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My experiences with Ubuntu 8.10 Intrepid Ibex, part 1

A few nights ago I installed a release candidate of Ubuntu's latest release, Intrepid Ibex. I've been upgrading nightly so I have what is now presumably the final release installed on my system. Overall, it's been easy to use and trouble-free. In this post (and a series of follow-up posts) I'd like to detail some of my findings.

nVidia video with dual monitors

Hardware Drivers tool

My computer setup consists of an Intel Core 2 Duo system with 2GB of RAM, and an nVidia GeForce 7600GT-based video card. I have two 19" LCDs connected to the video card. In the past this has been somewhat of a hassle to get working in the Linux distributions I've tried. However, with Ubuntu 8.10, I simply ran the Hardware Drivers tool to install the proprietary nVidia drivers. This installed the "NVIDIA X Server Settings" app which easily allowed me to configure my dual monitor setup and get up and running.

NVIDIA Settings app

I chose the TwinView configuration which is essentially the configuration that Mac or Windows dual monitor users would be used to: your taskbar appears on one screen and the other screen is initially blank, but ready for you to drag your windows onto. I've noticed a few minor inconsistencies with this setup; some apps appear to see one giant monitor instead of two separate ones (for instance, making YouTube movies full screen fills up both screens with the movie centered across the seam between the two monitors). There haven't been any problems that I'd consider dealbreaking, however.

Printing to a Windows shared printer

My fiancée has our printer hooked up to her computer, and it's shared via Windows printer sharing. In Ubuntu, I simply went to System->Administration->Printing and added the printer, following the prompts. It detected the printer and then allowed me to select the correct driver for it. From start to finish it took me about 30 seconds to set the printer up, and it's printed flawlessly ever since. This is something that my Mac laptop couldn't do out of the box!

DVD ripping woes

I came across a couple of GUI-based apps to rip DVDs, a task which I perform occasionally and had mostly only done on Windows until now. The first, K9Copy, was a KDE app that was in the Ubuntu repository. It immediately crashed upon attempting to open the first DVD disc I inserted.

The second app was called DVD::Rip, which is apparently a Perl-based front end to a bunch of command line ripping tools. It seemed to work alright, but I didn't like the interface and it seemed to lack a few features (for instance, ripping a DVD to an ISO image).

DVDFab under Wine!

DVDFab shortcut

Dejected, I began to think that maybe I'd have to keep Windows and/or my Mac around for a few tasks. Then, I remembered Wine. I thought it was a long shot, but what if I could use the DVD ripping program that I used on Windows (the excellent DVDFab Decrypter)? Then I wouldn't have to keep Windows around at all! I installed the latest Wine following the directions on the Wine site, and ran the DVDFab installer. It worked! It even automagically placed a shortcut in my Applications menu for me. Within 20 minutes or so DVDFab had completed ripping its first DVD without any issues.

And more...

I'll be writing additional posts in the near future with more of my experiences with Ubuntu 8.10. Until then, stay tuned!