Ubuntu First Impressions

Well, I finally did it. I got Ubuntu installed, running, and took it for a test drive.

It's fairly easy to see why Ubuntu is currently the most popular desktop Linux distribution. With sharp looks, the inclusion of applications to cover most users' basic needs straight off, and a system smart enough to help you quickly and easily add in support for most things not initially included (such as playing MP3s), Ubuntu seems to be a very usable Linux distribution.

-Installation-

One of the very cool things about Linux these days, aside from the whole FREE thing, is the LiveCD system most distributions use. This gives you the ability to boot to the CD and give the operating system a test drive, although at a slower speed. There are other great things about this system, as a simple Linux LiveCD with a lightweight OS and a handful of utilities on it can be a techs best friend for repairing even non-Linux systems. But I digress.

There are a few different ways to get a hold of an Ubuntu LiveCD. I went with the good old, download and make your own process. With broadband the large download was no big deal, and once it is done downloading it's fairly simple to burn to CD. I'm a Mac, so I use Toast, so it was a matter of right clicking on the .iso file I'd downloaded and selecting "Toast It" from the menu. Throw in a CD and tell it to burn.

The installer is smart and flexible enough to allow you to let it handle most everything, or give you the ability to do a fair amount of customization to the filesystem, setting up a variety of partitions and mount points for various parts of the filesystem. How well this all works and how smoothly the install goes can depend on a variety of issues, but mainly comes down to your hard drive and partition setup.

If you're doing your standard install of giving an entire hard drive over to the OS, then the install is simple and smooth. If you've already got a Windows install on the drive and want to make it share with Ubuntu, then it's a little, but not much trickier in most circumstances. Run some disk utilities in Windows before running the Ubuntu install and you'll have a better chance of getting through without a hitch. Scan the disk for errors and defrag it to avoid headaches. The installer should give you the option to resize the existing Windows partition and make it pretty straightforward to set up the system to give you the choice of which OS to use when you boot up. If you run into a bunch of problems trying to resize the windows partition and get things going, chances are your hard drive is less than healthy, despite anything windows has to say about it. I ran into this on my first attempt to try out Ubuntu a few months ago. Old hard drive, bad sectors.

My second attempt to try out Ubuntu I was installing it on my new "Test" system, put together out of some fairly old hardware I'd scrapped together from stuff laying around and a couple part systems I'd gotten on the cheap. Being a test box, I want it to boot a multitude of operating systems, naturally. So Ubuntu was the third or fourth OS I was installing, which certainly complicated matters somewhat. If nothing else though, it gave me the chance to become intimately familiar with the Ubuntu installation process.

The Ubuntu installer is fast. While trying to sort out my multi-boot setup with chained boot loaders, etc., I reinstalled Ubuntu a handful of times in what seemed to be less total time than it would take to do a standard Windows OS install once. Seriously. I've always wondered why Windows installations take so close to forever to get through. It really seemed somewhat unnecessary. I've always used Macs, and the OS install was always much faster than Windows, so I knew that much time wasn't inherently necessary to install a full featured graphical operating system. But the Ubuntu install makes a Mac install seem lengthy.

I won't get into the details of how I finally got Ubuntu up and running with my multi-boot, but I eventually did and determined that for most folks, a single run through the installer will have them up and running in very little time. My test box has an older AMD Athlon 2000+ running at 1.6 GHz, with 768MB PC133 RAM. Nothing fancy, but I estimate the install time at under 15 minutes.

-First Run-

The speed of the installation becomes even more impressive when you consider that unlike many a Windows install, where it takes an hour or to get through just to get to the desktop and find that a great deal of your hardware doesn't work yet for lack of drivers, Ubuntu will quite likely come up with most everything ready to go. So somehow in a quick little install you get a fully functioning and great looking system, something Windows can't seem to accomplish no matter how much we pay for it.

Like I said, Ubuntu was the third or fourth OS I installed on this particular system. I started off installing a few flavors of Windows, since they are usually the most greedy and picky about where and how they are installed, and try to take everything over without asking. First XP. A lengthy process that went fairly smoothly, came up and with a little configuration my basic Netgear network card worked well enough, though could probably benefit from an upgrade to drivers newer than 2001. Next, Vista. Lengthy installation process to end up with a non functioning network card and Vista asking me "would you like to search the internet for drivers?" Sure, I'd love to, if you could offer me basic support for a very basic piece of hardware to make searching the web possible.

