Hands on: Linux with guts

There are various other enhancements, including automatic printer configuration - simply plug a printer in and Gutsy will configure it for you and make it immediately available to print to.

The Restricted Drivers Manager has improved since Feisty, now offering to download more drivers and firmware for any hardware it detects on your system. This can be useful for wireless network cards and winmodems, as well as the graphics drivers mentioned above.

Finally, a new kernel enhancement allows for lower power consumption. This will become more noticeable in future releases, as there is an ongoing project to improve applications in this regard. There are, of course, many more minor changes - browse the Ubuntu site for more information.

Installation and Setup
As with previous releases, Gutsy is very easy to install, especially if you don’t need to dual-boot with Windows. The usual way to install is to boot from the Desktop CD (also known as a live CD), which gives you a full working desktop running from the CD. From there you can click the install icon. The process takes no more than 30 minutes on most computers. An alternate text-based install method is also available.

This offers more advanced options but is not recommended unless you require these options. The Desktop CD can repartition your drive for you; a tool (gparted) is available in the menus, and is more user-friendly and advanced than the utility built into the install application.

When we looked at early releases of Ubuntu there would be many steps post-installation that were necessary to get the desktop up to standard. Feisty made all of this much simpler, and that’s even more the case with the new release.

Multimedia support is limited due to US patents. If you try to play a file that is affected by these patents, such as an MP3 audio file or an MPEG4 (DivX/Xvid) video file, a pop-up window will ask if you would like to download the codecs necessary to play it. Most countries (the US being an obvious exception) do not recognise software patents, and so it is absolutely legal to install the open-source software that provides support for these formats. Once done, the file should automatically play back without any further problems.

Adobe finally got its act together last year and released the Flash 9 plug-in for Linux. You can now install this from Firefox, as with Windows. Alternatively, you can type ‘flash’ into the Add/Remove Applications utility and install it from there. Doing it this way makes the plug-in available to all users on the system, and is thus the preferred method.

There is other useful software restricted by licence or patents. The simplest way to install it all is to go into Add/Remove Applications and enter ‘restricted extras’ (ensure ‘All available applications’ is selected). This pulls in the various multimedia codecs, the Flash plug-in, Sun’s Java 6 plug-in (and JRE), Microsoft’s web-fonts (Arial, Verdana, etc.), the Lame MP3 encoding library, and various other libraries and utilities. Unless you have a reason not to install this package, I strongly recommend it.

Nvidia owners have an easier time with Gutsy. There are three levels of proprietary drivers for Nvidia cards. Ubuntu refers to them as Nvidia-legacy, Nvidia and Nvidia-new. The Restricted Driver Manager will check your graphics chipset and decide which is most suitable for you to use. Compiz Fusion will be enabled when you next log in.

Sticking with Compiz Fusion, the Appearance Preferences dialogue has a tab labelled ‘Visual Effects’. Here you can enable or disable Compiz’s 3D effects. The default setting is ‘Normal’, for some simple effects such as minimise and maximise animations, a nicer switcher, and a scrolling desktop wall for workspaces. Extra enables many more effects, such as wobbly windows. For anyone who really wants to play, install Advanced Desktop Effects Settings in Add/Remove Applications. This adds a new option to the Appearance dialogue, Custom, which can also be run from the Preferences menu directly. From here you can configure all the exotic Compiz plug-ins (some of which are possibly designed mostly to impress Windows Vista and Mac OS X users).