Hands on: Linux with guts

It doesn’t seem all that long ago when we were talking about the new release of Ubuntu Feisty Fawn, but now there is a new version of Ubuntu Linux.

October 2007 saw the release of Ubuntu 7.10, less formally known as Gutsy Gibbon.

This time, we’ll look at some of the new features Gutsy provides, as well as the extra tasks you probably want to perform after a new installation.

Ubuntu comes on a six-month release cycle in order to synchronise with Gnome, the desktop environment that the distribution uses. Each Gnome release adds new features in addition to bug and performance fixes. Version 2.20 is no exception. In fact, it feels like the most solid Linux desktop released so far.

New features include editable PDF files in Evince, automatic image rotation in Nautilus’ file previews, synchronisation between systems with the note-taking application, a simpler and unified Appearance preferences dialogue and better encryption support.

New to Gutsy
A key new addition to Gutsy is the compositing manager, Compiz Fusion. This provides the 3D eye-candy effects you may have seen on YouTube. With Feisty an earlier and much poorer version of Compiz was available to install manually, but Gutsy gives it to you already enabled, as long as you have the hardware to support it.

For those with Nvidia graphics hardware this just means installing the binary drivers, which can be done in one click through a helpful prompt when you first log in. For ATI (now AMD) owners, things are less simple. Older hardware should work without extra software, while newer cards may not support the effects at all. Thankfully all this is set to change, since AMD has released drivers that will give the same support as with Nvidia cards. These drivers may not make it into the distribution until the next release.

A common criticism of Ubuntu was the lack of a graphical configuration tool for managing the display. A tool is now provided with Gutsy to do just that, as well as set up dual-monitor configurations. Thanks to improvements in the underlying architecture, detection of displays is much better. For most monitors it should be possible to hot-swap, or easily attach an external monitor or projector. A new failsafe mode has been introduced, so that if the graphics system cannot be loaded on bootup, the configuration tool will automatically load in a safe low-resolution mode. This means you can fix the problem without having to use the command line.

Those who dual-boot between Linux and Windows will be pleased to see full read/write support for NTFS. This is thanks to the NTFS-3g project (www.ntfs-3g.org), which provides near complete support for the Microsoft filesystem. Previously only read support was possible, which made it difficult to swap files between the operating systems unless you had an additional FAT32 partition.

The addition of Tracker lets you search for files much more quickly, and will be familiar to those who have used Spotlight in Mac OS X. Tracker will index not just your files’ names, but also their metadata, such as tags on MP3 and video files. It will index the contents of text files, PDFs, emails, Instant Messenger logs, and other documents. Tracker is integrated into Nautilus; just click the search icon and type what you are looking for. Alternatively, you can use the Tracker Search Tool, found under the Accessories menu. Somewhat related to Tracker is the Deskbar applet, which is now added to the taskbar. This lets you quickly access applications, websites, bookmarks, email contacts and files matched by Tracker.