Feisty Feedback – Free For All March 29, 2007
Posted by Carthik in ubuntu.trackback
I installed Feisty Beta on my main laptop and I must say it is very impressive. In fact, I am more impressed with Feisty than any other release so far, especially when it comes to making life easier for new linux users and non-geek users. More than once, I was pleasantly surprised by the detail that seems to have gone into making life easier for regular desktop users, and this includes the documentation. Another thing I noticed was that on the IRC channels, there seem to be a lot less people complaining about random problems with Feisty. I still remember how busy #ubuntu+1 used to be after a beta release in the past. Since I don’t have any quantitative information, this has to remain a subjective observation for now.
Oh and yes, the rule that states that the busy-ness of a blogger’s life is inversely proportional to the frequency of blog posts is true 😉 I have ideas for a couple of posts, and an interview, on my mind for about 2 weeks now. Wish I had the time and peace-of-mind to share it with all of you.
I am maintaining a log of the features in Feisty that impressed me most. I decided to completely reinstall Feisty on the laptop, since upgrading never gives one a very good view of what life is like for someone who is installing Ubuntu from a specific release. I will try and summarize what others like about Feisty too. To help me with that, please let me know what your experiences have been with Feisty so far.
What do you love about it?
and more importantly,
What do you dislike most?
Extra points for originality, and for not repeating what other commenters have said 🙂
Watch this space for more. See you in a day or two!
Ubuntu Blog 
-The autodection of codecs and the popup that ties into apt to install the correct plugin
-The fact that Ubuntu is taking over the world and gives me a warm fuzzy for knowing I am one of it’s minions.
-command-not-found, this will cut down on support requests in the IRC channels and forums tremendously because newbies don’t know about apt-cache search
-migration assistant. Now this is a cool idea AND it is open source, wow.
The only things I really dislike is that:
-the default color is brown
-The murrine gtk engine is not installed by default and no murrine themes are in the repos
-No eyecandy facebrowser for gdm
What I like:
– wireless network integration for the new user
– new sudoku and chess games (although only human player by default after upgrading from edgy)
What I dislike:
– OpenOffice.org 2.2rc3 is still buggy. quite often, the recover window will pop-up after closing the document window. Will feisty ship with oo 2.2 final?
I’m very impressed with Kubuntu Feisty. I have done fresh installs of herd 3 , herd 4, and herd 5. I see small improvements here and there. The colors in Kubuntu are better than Drab brown in Ubuntu. I only have one thing I dislike so far. My Epson usb printer was detected and installed right on first attempt in herd 3 and herd 4, but herd 5 doesn’t do it right. I have recently installed the beta version, overall very nice, but I still have printer troubles. I’ll solve this , I know I will, but it’s disappointing that earlier herds got it right, and now, at beta, and still I have printer troubles.
So, far everything else is very nice.
If you run Feisty Beta, give this guy some feedback
The writer installed the beta and was very impressed and is asking for other chaps to chime in on their experience. If you are running the beta give him your best opinion.
What I like:
– wine 9.33 actually runs steam + hl2 + sin episodes and all hl/hl2 mods without any troubles or tweaking
– tracker is promising (compared to the beagle-monster)
– restricted drives (its informative and usefull, you can manually, but graphically enable a restricted driver such as the nvidia driver and be informed about how much it sucks that its restricted)
– jamendo plugin in rhythmbox (20,000 songs added to my library.. whoehoe)
– frozen-bubble 2 .. my new all time favorite multiplayer game .. i’ve switched 3 people to ubuntu _just because of this silly game_
– beryl in ubuntu repo’s: good move! everybody’s using beryl instead of compiz
What I don’t like
– the universe contains lots of broken packages. i’m afraid they are not going to be fixed. i’m also afraid they are not going to be removed. (they should remove packages that are broken at release time!). We’re talking (just the stuff I tried) democracyplayer, penguintv, azureus.
– the many experiments with desktop innovation (gimmie, gnome-main-menu, etc.) aren’t really leading anywhere. They aren’t focused either. It looks like its going to take years before gnome will innovate again, whereas the KDE folks are already developing and designing KDE4. The optimizations and tweaks in the current gnome generation are now done, but where is the path forward?
– deskbar + tracker has issues. It doesn’t look like this is going to be fixed.
