Gutsy Gibbon
Posted by Nils Tue, 02 Oct 2007 20:28:00 GMT
This is yet another geek post, however Ubuntu is going to be usable also for people with zero Linux skills.. I promise, the next post will not be geeky..
This weekend I tried out the beta version of the new release of Ubuntu. And I was quite surprised: Everything worked out of the box on my Dell Dimension 9150, INCLUDING compiz-fusion Also it needed one click to install Flash in Firefox and some more to install the proprietary codecs to watch videos.
Congratulations to the Ubuntu developer team! :-)
However I did not try out suspend and hibernate, since it's a desktop computer, I don't need it.
It's also good to see that Deskbar is now included by default. Deskbar is basically Quicksilver for Linux. And the idea behind Quicksilver is that, instead of clicking around, you just type in what you want to do. (after pressing a shortcut) This can be: The name of a band, song, a URL, a filename, the name of a website (which is bookmarked), the name of a program, or just something you want to lookup on wikipedia or a search engine. After typing, you can select from a menu what you want.
So far the good news, however there is also a downside: Deskbar does not support typo correction: For example if you missed one character, or swapped 2. It should correct you, like google does. Peter Norvig (Google's research director) has written agood article about it. Also Deskbar cannot compare the input with it's database based upon the edit distance. In English: If you type in "foxy" instead of Firefox, then the letters "fox" match Firefox and therefore Firefox should show up in the menu, but it does not. I'm not sure how difficult or CPU/memory consuming this would be, but I think it should be possible to implement this.
Deskbar also supports a history, but it does not show up on the top of the menu. I think, that Deskbar should order the items by edit distance and history. For example: If you decide to call Firefox foxy, then it will probably show up on the top, because there is another item, which matches foxy better then Firefox. But if you then repeatedly choose Firefox when typing foxy, then foxy should move up to the top. It's also too dumb to recognize that certain commands should run in a shell, for example if you type ssh somewhere.com it does not work.
So far my experience with Gutsy, since everything works well here I can recommend trying it out.
