Software: Ubuntu 64-Bit

I finally had enough with my Fedora 8 install last night, and I decided to reinstall. Compiz has been giving me weird coloration issues, including the status bars suddenly disappearing at will. VLC no longer plays anything, and I'm fed up with the dependency issues from using atrpms, livna and the standard Fedora repos. On top of that, yum is slow and annoying. As I've been using Ubuntu on my MythTV/File Server in the living room for a while now, and fiddling with it on my laptop too - I've been impressed enough to say that Fedora offers me nothing over Ubuntu, bar the "service" command for restarting system services.

As the poll on the left suggests, I voted for Ubuntu 7.10, and for some reason, I installed the 64-Bit version, to see how stable it was, and if it made any difference to performance.

When I had installed Fedora, I had opted to use LVM, which is supposed to make partition resizing simpler, but instead, not even Fedora recognised my partition properly, suggesting that the partition table was invalid. Rather than risk resizing the partition and losing everything, I trimmed the fat a little and ended up with 13GB for the Fedora install plus my VirtualBox images. I backed this up to a 16GB Corsair Flash drive, doing a direct file copy rather than any partition backup - in case my dodgy partition table decided to get in the way.

Booting up off the Ubuntu CD was very quick, and using the install program I repartitioned the drive - 128MB for /boot, 40GB for /home and 30GB for /. This left me with close to 90GB left of my drive should I want to dual boot some other distros (ZenWalk is tempting).

The install took barely any time at all and I quickly booted into the OS. As per usual, getting X setup as I wanted was the difficulty. I have two 22" 1680x1050 displays, on an nvidia graphics card - that's the easy part. However, getting those to work while also running Compiz can be a PITA. I can't explain why I love the Compiz effects, but it really does make my day to day working more enoyable - so it's worth the fiddling. In the end, I copied my xorg.conf from my Fedora install, and cleared out some of the excess that had built up in there. You can download my xorg.conf should anyone want to look who has a similar setup. It's on my "to do" list to understand the X configuration a little better, but it seems to vary so widely wherever I find it documented.

Talking of "to do" lists, somehow I managed to lose all my Tomboy Notes, and had to restore to a pre-Christmas backup. I wish the syncronisation option ran daily, without me needing to set it off, as losing my notes is rather annoying - I live by them! However, it's my own fault for now setting up a backup to my server before reinstalling.

I then noticed that the fonts on my desktop were a little off and wondered if me still using Analogue input was causing it - my dual monitor KVM is analogue only unfortunately. I plugged the DVI cables in, and if I'm honest I'm not seeing much of a difference at all, and I still get visual tearing on the Compiz effects. I'll leave it for the moment as I'm not using the KVM much, but I'll do some direct comparisons at a later point.

With Synaptic being as speedy as it is, I soon had everything extra I needed setup - Microsoft Fonts, Thunderbird, Amarok, MythTV Frontend, Putty and SMB4k (off the top of my head). Interestingly, Fedora wouldn't let me install MythTV Frontend without installing the backend too, which Ubuntu didn't make me do.

A little graphical tweaking here and there, and the machine is now setup exactly as I want it. All in all it must have taken me 3 hours tops to get things as I wanted them, including the time it took to clean up and copy my old partition to a flash drive, and the time it took to panic over losing my Tomboy notes.

Compiz performance seems faster on the Desktop Cube, and boot up times are definitely faster than my previous Fedora install. How much of this is because of 64-Bit, is questionable to say the least, but I'm not complaining. My 3GHz Pentium D still has some life left in it.

The biggest issue I have with Ubuntu, which is something I will be dedicating some time to this week, is the fonts. For some reason, the default font used is horrible, and I get a variety of fonts that are too slim, and other that are too wide.

I have had the same issue on my laptop and it's quite frustrating. I don't have any fonts missing, and most of my googling seems to come up with talk about font hinting - which is easily adjustable in the "Appearance" setting, and not the cause of the issue. Another issue that comes up is the default DPI - also not an issue. If anyone has any clues, I'd be interested to hear them

Well, Fedora did a much better job of it