Ubuntu finished it's installation, rebooted, and came up connected. My network card worked, and Ubuntu found my DHCP server, pulled and IP and rolled right along. I clicked on the Firefox icon at the top to test it, and was quickly on an Ubuntu welcome page, then browsed to google and elsewhere. It worked!

Shortly after getting loaded up I began to see some popup balloon messages at the top of my toolbar. Apparently the system was checking itself out and wanted to tell me what updates and such were available to me. I was informed that there was a proprietary driver available for my video card. Ubuntu doesn't ship with anything that's not open source by default, strictly adhering to GNU license ideals. However, the system isn't squeamish about alerting you to what's out there and giving you the option to easily install it. I was alerted that while the proprietary drivers for my video card would come with support, that they would allow for 3D rendering and other graphic effects beyond what the open source driver would. I clicked a little checkbox to enable them, and was quickly on my way to downloading and installing them.

I was also alerted to various system updates (195 to be exact), and while these took a bit of time to all download, the process was pretty automatic and painless. After another reboot I was now up to date, off and running. The Ubuntu menu system is very simple and intuitive, so with no previous familiarity I was able to explore a variety of settings and quickly find all the installed applications and know what they were for, despite some unfamiliar program names.

-Usability-

This is a basic "First Impressions" write-up. I haven't yet delved deeply into the inner workings of the system, or tried to do a lot of advanced operations. I focused mainly on testing out the OS as far as what a standard user might want to be able to do right off the bat.

Connecting to the internet and being able to browse was first, and was basically done for me. Firefox was already installed and has an icon in the top bar. Doesn't get much easier than that. I'm sure some extra configuration would probably be necessary to start viewing youtube videos, flash content, etc. Just as it is with Firefox on any system. But I don't forsee many challenges there.

Next, I wanted to see how various media formats were handled. Photos and music have moved over to the digital world for the majority of us, so being able to listen, view, edit, and manipulate our digital media collections easily is a pretty common user need. Because of the number of different computers in my household, the amount of collected media, and the fact that some of the main systems are laptops with smaller hard drives, I have a NAS (Network Attached Storage) system where most everything is stored and is quickly available to any computer over the local network. Connecting to it through Ubuntu was a breeze. Sensibly listed under the "Places" menu, I selected network and the SMB/CIFS share of the NAS was visible. I logged in and mounted the drive with all my digital music and photos. Most users probably would not do this, and would be bringing in their files from other formats, which in most cases should be just as easy.

I don't have speakers attached to my test system at this point, but still wanted to see how my music collection would be handled and get a glimpse at the music player in Ubuntu. I've used iTunes since it's first pre-OS X incarnations. It was the best for organizing and playing a music collection back then. Now... well it's familiar, if not always the smoothest running on my not so new Macs. Ubuntu comes installed with Rhythmbox by default, the GNOME music player that is styled after iTunes. The similarities are immediately apparent and it is pretty straightforward in its layout and function. MP3 playback is not supported straight "out of the box" with Ubuntu, as MP3 files are somewhat proprietary. However, as soon as I tried to play an MP3 I was alerted to this and shown my options for plugins to install to play my music files. This was again, simple. It wasn't long before I had my music playing away from my NAS across the network. Rhythmbox also supports DAAP, which means it will see any shared iTunes libraries across the network. Handy.

Next, I checked out the built in photo software. Easily found under the Graphics category of the Applications menu, I opened up F-Spot, saw the obvious "Import" button and pulled up the import screen. By default the import feature is set to copy any imported photos into a specific folder for the user. I unchecked this as I didn't want or need my photos stored locally. I wasn't sure how well it would work to import them to F-Spot without copying them to the local hard drive, but after selecting my entire photo collection on the NAS and hitting import, I was happy to see thumbnails for them all appear.

