ubuntu and the gutsy gibbon

I decided to try out the new pre-release version of Ubuntu, titled Gutsy Gibbon. Overall I found the installer to be very polished and easy to use. Make sure that you have at least 512MB of ram or you will have to use their alternate installer CD.

User Interface
They've added a lot of really neat user control panels, including an "Appearance" panel and a very useful "restricted drivers" panel. the latter is used to enable binary drivers from manufacturers like Nvidia and ATI, something that most users of high end 3d cards will want to do.

Printer Detection
I unlike most folks, have an HP 4600 at my house. The detection and driver installation of HP printers using jetdirect is so fast and easy, i'd venture to call it seamless. Amazing work by the Ubuntu team on supporting business class printers.

It automatically sought out and correctly detected the printer model of my HP 4600 Color Laser.

Eye Candy
In the Appearance control panel there is an option for tweaking the desktop effects. If you choose the "Extra" radio box, you will be enabling Compiz Fusion. I was able to enable Compiz, but unfortunately all my window titles disappeared after doing this. Something wrong with the window decorator I guess. They are releasing tons of updates each day as this is a pre-release, and other users who have had the window titles working before have mentioned that some of these updates have broken, then later fixed this problem. They should have it worked out by the final release.

For the testers
I recommend that if you are testing gutsy, set up your home directory in it's own partition. That way when the final release comes out you can do a complete reinstall. Some of the problems experienced during testing might linger unexpectedly when you install the final release, which I believe is set to be out at the end of October.

Crash Reporting
The crash reporting tool is pretty badass. it's very easy to submit crash reports, a lot less intrusive in fact than the Mozilla project's crash report tool. This app comes up every time an application crashes unexpectedly, but it does go one up on the Microsoft crash reporting tool in that it will give you the option to ignore future crashes of the same application. This is sometimes useful for apps like firefox that take a dive when they are told to terminate with more than one tab open.

Firefox Extension Manager
Not only can you grab generic firefox add-ins, the Ubuntu team has their own firefox add-in manager that can be reached from within firefox. This extension manager will load Ubuntu approved extensions through the system package manager. Word of warning though, when you use this panel you are not told to restart to activate the plugin, as you are with the standard add-in manager panel. This may confuse some users down the road.


Conclusion
If you'd like to try out Gutsy, and are looking strictly for the eye candy, hold off until the release, or use a test machine. Also, dont go manually mucking about with the /etc/apt/sources.list file until you have applied ALL the current updates and still are experiencing problems. I'm somewhat suspicious that my messing with this file may have broken the window titles when compiz was enabled, since there were two batches of distribution upgrades following my tweaking.