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Obligatory "Upgraded My Dell Inspiron E1705 to Ubuntu Gutsy" Post

Back in April I upgraded my Dell Inspiron E1705 (which is also known as a 9400) from MSWindowsXP to Ubuntu Feisty Fawn (7.04). It was not the easiest installation I've done, but with the help of linux on laptops directory and in particular this guide I was able to get it done. With the recent release of Ubuntu's Gutsy Gibbon I was excited to upgrade.

Feisty Fawn to Gutsy Gibbon (7.10) Upgrade

I was expecting the worst, but got the best. I first made two backups of everything, just in case, and then followed the steps listed on the Ubuntu upgrade guide and it was a piece of cake. The only questions that seemed weird were about my Apache configuration file since I modified that. Otherwise, it worked flawlessly and was easy to understand.

New Features in Gutsy

In fact, I have to repent. For a long time I've been saying that the "eye candy" is pointless. Lots of it really is. There are all sorts of visualizations that people add to the desktop (e.g. drop shadows on alert boxes, windows that fade away, etc.) which I never really understood. I'm starting to like them. Nay. I'm starting to love them.

It looks something like that. You say you don't want it, but when it's in front of you every day it really does help your productivity.

The machine feels just as snappy as before if not moreso. I can only imagine this is due to updated graphics drivers.

This does make me wonder what new features in Leopard are going to blow us away if any. Now that we've got graphical goodies and ease of use from Free software, what will Leopard bring?

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Comments

it's funny cause it's true

Seriously. It's so funny to me how much I hated all that stuff until I started using it.

Although interestingly enough, I still hate the Mac desktop, though. Any machine where it's impossible to navigate without the mouse is fundamentally borken.

Quick update
In more recent use I've noticed that I get a fair amount of Firefox crashes, particularly with JS rich sites, or with Flash heavy sites. I mean, the fact that I get any Flash on Linux is a major improvement, but being able to upload my videos to revver would be even better. And before you suggest it, I tried opera on these sites and it's no better.