of the Sony is very bright. In Ubuntu it does work.
Frankly that did it for me. I like customizing, but I don’t want to search the web and find that stuff as trivial as the support of brightness is not supported in an OS.
On the positive side I must say that the KDE4 is really, really good. It’s much better then Gnome. Everything from the looks until the functionality is just a step better. But it’s not finished. When I see the prereleases of KDE4 I see that they are moving in the right direction, but they are just not there yet.
I’ll stay with Ubuntu for a while, but with the 9 release Fedora really made a huge step towards the usability for the general user.
BTW. I’ve also taken a look at Kubuntu. That looks rather pale when compared to Fedora. I understand that Ubuntu didn’t want to take KDE4 into the LTS verison, but KDE3.5 is real crap. It’s completely outdated.
I replaced the default intel 810 driver with the experimental mode setting driver. This made my external monitor work.
Section "device" #
Identifier "device1"
Boardname "Intel 945"
Busid "PCI:0:2:0"
# Driver "i810"
Driver "intel"
Screen 0
Vendorname "Intel"
EndSection
The graphical tools to set the graphics card, monitors and resolution are still crappy. I guess this is related to the intel board because it never worked correct. The strange thing is: I know it can work. I’ve changed my xorg.conf in Gutsy and I could get it to work as it should. But it looks like the graphical configuration is still complicated in X 
I installed Hardy (8.04) on my laptop because Gutsy did not run very nice out of the box and I was too lazy to make it work smoothly. So I went for the beta version. So far it runs ok. There are glitches, but it’s stable and it looks good.
I run it on a sony vaio TZ21MN, the smallest of the TZ series.
What works:
Still strugling with:
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