Review: Ubuntu 8.10 'Intrepid Ibex' – Missed the mark? - 22/11/2008 by Andrew Distro Review As some people have gathered reading my previous distro reviews, I'm an Ubuntu user, so I was waiting with high hopes that the final release of 8.10 would serve as a meaningful upgrade. I've previously reviewed Alpha 2 (not really usable) and Alpha 4 (this was usable) and I was thinking it was going to win against arch rivals Mandriva and Fedora. Well, I was wrong. For me (this is a gaming site after all), one of the most important attributes that a Linux Distribution should have is easy 3D acceleration. You should be able to install your choice of Linux and without too much stuffing around get either Nvidia or ATI propriety drivers moving those pixels around. I'm not really picky, it doesn't have to be automatically done for you (like Mandriva), it can be something that you have to search through the repositories and enable (Fedora – after you add extra 'non official' repos) or something that prompts you to enable proprietary hardware (Ubuntu and friends). Considering that Ubuntu 8.10 Alpha 4 worked fine (albeit with a few bugs) on exactly the same hardware, I was slightly shocked to find that Ubuntu 8.10 'Final' failed to work correctly. Sure, Nvidia acceleration worked fine, though it couldn't detect my monitor (ViewSonic 22” LCD, connected via DVI input). I could either have the open source 'nv' and my display locked at 800x600 or proprietary 'nvidia' and a blank screen. Joy, joy, joy. Yes, with a bit of googling and ubuntu forum lurking I found the answers to my problems (manually hacking xorg.conf to include an entry for my monitor) though this really isn't good enough for the 'distribution for human beings'. Would someone trying Ubuntu out for the first time be impressed with this? I doubt it and it seems that I'm not the only one that's having issues with getting the proprietary graphics card drivers working correctly. On a related topic, I'm about to setup a Linux gaming machine for a mate of mine (bit of a noob, though he's Bilbo T Baggins at Halo). It's hard to promote Ubuntu as an easy distro when I'm going to be whipping out terminals nanoing stuff left, right and centre. And you can forget about phone support or some update kills X. If anyone has been through a phone conversation where you have to get them to blindly read/type stuff from/to the terminal then you know exactly what I mean: “You want me to type what? Sudoku who? Man, I'm going back to Windows”. So ignoring this seeming regression in hardware support, I can report that everything else is as it should be – clean, simple and easy to use. Though, considering that the previous version was a 'long term support' and was conservative for the sake of stability, this version isn't different enough. It feels very much like the older version, though with a few tricks added here and there. Yes, I know that there's a new version of X.org and Kernel, so it will support newer hardware though I just can't warrant upgrading my current system just to access the newer repositories. After all Nexuiz, OpenArena and Warsow are easily downloadable and already OpenArena is out of date in 8.10 (0.7.7 compared to 0.8.1). Conclusion So where does this leave us? If you're new to Linux and are looking to do some gaming in Ubuntu, it might be best to stick to 8.04.1 LTS or give the latest Mandriva a go. If you're an old hat with Linux, you can get the proprietary Nvidia drivers (not sure about ATI here) working under Ubuntu with a bit of terminal haxx0ring. For me, these issues have left a bad taste in my mouth so I'm going to give the Ubuntu family one last chance with Xubuntu before I go to Mandriva Linux 2009 (gnome version), which scored very highly when I reviewed it last.
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