A look at Ubuntu Gutsy Gibbon (7.10 alpha)
I used VMWare player to try out Gutsy. I had a bit of a problem with the resolution - whatever options you choose when booting from the live-CD it always starts up at 1680x1050, but as long as you don't choose 'safe graphics mode' you can bring it down to 800x600.
Fonts look a bit different (smaller and the hinting is a little better maybe).
In trying to install I hit a greater snag - the Ubuntu installer hung on "Setting up partitioner".
Looks like I'll have to use the Alternate Install CD instead...
Take 2
Alternate Install CD worked fine. I'll spare you the details of installing - I didn't notice anything new.
After installing there were lots of updates to download - they took an hour or two to complete.
Font, theme and desktop effects preferences have all been consolidated into a single "Appearance" preference. The themes in Gutsy aren't particularly inspiring - almost exactly the same as those in Feisty though the Clearlooks one has had a bit of work. I'm going to stick with my custom mix of Clearlooks but with black title bars and icons from Ubuntustudio.
Pidgin (the new name for Gaim) is installed by default - the changes from Gaim aren't huge. I spotted one bug already - mouse over on a contact's name sometimes gives the person above's details...
Printing
Printing seems to have been improved somewhat from Feisty - when you connect a printer, Ubuntu detects it and adds it to the list of available printers.
Unfortunately, my Canon MP600 still isn't detected correctly. Manually selecting the driver for a similar printer works to a certain extent (test page printed okay), but I found printing used about minute of CPU time for every document printed!
The GIMP
A new version of The GIMP (Ubuntu's default image editor) is included in Gutsy - the most obvious change (apart from the new splash screen) to me was that open images are nicely interpolated when zoomed out.
Conclusion
For existing Ubuntu users, Gutsy is worth the upgrade, or rather, it will be when it goes stable. As should be expected for an alpha release, it has some bugs at the moment (e.g. the installer issue) but it's certainly usable. Hardware support is generally good, and is improving release by release, but printing support still isn't as good as Windows.
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