The Geek Laboratory

Ubuntu Gutsy Gibbon (7.10)

About a week or so ago, I decided to upgrade my computer from Ubuntu Feisty Fawn to Ubuntu Gutsy Gibbon. (Gotta love that alliteration). For the most part, everything went relatively well; the drivers for my hardware were automatically configured, the new desktop loaded smoothly, and the flashy eye-candy…well, that didn’t go quite as well as I wanted. I think the problem could be attributed to the fact that I had both a previous version of Compiz Fusion and also Beryl installed. Well, anyway, after two attempts to re-install Compiz Fusion, the upgrade was complete. Why I care about eye-candy so much is beyond me also, but hey, I have it working, might as well use it.

Eyecandy: Compiz Fusion

Even though setting up and getting Compiz Fusion to work well was a bit of a pain, now that everything is fixed eye-candy wise, Compiz Fusion is notably faster with visual effects than Beryl was on my computer. With Beryl, dragging windows tended to be on the slow side. The window dragging element of Compiz Fusion is faster and snappier. Other improvements include better configuration options for effects and new effects. This information probably won’t be news to those who used Compiz Fusion on Feisty, but I myself could never get Compiz Fusion to work well on Feisty.

Some screenshots of Ubuntu Gutsy Gibbon (Click on Thumbnails):

(Desktop is Mac-ified, of course, for my entertainment. However, it’s only a transformation that’s skin deep.)

This screenshot features the new Appearance settings. Everything relating to the Ubuntu Desktop Interface has now been put together here (like the Gnome theme, Background settings, among other settings).

Thunar (the file browser in this screenshot), is not a normal part of the Ubuntu distro (although it can be found in the Xfce-powered Ubuntu desktop Xubuntu). I’ve set Thunar as my default file browser using a script found on Psychocats.net.

The Evolution mail and calendar client included in the Gnome desktop has been updated as well. I haven’t really looked/explored the updates in detail yet, so I can’t really say how they are.

GIMP 2.4.0 RC1 is included in Ubuntu Gutsy. GIMP 2.4.0 has improved features and an improved user interface (well, sort of).