I just installed the Ubuntu Feisty Fawn 7.04 Beta. I must say it seems much better at hardware detection, and booted up with a much higher resolution. This is a huge plus because it doesn’t require users to know to open terminal and run sudo dpkg-reconfigure xserver-xorg to get a workable resolution. With Edgy, the previous Ubuntu release, the resolution defaulted to 800×640 on all machines I tried, small enough to make it impossible to see the entire installer window, which doesn’t seem to be that good of an idea. I hope it stops nagging me about how it’s using “Restricted Drivers,” which are closed source drivers from companies, making them harder to debug or fix. Load times for the Live CD were long, I hope that improves, and manually partitioning the drive with their partitioner was a hassle. Good thing it’s one-time-only. Link!

PS: If you’d like a dual boot, I’d suggest manually partitioning the drive. I’m not sure what guided does. I should probably find out, though. It may be easier…

EDIT: One of the things I like additionally is that Ubuntu auto-mounts your other filesystems and displays icons on the desktop. This means you can access your Windows files from Linux. If you have a recovery partition like I do, Ubuntu may add this to the bootloader and mount it as well. This can just be ignored in the GRUB menu, but if you’re like me, having a partition you won’t use on your desktop is annoying. In this case, run sudo nano /etc/fstab in terminal, and comment out the line that mounts any filesystems you don’t want. You should be careful mucking around in there, however. In my case, it’s the HDA2 mount line that I commented out.

EDIT 2: Argh. I started the Linux love flowing, and it doesn’t seem to stop. I also like the workspaces, which allows you to clear up your screen by switching desktops. Say you’re multitasking. Instead of cluttering your taskbar with all this minimized stuff, you can switch windows to another workspace. I’m having trouble explaining, but I like it anyways.

Or more specifically, their “Big Science” series. I recently watched their Human 2.0 special, and it was interesting, but seemed to take all of its content down to the lowest bar possible and water it down with nauseating amounts of recap after commercial breaks, reused footage, effects, and sound bites, topped off with only tantalizing mentions of interesting subjects that the hour-long garbage pile only mentions. I was laughing at how overused the unneeded theatrical elements were, and was literally yelling at the screen for more facts and less meaningless filler timewasting! Discovery: If you’re reading this, assume your audience has more intelligence than one of those petri-dish brains you highlighted, and adjust the depth of your shows accordingly, please.

If you aren’t aware of it already, I’d like to draw your attention to this nifty plugin.

Well, I was feeling great yesterday, but it turns out it takes a day for the swelling to kick in. 🙁

Well, I’m getting my wisdom teeth out tomorrow morning. I’m a little apprehensive, but I’ve been told I have a virtually nil probablility of any complications. I know it won’t do any good to worry and it would only hurt to do so, so I’m trying not to. The drugs will help: laughing gas and Valium. I don’t like not being in control of myself, but it’s better than feeling them cutting my jawbone open and my wisdom teeth in half.

$ sudo apt-get install cron bash amarok find
Reading package lists… Done
Building dependency tree
Reading state information… Done
cron is already the newest version.
bash is already the newest version.
amarok is already the newest version.
E: Couldn’t find package find
$