– general polish: there are a number of rough edges: broken packages, not all gtk2 engines installed by default (so downloaded themes don’t work by default and users have no clue they have to install those), issues with localization and default dictionaries still present, etc. There is this number of usuablitity bugs that aren’t being addressed at all. Yet require simple fixes which are sometimes even available (but would violate the freeze), totem still doesn’t play most online video’s, universe still doesn’t contain most popular OSS games such as ManiaDrive, vDrift, Sauerbraten.
A lot of my complaints aren’t really Ubuntu specific, I know. But it looks like the innovation in the gnome world has come to a halt. And Ubuntu can still use lots of polish. Making more stuff working ‘out of the box’. Redesigning the configuration panels. (Some are too complex, some are too simple). Graphical server management tools, etc.
All things considered, I would still recommend this version of Ubuntu above any other.
Wireless encryption completely broken.
I could see my neighbor’s wifi connection and even connect to it momentarily just as a test, but could not for the life of me get it to connect to my own. I saw some OLD bug reports about it inserting extra characters in front of the WEP password, maybe it’s not considering all the types of WEP-password-thingies-out-there (stupid newbie presumption), or maybe it’s not storing the wireless network password after I type it in. All these could be the case.
Been alpha/beta testing on two machines now; some thoughts:
Pros:
Fantastic all around. I echo many of the sentiments above. Strong recommends go to Comix & Quod Libet; while not installed by default, fantastic applications and no longer require universe to be installed.
Cons:
– Still not recognizing onboard wireless card
– Krename crashes; wish there was a GNOME replacement that worked more like Flash Renamer (windows app)
– initial upgrade resulted in X freaking out; easy fix, and this was long before the ‘beta’ came out, but worth a mention, as I haven’t checked to see if the bug is still around.
Things I like:
– great wifi
– the one and only good approach to restricted drivers
– ubuntu on the forefront of user friendlyness
What I’m still missing:
– My usb Wacom tablet doesn’t work when switing kvm due to this bug:
https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/wacom-tools/+bug/38336
I would expect usb to just work by now.
– Server/deamon config tools
– LDAP client config tool
Against:
installed this and as usual with most Linux type platforms, NO support for LCD screen (Philips 190P7) no support to install SIS190 on board ethernet, wireless no go.
So this is still nowhere near as good as it could be, okay I know its free but if you’re going to try and get people interested in Ubuntu or Linux no good telling them to fiddle with command lines, recompiling etc because most will say “bugger that I’ll stick with Windows, at least I can use the hardware I got”
So what about it Linux experts? no good coming back with a smart remark like I read the other day on a blog for Ubuntu where the answer “do you want me to do the work for you” was, rather then “lets have a look and see what we can do, too many so called Linux experts treat newcomers like dirt or stupid, maybe they forgot they had to start at some stage with Linux/Ubuntu or whatever too.
For: none, hard to believe with all the expertise out there they still come out with broken packages and pityful support, probably because most Linux “experts” run crappy old machines, nothing late and up to date, hence the lack of drivers and support
I am impressed that the Ubuntu-randomly-crash-after-a-short-period-time bug was fixed. I don’t know what caused it, but I had been suffering from it for months, (I think in Dapper too)- so much that I didn’t even hardly use Ubuntu anymore. Kubuntu looks like Kubuntu 6.10 to me. Ok, I guess.
I’m running herd 5. There are so many little things that make me smile when I find them like the choice of “kate”, “kwrite” or “other” when you want to display some text. To me Feisty is a breath of fresh air.
I’m programming Qt4 and it works for me. No downside
Pros: At the risk of sounding overly-generic, everything that I like about Ubuntu remains in this version, with nice extra touches and refinement along the way. Feisty was an effortless upgrade and I’ve been pleased with the little extra perks (e.g. Network Manager running by default, 2.6.20 kernel which picked up driver support for my TV tuner card — no more rolling those puppies by hand!)
Cons:
Various things… I had some weirdness in fstab with the /dev/… -> UUID conversion. I’m not actually entirely sure what was going on, but I managed to fix it by changing /dev/hda (which I had manually edited to use the /dev hierarchy for some reason, admittedly) to a UUID format, and things worked. So whatev. I wouldn’t wish that situation on a newb, but then again, what newb goes “Oh, using UUID instead of /dev referencing for that drive in fstab is going to cause a problem with X or Y”?
The dropping of Adobe Reader packages caused problems; this was also my own damn fault ultimately, not being content to leave well enough alone.
