No… I am not going to tell you anything about animals now. I will talk about upgrading and customising the latest and greatest Ubuntu Linux distribution codenamed Feisty Fawn. It is going to be released as a final relase later this month named Ubuntu 7.04.
Just as background information I run the earlier Dapper Drake(6.06 LTS) at home as my main workstation being used for all sorts of stuff including a personal video recorder, video editing station, Java software development machine and general all purpose box for things like maintaining a music and photo collection and much more, occasional image and DTP work, playing with Beryl and so on. At work I run the last release of Ubuntu called Edgy Eft(6.10) as a Java development machine and I recently installed the beta release of Feisty Fawn in a VMWare virtual machine. I was pretty happy with what I saw so here I am migrating my main workstation.
So for a start I am doing a dual boot install since I won’t have time to get it all going at once. I downloaded the beta release of Feisty and installed into a second root partition in parallel to the heavily customised fulling working Dapper install. That way I can tune it until I am happy and switch then. I have 3 partitions available for potential root partitions. At a later stage I hope to get Nexenta or a pure OpenSolaris going for kicks. For now I will stick to Ubuntu though.
The install off the CD worked smoothly as can be. I changed the filesystem of the potential root partition to ext3, since the trusted reiserfs is not getting that much development anymore. The reboot after the install showed my old Dapper install nicely as another operating system. The only thing I found a bit odd was that the migration assistant does not work for migrating from Ubunt to Ubuntu. It seems to be intended for migrating documents and settings from Windows. Since there is no such thing as Windows in my house that fell flat. Oh well.. I will do the integration with the data from the old Ubuntu install all myself later.
The clean install off the CD already leaves you with a really nice system, but as usual I need more than the out of the box stuff. A long time KDE user stemming from old habit from the old Suse 4.x onwards I need a lot of the KDE stuff around. I could have used the Kubuntu install CD but then I would have to do the same steps for GNOME programs I like. So here we go.
Fire up synaptic and kubuntu-desktop gets installed. That gives me a lot of the programs I need like Kontact/Kmail/KAddressBook, K3B, digikam, Konqueror and more apart from the full KDE desktop I prefer to use. That gives me a good first stab at a system that does lots of what I need.
All in all so far Ubuntu Feisty even off the beta release is a super polished Liunx distribution. I can only recommend anybody to try it out once the final release is out. Even in the beta stage I have not found any problems yet. Find out more on my quest to my new system in another post soon.
