The Book of Screed - October 23rd, 2007

I’ve been playing with the new release of Ubuntu Linux 7.10 for the last few days, and I gotta say, it looks really cool. It comes with the Compiz window manager, so if you have an appropriate video card, you get the whole 3-D video bling experience of shadows and swooping windows and translucent window borders. The install was quick and easy, and comes entirely on one CD, which is a welcome experience if you’ve ever spent an afternoon swapping CDs to install Red Hat or SuSE.

This screenshot might sum it all up. You see the translucent menu bars in the picture – look near the title bar that says “Unsaved Document 1 –gedit”? See how it’s translucent? (Click here to see a larger version if it's too small.) Linux has long had notoriously poor ATI driver support, mostly because ATI had little inclination to release functional drivers, and getting an ATI display adapter to work with Linux was something of a chore.

But my test machine has an ATI Mobility Radeon 9000 display adapter, and it worked. All I had to do was to click on the “Restricted Drivers” icon, reboot, and it worked. No manual editing of the xorg.conf file, no running the xserver configuration program, nothing. It just worked.

Astonishing. And virtually unprecedented, in Linux. It would be pretty cool if the consumer OS market over the next five years turned into a three-way slugging match between Microsoft, Apple, and Ubuntu.

It’s not terribly likely, mind, but it would still be pretty cool.

-JM