Ubuntu Fiesty Fawn, Herd 5

THE best version of Ubuntu ever… well, so far, at least.

And it does have its faults. For example, the default Live CD installer is slow, cumbersome and crashed when I tried to install it. I do hope they sort this out when the final version of Fiesty comes out.

Then there’s the artwork – a horrible, grey, milk-chocolate coloured wallpaper is the default, and the login splash screen is similar. They don’t even closely resemble skin tones, and in my opinion the orange and caramel colours in the windows look much better. I hope this is sorted by the final release.

But now we turn to the positve parts of Feisty Fawn – such as the no-longer-terrifying boot screen. Basically it shows a glowing, glossy Ubuntu logo, and one of those lovely orange progress meters beneath it. Instead of the terrifying (to a Linux newbie) text scrolling underneath that used to accompany booting.

But the system sounds are annoying – I installed 7.04 over the outdated 5.10, which had one of the best startup jingles ever. The new sounds (started in 6.10?) aren’t bad, but they just lack something that the previous set had. But at least it beats Windows’s set.

I do like the new applications, ie Tomboy, Disk Usage analyser etc. And also, the big advantage of this new version is its SPEED! It boots within thirty seconds, around half the time of the old 5.10 release. That’s a very nice surprise, as normally an OS would get slower on the same hardware in later versions. Closedown also happens remarkably quickly, as no more than twenty seconds pass between my hitting the “Shut Down” button and the machine powering off.

So, while Ubuntu 7.04 does have its faults, it’s the first version of Ubuntu I’d be truly happy to install on my computer in place of Windows.

Well, if they had drivers for my WLAN adapter and printer I would…