The BOINC package(s?) are way out of date, and to my knowledge should have made it in under any version freeze deadlines (are we even to final version freeze yet?). The client functionality is tremendously improved in the new packages, and the fact the new software isn’t available in apt repos is woefully complicating.
Please, in desktop-effects add a way to select Compiz or Beryl. If none of this is installed, download them and configure.
have look at this nice preview
http://onlyubuntu.blogspot.com/2007/03/ubuntu-704-feisty-fawn-beta-preview.html
Dislikes:
– How the Feisty specs page looks. Specs involving the boot process (Slick boot, fsck progress, no-usplash-timeout, replacement-initscripts) didn’t make it. Boot process still seems to be a sore point.
– driver-device-manager spec not making it into Feisty. (Something really needed for new users)
– Printer specs not making it into Feisty.
– Spell checking. End users have to change there locale when they want programs to spell check in differed languages. (gnome problem)
– Art work. I hear this time people have been payed to make it? The community can build something much better (just looking at deviantart). Art work seems to be held down from the top. It’s all personal preference I guess.
– glipper or something should be enabled to fix copy pasting.
– gnome-network-manager: flaky, works for some, not for others. (Let’s just stick to “still lacking driver support”)
– gnome-control-center, It has not made it into Feisty. I wanted it 2. But even then. This is not the way to build a control center. Having 100 dialogs sometimes recursively linking to another to offer the limited config options GNOME is know for can not be the way.
– repositories, example: kdbus was broken when Edgy launched. I reported it. 6 months later, it was fixed. I upgraded to Feisty a couple of days later. kdbus is broken in Feisty. I reported it. Will it get fixed? (Just noting a structural problem)
Likes:
– apport, this one simply makes me hopeful for the future.
– Codec spec, This is good good good. Although I had to click more then 10 times to actually get them installed. No reason why this should be so messy.
– uuid’s
– BCM43** support by default (New wireless stack).
– Mount local file-systems, Although not working for me.
Many of the above things or not Feisty specific, some are upstream problems, but they do affect end users. Feisty is a small incremental improvement, some nice usability changes for people installing it, like the installer, easier wireless, codecs. But for people upgrading, they will notice little.
Ubuntu does a great job once again providing the best of what upstream projects have to offer, and since allot is happening upstream, I’m hopeful for the future.
Good stuff! There a few things that I missed out on, and given the hardware I have/use I have had no problems, but it is sad to see that hardware support, though improved seems to suffer just a little.
Hi, I’m a Windows XP user and I’m waiting for the 7.04 release to install Ubuntu on my laptop in dual boot mode with Windows XP. I have two question:
1. Does Ubuntu 7.04 include the NTFS-3G Read/Write Driver?
2. What is the precise release day? April 19?
Thanks
I actually forgot the thing I disliked the most.
– Network-manager-gnome making you input your password to get online.
This one makes it impossible for me to “sell” Ubuntu to friends. No Windows user can have sympathy for this. And I do know the technical reason and how to fix it if your password for the keyring is the same as your user pass. But that this makes a release is… funny.
[…] Feisty Feedback – Free For All I installed Feisty Beta on my main laptop and I must say it is very impressive. In fact, I am more impressed with […] […]
I normally like waiting until the final release, but I’ve been giving it extensive testing in a VMware environment, and despite the fact that this is still in Beta, I am taking the leap.
Geronimooooooooooooo……………!
I recently installed Feisty (64bit Desktop, CD) on my girlfriends laptop, and it all went really smooth.
One thing that bugged me was that, after installing the propietary ATI drivers from the Ubuntu assistant, the keyboard layout both in the login screen and in gnome were reset from German to English. I ended up editing xorg.conf to fix it, which i think scared her a bit…
Second, being more of a cosmetic issue, the screen still shows weird colors and stuff when the system’s coming up from hibernation, disappearing as soon as the login prompt comes up.. On my Thinkpad, running Edgy, i get some ugly white squares there, which also doesn’t look quite right…
Other than that, i am very impressed by Feisty. All thumbs up for Ubuntu!
I had tried Ubuntu a few times, since about 5.0.4 (I think) but I struggled to get my internet working until Feisty. I am really pleased that I managed to get my wireless internet connection working with no problems what so ever.
