Comments on: Gutsy beta: What have you done for me lately?

By: Neostar

Neostar — Fri, 28 Sep 2007 16:20:00 +0000

I know that Ubuntu is made for high end users but the great thing about Gutsy is the Fluxbuntu release. It’s made for those with old hardware, i’m hoping that it will become part of the main Ubuntu like Xbuntu is as that will mean more support for older hardware. I have an old laptop that’s similar to kmandla’s, so I will be giving this release a test.

http://fluxbuntu.org/

By: tactus

tactus — Fri, 28 Sep 2007 14:35:35 +0000

I’ve had trouble enough getting a stripped down Debian stable to run on a 9 year old Aptiva desktop, don’t understand why anyeone would bother with Ubuntu of all things on 10 year old laptops.

By: Luke

Luke — Fri, 28 Sep 2007 14:07:56 +0000

Well, as with most distros that do not have necormancy (the arcane magic of resurrecting very old computers using linux) in their mission statement support for old hardware is usually an afterthought rather than a driving focus. That’s just how it is.

I’m still on Dapper and it is rock solid. I haven’t had any issues with it since I upgraded from Hoary (knock on wood). The only annoyance is getting newest releases of software. If I want to keep up with the newest releases of Firefox for example, I have to use the generic Linux binaries or roll my own debs. But it’s not that bad.

My hardware can’t really take the eye candy compiz-fusion stuff so I’m not really driven to upgrade just yet.

By: voislav

voislav — Fri, 28 Sep 2007 14:05:27 +0000

Well, it’s a bit of a biased view. How many people use 8 to 10 year old laptops these days? What you really forgot to mention is that it is amazing that you can consider running the latest Ubuntu on 10-year old hardware, something that cannot be said for either Windows or MacOS.

By: K.Mandla

K.Mandla — Fri, 28 Sep 2007 13:27:55 +0000

You’re very right on all counts. I should make it clear that I’m not standing in opposition to any of the improvements, I’m just a little sad because so many of them are intended for higher-end machines.

As far as I’m concerned, wowing the power user is the right track. It’ll draw more people, many of them capable of improving the entire Ubuntu base.

My only fear is that the wow factor will increase but the bug count will go up, and if the scale becomes unbalanced, Ubuntu will become the flashy-but-buggy distro. Unlikely, but one never knows.

By: deadcabbit

deadcabbit — Fri, 28 Sep 2007 13:23:26 +0000

I’m not a fanboy, but hey, all I see in your post is “I don’t need this”, “I don’t need that” – try a broader perspective please. Vista has “treagle” enabled, MacOSX has it, plain old endusers like it (I don’t), so it is cool. NTFS? Good for the masses. Eyecandy? Good for the masses too + good propaganda… etc. Linux is about choice, you can always tinker an Arch, build a Gentoo or do whatever you want with LFS

By: Danny

Danny — Fri, 28 Sep 2007 03:55:41 +0000

From what I’ve been told by a Canonical person, they’re really trying to put together a system that will WOW power users for the desktop, and work towards 8.04 for a really good business desktop. They’re also working no a small business server addition. My understanding is that it will have a minimal GUI install, but I haven’t heard anymore about that.

It seems Canonical is trying to position itself to compete against Novell and Red Hat for the business market, and against Vista for the home/consumer market.

I agree in that I have little use for some of the more ‘fancy’ stuff, but our Free Geek recipients will appreciate the automatic printer detection and setup. I’m almost paperless myself. I don’t even show up to class with a pencil or pen anymore, but many students can’t do that just yet.

New kernels are not always best for old hardware. That’s where DSL and Puppy shine. But if the new kernel in Ubuntu can get my machine to hibernate/suspend, I’ll do a little jig for it.