Alex Le’s Blog

I just received the Ubuntu CDs that I requested … 2 months ago when they just announced about ubuntu6. I popped the CD in and try out the LiveCD.

The boot up part is very smoothly. Ubuntu correctly detects my video card (x300). I had fullscreen 1248x 1024 resolution immediately! However, GNome is not as slick as KDE - based on my brief experience with SUSE 10.5 running KDE. But it doesn’t matter, both KDE and GNome would beatthe upcoming Vista big time perfomancewise and that is for sure. Quite nicely the Ubuntu LiveCD picks up my built-in NIC-card and I had live internet! The bundle Firefox is of version 1.5.0.3, good enough! I started IMing my friend over Meebo, checked out my stripedesigner.com and things look great!
The only problem that I encountered was that Ubuntu coudln’t pick up my soundcard, Creative SoundBlaster Live! something. I don’t blame on Ubuntu as this thing is 5, 6 years old already. However, I’d expect there’s a default driver for sound-cards made by Creative or other popular makes. So I couldn’t test out the sample OGG videos as the player said that it couldn’t connect to the sound server. I think if I actually install Ubuntu and use it, I would spend sometime downloading the correct driver and update the system as I believe that someone in the Ubuntu community will have the solution.

I would give Ubuntu a thumb up for its smooth performance under LiveCD mode. The slow CD-access time doesn’t slow Ubuntu down too much. OpenOffice 2.0 loads quite fast and the sample presentations look awesome too! Firefox works great as always. Taking screenshot is easy with the Printscreen button and the output dialog asking me where to save the file. I wish Windows has that feature built-in so I don’t have to use other 3rd-party software.

Anyway, I do like Ubuntu and would seriously give it a try later on. But Suse10.5 is actually my first choice if I ever do Linux.