The other "New Release" I'm been testing...

The other "new release" that has most interested me has been the new Ubuntu 7.10, the "Gutsy Gibbon". I have installed it on three different older systems, my Dell Precision 420 (dual 1 GHz P-III w/ 768MB RAM, NVIDIA GeForce2 GTS), my Dell Latitude C640 laptop (2 GHz P4M w/ 512MB RAM, ATI RADEON 7500), and a Toshiba Satellite Pro M10-S405 (1.4 GHz PM w/ 256MB RAM, NVIDIA GeForce4 Go 420). I was curious if Compiz Fusion and it's nifty special effects would work with any of their graphics cards. The answer in all cases was a disappointing "not yet". I could load the restricted NVIDIA and ATI graphic drivers on each of them, but when I tried to activate any special effects they could not be enabled. I had booted my Latitude using the Kororaa AIGLX LiveCD and that had seemed to have worked fine, but upgrading my Ubuntu 7.04 to 7.10 did not allow me to use the same special effects that ran fine under Kororaa booted live even after installing all the GL, compiz and beryl packages I could find. I may have to see what I must install and tweak in my xorg.conf to get things to work. I also plan on upgrading my Ubuntu 7.04 to 7.10 on my main desktop here at work (Dell Precision 360, 2.8 GHz P4, 1.5GB RAM, NVIDIA Quadro FX500) and see what I can do with that box. This is just too much fun playing with Linux!!

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