I've never liked iPhoto, so I've messed around with a variety of photo organization programs, and for the past few years have just stuck with the software that came with my Canon camera. It's funky and clunky, but it is intuitive in its display and organization, so it's worked well enough, but never really impressed me. F-Spot however, is what a digital photo application should be. The organization is brilliant. Your main Browse window is incredibly flexible and responsive. A slider allows you to adjust the size of the thumbnails so you can view a lot of very small thumbnails of your images at once, or fewer at a larger size. My favorite feature though, is the chronological bar above the browse window showing the years, with divisions for months, that your photos were taken. Each month division also has a colored area, like a bar graph, giving you an idea of the quantity of photos you have for that month. With this handy chrono-bar, you can quickly browse to a time period and find what you're looking for. Brilliant! You also have the ability to tag photos, search by these tags, etc. I'm a big fan of organization of digital files, so I was immediately enthralled by a smooth, fast program that provided basic organization automatically, and allowed for organizing to the tiniest detail.

Double clicking on any photo in the browse window instantly gives you a larger view of that photo, while retaining a small browser bar above it showing a handful of the photos before and after that particular one. From this view, clicking Browse again takes you back to the browse window, where you find yourself exactly where you left off, not zapped back to the start of the collection or to some arbitrary point. This is a small feature that can make a big difference to how easy it is to work with your photos. Details like this get often overlooked in software development.

Right Clicking on any of the thumbnails in the browse view gives you some useful options such as "Open With". Browsing through I quickly found a cute photo of my daughter from Halloween that was too dark. I right clicked it and selected open with - GIMP Image Editor. GIMP loaded up, pretty quickly if compared to Photoshop on most systems, and with intuitive menus, I quickly found myself adjusting brightness and contrast with a very responsive preview showing me the effects of my changes before I finally applied them.

The combination and interoperability of F-Spot and GIMP left me pretty well awed. Never have I found it easier to browse, view, and then edit my photos. GIMP is full featured enough for some pretty serious graphics work, but lightweight enough to not make it a hassle or overkill to open up for some basic manipulation, touch-up, or just cropping and resizing tasks. I wish I had a pair of programs on my Mac that worked this well.

-Other Applications-

I admittedly did not delve into all the functions of the couple of applications I tried out. With how much I was able to do straight away, I suspect there are probably some pretty useful features tucked away as well. I also did not work with each and every application that comes installed with Ubuntu. Sure, I played a couple games, and there's some fun time-killers there. But for the sake of sticking to my basic usability, there were some apps I probably should have checked out a little more. Mainly, the OpenOffice suite. Digital media, music and photos are common and fun, but I suppose just as common are the less fun tasks such as word processing, spreadsheets, etc. Okay, less fun, but somewhat vital tasks. So now that I'm writing this up, I see that this really would have been a much more complete review if I'd dabbled with OpenOffice and checked out it's compatibility with our standard Office suites. Maybe later. Based on my experience with the other applications in Ubuntu, I'd say there's a good chance it'll be easy to use and offer a good amount of compatibility. Considering the compatibility issues between various versions of Word and Excel, whether between Mac and PC versions, or just different editions of the program on the same OS, it wouldn't be hard to meet or exceed the compatibility standards we're used to seeing.

-Conclusion-

If you want a free and profoundly usable Operating System, Ubuntu is a great option. If you're tired of the whole "I'm a Mac, I'm a PC, I'm a box of rocks" debate, here's a great alternative. If you're using Windows and have space on your hard drive, install it alongside Windows and try doing the things you usually do with it. You may be surprised at how much faster and easier some basic tasks become.

I use my older PowerBook for nearly everything I do, both at home and at work. I carry it back and forth with me and stick with it for that portability and accessibility. Ubuntu won't make me change that. But I have a feeling that when I need to work with my digital photo collection I'll be firing up the test box. And possibly the more I tinker with Ubuntu, the more tasks I'll find worth jumping over to the Ubuntu system to do. If I had Ubuntu installed on a laptop it's hard to say what would happen. All in all, Ubuntu is definitely a contender. Linux has come a long way and it's looking like the main drawbacks that exist at this point is the support of mainstream commercial hardware/software vendors. Brand spankin' new hardware devices may not be supported right away, and you're not going to see all the big new games being released for Linux. But, with as many strengths as Ubuntu has, and it's ability to coexist with a mainstream OS, it is certainly viable that Ubuntu could be used as a "common use" system for web browsing, digital media usage, etc., while our old mainstream OS's get relegated to only being booted up for specific tasks, such as gaming.

So, what are you waiting for? It's free, you can test run it without changing your system setup, there's not really anything to lose now is there?