You could say I am an Ubuntu ‘Newbie’ as I haven’t used it much before, that being because of the internet connection issues, but I have to say that I love Feisty! Not once since switching to Ubuntu have I felt inclined to turn on XP! The only reason I have been on XP since installing Feisty is to do some Web Design work as I still haven’t found a program for doing this on Ubuntu. That is down to me being an Ubuntu and Linux “newbie”.
I am running Edgy Eft on my ASUS notebook. I downloaded and burned the Feisty Fawn Live CD. I booted it and I’m impressed. It found all of my hardware and functioned very well. I plan on installing it soon. I think Ubuntu has a hit here. I’m anxious to experiment with the virtualization.
There is a problem with an external Seagate 320GB hard drive, it refuses to mount, even from the terminal (keeps saying sda5 busy), and as a whole it doesn’t eject external storage devices properly. That concern aside, I have no problems. Off to bed.
Just did a fresh install on my PPC (DG5) and I am REALLY HAPPY. The beta is already much more stable than any previous installation of dapper or edgy. Finally Xorg doesn’t randomly freeze up the machine when dri is enabled ( I guess it was one of the many ATI problems). Was afraid, since official support for PPC is now gone, I would be forced to go to another distro. But for now feisty is rocking. Long live the community
Installed Kubuntu Herd 5
Pros:
– Instillation process felt better then when I installed Edgy beta.
– The interface just feels slicker
– Easier instillation of codecs
– OpenOffice looks nicer
– Frozen Bubble 2!!!
Cons:
– Had to manually configure X11 and the onboard wireless card before I could boot in to X.
– Still no support for my onboard wireless card.
– No write support for USB memory sticks (have to edit that using sudo).
– The fonts being used in the browsers seem a bit off…
All in all, once I got everything working, it just feels more polished then Edgy; but it took more work to for me to get everything working (of course I just got a new laptop).
Updated to 7.04 beta from Edgy –
Things that i liked:
OOo 2.2 – WOW, it IS a lot faster than the 2.0.* stuff
New GNOME is perfect!
The whole system seems to work faster than Edgy…
Things that i dislike:
I’ve got GeForce3 videocard. The problem is, that the latest nvidia drivers, that support my chip are 9631. But I can’t install them in Feisty! =/ (because there are no restricted-modules matching the driver)
Please, add more conf for MySQL like those that will be available in the windows version (e.g. one for OLTP, one for OLAP, ect.).
i have to agree with the one person who didn’t like the “specs” page… i looked at some of that stuff and my eyes glazed over (and I have written code for a living for 28+ years!!). i have been trying to figure out whether i want to drop Ubuntu 6.06 LTS onto my old T40 or wait for the official “Feisty” release. i went to the specs page to see if i could find something really compelling that would make me wait but i really had a hard time trying to figure out what they were adding/fixing/whatever…
…and what’s up with no USB write support someone was talking about? is that for real — you can’t write to a USB device like a stick or hard drive??? hmmmmm…. that doesn’t seem right at all…
6.06 runs nice on the T40 (as a live CD) … maybe i should just bite the bullet and try Feisty…
I still have to manually alter xorg.conf for my trackpad to work. That ought not to be. Synaptics’ trackpad is very common. How many minutes would it take to add that to the install script?
What is there for internet TV, Shoutcast, TVU, Anime On Demand, etc?
Page down still doesn’t work in Firefox.
Kubuntu lacks the bootup sounds of Ubuntu.
My Creative notebook Ultra webcam is not recognized. Nor does there appear to be a way to do so.
The install CD contains so very little. People without broadband and hours to spend, won’t have a complete system. How about an install DVD?
Beryl doesn’t work on my laptop, and has no graceful means to exit. Typing “shutdown -r now” has worked for me a couple of times, but how many Windows users are going to know that command, or think of using it on a blank, white screen?
As to the whole KDE/Gnome issue. What would it take to raise enoiugh money to purchase QT and make it GPL?
[…] Feisty Feedback has now been used to get comments on Feisty Beta. I for One think that Feisty is great. though I have run into problems such as: some packages cannot for the life of it seem to not want to get installed so in my virtual machine I am stuck with a Fiesty Fawn Alpha 4. I cannot seem to upgrade it to alpha 5 or Beta 1. […]
Things I like:
– Wireless card works better and is much more stable (Netgear WG311v2 for reference)
– System feels smoother and more responsive
– Startup log showing what is happening during the startup process
Things I hate:
– The ‘Layout Options’ tab in Keyboard Preferences.
