Wednesday, October 24, 2007

Gutsy Gibbon

Ubuntu has taken all the fun out of installing a new version of a distro. Whatever happened to the thrill of discovering via Slashdot or Reddit that a new version is out, patiently downloading the ISO, looking at the current installations and deciding which distro/partition to jettison for the new version, going through the actual installation, finding that the new version has nuked your wireless networking (just kidding)...

Gutsy Gibbon is out, and the only indication I had of its availability was a message in Update Manager to the effect that a new version (7.10) was available for upgrade. Well, the blame is actually mine, as I've not been to Slashdot and Reddit for something like two months.

Anyway, 946 MB worth of downloads later, my desktop is more or less the same (heck, it's practically the same) as it was before the upgrade. I know that there are new features -- the login screen that appears on waking the laptop after hibernation displays an additional button called 'Leave Message', for one thing -- but they aren't readily apparent.

I ended up changing my windows theme to Slate Horn Blue just to remind myself that I have upgraded to 7.10.