Comments on: Ubuntu 7.04 Feisty Fawn — Cool, Fresh and… Unstable

By: damaltor

damaltor — Sat, 03 May 2008 14:22:42 +0000

i am using feisty since it was new, and never had a single problem with it… compiz and every other things work fine.

By: Eemil Lagerspetz

Eemil Lagerspetz — Thu, 13 Sep 2007 06:45:58 +0000

I agree, the 64 system gives us some significant trouble since the world is still mostly 32-bit. 64-bit systems support in Ubuntu could be improved a lot. The boot thing is a very serious one.
I hear there are similar problems with Windows 64-bit versions (drivers not working/installing, crashes etc).
As a half-joke, would a “noob” know what 64 is and install it instead of the i386 version?

By: SteveP

SteveP — Fri, 20 Jul 2007 06:31:20 +0000

Well, I have installed both Debian and Ubuntu. I been using Debian since 2000 and I am using it on a old Compaq Presario 700 laptop. I remember having to do quite a bit of fiddling to get my linksys pcmcia wireless card to work. It would work with ndiswrapper but would not enable wep (or any other wifi encryption). In the end I finally got acx to work. Well that computer has finally coming to the end of it’s days. I just got a new HP dv9310 as a multi-event gift. It has Vista on it and it is just horrible. With Ubuntu having such a buzz I decided to give it a shot. The amd64 cd booted up fine and the install went without a hitch. The machine would not boot though. After tweaking the boot params, it finally would boot. Not a real noobie fixable thing. There were several items of contention outlined below:

powernowd wouldn’t work (no cpu stepping) - fixed with kernel param

display 1280×800 instead of 1440×900 - only fixed with proprietary nVidia driver.

built-in broadcom wireless card didn’t work - fixed with ndiswrapper

built-in ricoh web cam didn’t work- fixed with r5u870 driver

spurious disabling of irq7 (would kill the webcam (once it was working)) - more kernel boot param tweaking

beryl black windows rendering - xorg tweaking.

suspend problems - nvidia problem xorg tweaking to fix.

no codeces! had to install win32 codeces and mplayer32(and support) to watch a rented dvd.

no java in firefox - there is no 64bit plug-in for Sun’s java. I hear I can install the 32bit version of firefox and java to get it to work.

The above issues were not noob fixes, granted this is a newer machine and maybe my expectation of the install was a little too high, but a noob would expect many of the above things to work out of the box.

Despite the short comings above, which I’ve fixed all but the java, once everything is said and done, it has been very stable. The suspend problem caused me to have to reboot a couple times. Not a problem now. It crashed on me once since. I made a change to a Beryl setting using the Beryl setting manager and it locked up. I’ve been using this computer just about every day since I got at the beginning of June with most of the issues I had now resolved. There were many things that worked well straight away. Most notable were cups and samba. I am looking forward to many years of service out of this laptop as it’s Debian parent has provided me good service over the past years with other machines. I am expecting the same from Ubuntu 7.04.

One last note: I just recently installed kubuntu(6.10) on my wifes computer amdk7 900Mhz, 512Mb because the ibm deskstar hard drive died an extreme sudden death. Kubuntu installed and ran without any issue (on a new hard drive of course).

By: RZ

RZ — Thu, 12 Jul 2007 01:49:00 +0000

I like Ubuntu Feisty 7.04, specifically the 64-bit flavor, which does quite well in response and performance. Using the raved (loved & hated) automatix2 for easy setup of swiftfox, I hate that my ATI 200M sucks so bad that I can’t get framerates I need. Otherwise, customization, functionality, and overall fun (sadly addicted to Super Tux) I would say that as a new ubuntu (not new to linux) it is much better then other comperable distros. I do agree heavily that it has stability issues, but nothing I didn’t get in XP, or especially in vista. Man, I love being able to do work in Ubuntu and reboot into windows for the whole 2 games I play in windows. Any how, sorry for the fan boy sounding opinion, but I honestly enjoy this distro, which I have never been able to say about any other.

By: Netwalker

Netwalker — Mon, 02 Jul 2007 17:43:07 +0000

After beating my head against the laptop suspend/resume problem I gave up and went back to Edgy. Everything worked there. Will wait for the fall release.

By: Zhinker

Zhinker — Wed, 20 Jun 2007 21:26:41 +0000

I like their regular 6 month release cycle. But I agree stability should be top priority; I’d say they should solve it by simply not including unstable updates to the release. It’s better to simply postpone the problematic updates till the next release than to delay the whole release instead. Work will still get done on the same schedule while people will still get their dependable release cycles.

Alternatively, we could just extend the release cycles to 9 or 12 months.

By: Tim

Tim — Tue, 19 Jun 2007 21:00:50 +0000

I just bought my wife a Macintosh notebook. After a couple of hours of playing with it, I became embarrassed to be still using XP on my desktop. Ubuntu is not OS X, but it’s a lot closer than XP (or Vista). I’ve been fiddling with Debian and then Ubuntu in the last few years, but after doing a clean install of 7.04 on an old machine, I was very impressed, so I made it the boot OS on my main computer. With XP running in VMWare Server, I am very happy … until tonight, when I discovered that the Open Office package in 7.04 is badly broken and the bug reports go back for two months, with no corrected package (Debian shares the problem, apparently).
Apart from that, 7.04 is excellent. It is stable for me, although suspend and hibernation don’t work (which I think is a problem with the NVidia drivers).

By: Scott

Scott — Sun, 17 Jun 2007 21:48:39 +0000

Yeah I don’t get all the Linux fan boys. I’ve been using Linux since 1996, Debian Linux since 2000, and Windows since 1993.

I’m a programmer and I like to fix stuff. However, maybe it’s my age but I just want a computer to work now, I don’t want to spend 10 years trying to get something like g++ installed. I want to type “[sudo] apt-get install g++” and have it actually install it.

Q: Ever wonder why all the Ubuntu/Linux reviews are about installing it and not actually using it?

A: Because very few people use it for real work because it hampers their productivity.

I demand a Linux distro that doesn’t require 2 days of frustration just to get the littlest thing work.