…with a newt, and her name is Edgy Eft. I just upgraded MotherBrain from Kubuntu Dapper Drake 6.06 to Edgy Eft 6.10 Release Candidate (the final release is due Oct 26), and now I’m in GNU-heaven. While using dapper, I had made the decision to stop using XGL/Compiz for a couple of reasons:

1. No direct rendering of opengl apps and painfully slow indirect rendering.
2. No support for my wacom graphics tablet.
3. Frequent slowness and bugginess.

Well, the new version of Xorg, supplied by Ubuntu comes with AIGLX built-in (sorry Novell). It works flawlessly after following these simple instructions (for Nvidia users — search wiki for other cards and distros). And after you follow that link, you’ll notice that I’m also not using Compiz but rather Quinn Storm’s fork, which is now called Beryl and uses a window manager called Emerald (thanks Quinn).

But aside from all the eye-candy goodness, Edgy seems to provide the stability, ease of use, and feature-rich applications that have become the staple of the Ubuntu/Kubuntu. From KDE 3.5.5 to the addition of digikam into the base packages, to the slick new styles and themes, to the exciting new init system that makes booting fun (OK, now I’m exaggerating, but you get the idea).

This entry was posted on Sunday, October 22nd, 2006 at 7:14 am and is filed under Free Software. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.