– FLAC and WAV audio preview in Nautilus not working (for me anyway – MP3 and OGG work however). Nautilus needs to depend on Gstreamer in my opinion…
– Network Manager doesn’t work with my wireless (even more annoying since I’m using the ACX driver that ships with Feisty).
– Alacarte seems slow & unreliable (often won’t edit items & is very slow).
– Inclusion of the crappy Desktop Effects window. Should have implemented the full Compiz manager rather than going for a half assed attempt. Was removed straight away after install.
The above are minor points and generally don’t bother me/are easily solved. Apart from those I do think Feisty is a great release…honest.
I’m running xbuntu.
So far all has been sweet. Restricted formats were enabled quite easily.
As for Ubuntu, same as above. I think some work is needed to improve the themes. This is what pulls new users more then functionality it self.
I agree with people about the themes, artwork and colouring but Ubuntu does have some big annoyances and bugs which need to be worked on. These in my opinion are much more important that colours and backgrounds which can easily be changed anyway.
Anyway, my new biggest gripe is the new Kernel update which has decided to break a lot of machines, stopping people from booting and such. Hope it is sorted very soon…
I have looots of problems with that upgrade (kernel 13 freeze, kernel 14 not booting, kernel 15 ok but beryl broken…) and I have the nasty following problem: ethernet breaks after some time, can’t understand why… good thing updates repaired wifi 🙂 anyway I wait for a while since I guess Ubuntu team will cook some nice updates :p
@dennis parrott
I have multiple USB storage devices – an external hard drive, USB key, camera flash cards, UMS audio device, etc and they all read and write flawlessly. 7.04 adds the very nice feature of being able to custom-name the mount-point (in a gui dialogue) for each individual USB volume, so the icon that appears on the desktop when the device is connected is suitably named (“iriver”, “usb-key”, etc).
No joy!
Install is doa to a white screen. Nvidia driver support is very disappointing.
I’ve been looking at Linux for the past year, but I haven’t been able to ditch windows yet. None of them worked with my wireless and my struggles to get them working left me cold to Linux. I recently purchased a new laptop with a yet newer chipset (Intel 4965 Wireless) that of course wasn’t supported. I tried various distributions (pretty much every major one I could find) and none of them worked.
When I heard that 7.10 did support it I downloaded the beta and fired it up. I am very impressed. I like the fact that there are thousands of apps at my fingertips. I love the Synaptic Package Manager and the search key. Sometimes there is just TOO much software available..lol. I love the fact that I didn’t have to edit some grub file to get my windows in the boot menu. This is just a nice distribution.
I also love the fact that I don’t have to be a Linux Guru to run the thing. Believe it or not the only thing I’m still having problems with is the wireless. It fails to connect most of the time (although it see’s my router), causing me to reset the interfaces file or just plug in the wired connection. That is my only complaint. I’ve tried the WICD software from Sourceforge and it does the same. I can hope they fix that with the final release. I’m guessing maybe it’s the WPA2 support that’s flaky.
I also have my favorite apps working with WINE. Newsbin, WinRar, QuickPar. I’m loving this. The best of both worlds!
Almost forgot. this is also the first Distro that worked with OpenGL and my nVidia card. The new Restricted Driver Manager is EXACTLY what Linux needed.
ooh neat. thanks!
The writer installed the beta and was very impressed and is asking for other chaps to chime in on their experience. If you are running the beta give him your best opinion.
A lot of my complaints aren’t really Ubuntu specific, I know. But it looks like the innovation in the gnome world has come to a halt. And Ubuntu can still use lots of polish. Making more stuff working ‘out of the box’. Redesigning the configuration panels. (Some are too complex, some are too simple). Graphical server management tools, etc.
I am running Edgy Eft on my ASUS notebook. I downloaded and burned the Feisty Fawn Live CD. I booted it and I’m impressed. It found all of my hardware and functioned very well. I plan on installing it soon. I think Ubuntu has a hit here. I’m anxious to experiment with the virtualization.
I am running Edgy Eft on my ASUS notebook. I downloaded and burned the Feisty Fawn Live CD. I booted it and I’m impressed. It found all of my hardware and functioned very well. I plan on installing it soon. I think Ubuntu has a hit here. I’m anxious to experiment with the virtualization.izmir escort
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