April marked the month of the newest release of Ubuntu: Ubuntu 7.04 Feisty Fawn. Read the following review to see how stable the system is and how easy upgrading from the extremely stable Dapper Drake release is.



Our Setup:
For our setup we have 3 year old computer running on the following specs.

PC Specs
Ubuntu Dapper Drake
Abit IC-7G Motherboard
Intel Celereon 2.6 GHz Processor
512MB DDR SDRAM
160GB Western Digital Harddrive
LG DVD-ROM Drive
LG CD-RW Drive
nVidia MX440 Graphics Card

Other Hardware:
HP Photosmart Printer
Logitech LX710 Laser Mouse and Keyboard
USB Thumbdrives

Programs We'll Use:
Envy

Overview and Upgrade:
This review is going to be over upgrading my main computer, i've been working on a replacement but since thats noot finished and Dapper is over a year old i decided id test the upgrade. Edgy had given really bad issues with this pc before and a total reinstall became necessary back then, so i was a little on edge about the upgrade.

Before i began the process i made sure i had backups of everything i would need incase of data loss and then fired off the first command:


Sure enough i was able to click and begin the upgrade to Feisty. After several screens i got a few errors about broken packages and the installer stopped from here i edited my /etc/apt/sources.list and changed all my dapper entries to feisty and ran the following:


I had to do this several times to get it working right, finally after a restart i had a new kernel and some new errors, seemed like my system had hit edgy then feisty and one of my new kernels wasnt working properly. After fixing my sources.list, running the above commands a few more times, installing the nVidia drivers using envy, and changing to the new usplash(the custom one i had wasnt working) i had most of my applications working.

Problems:
Other than some boot up errors that were fixed by removing a flash drive on booting, i only have a few complaints, but also a few congrats as well.

My thumbdrive always automounted as usbdisk, in feisty this gets changed to disk. If you try and change the mount point, the drive no longer automounts and you then have to manually mount it, remove the custom mount point, and then unmount it, and replug it in. Apparently if you change the label the drive will mount with that name though.

Something nice but irritating is that Feisty tries to repair or add broken menu items. I had to manually make a kasablanca menu item in the past, when i upgraded, Feisty threw in its own instead of replacing the one that was there. There are both postive and negative sides that could be argued, but hey its just a heads up.

The overall Experience:
The actual upgrade wasn't as bad as it seemed, no life threating errors, no bricked system(the new .20 gave me a scare though), and completely stable in the end. There are several nice new features in feisty. The ability to add desktop effects is nice, my systems kind of buggy with it, but its nice that its there. Theres also a tomboy sticky note replacement that is nice, as well as several new programs.

All in all the new release is extremely stable and extremely great, its also very fault tolerant as i found out. Thumbs up to the Ubuntu team for a great and timely release!

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