Ubuntu 7.04 “Feisty Fawn”
The latest release of Ubuntu Linux is out, known as “Feisty Fawn”. My first impression (having installed it on the same laptop that I had version 6.10 “Edgy Eft” on) is that it certainly has improved but there is still a long way to go. The single best improvement I have noticed so far is that WPA security for wireless networks works from the get-go, assuming your wireless card is supported. That was one of my biggest gripes with pretty much every Linux distribution I’ve tried. Fair play to them for getting that working.
Pretty much all of my laptop’s hardware with the exception of its integrated multiformat card reader works fine with Ubuntu 7.04. I still experienced the same annoying problem with screen resolutions that I had with 6.10 though. My laptop has a wide screen with a resolution of 1280×800, which is very, very common. Ubuntu only offered three resolutions, all 4:3, even after installing the nVidia graphics driver.
I had to go and manually edit xorg.conf to add 1280×800 to each display mode that I might possibly want to use it with. My laptop’s Synaptics touchpad also doesn’t behave properly (scrolling, typing detection and so on), but I think there are packages out there to sort that out.
All in all, its getting better, and I’ll continue to use it on my laptop but I think for the average user there’s still a ways to go.
