A quick look at Ubuntu 5.10 Preview

The Ubuntu Linux 5.10 (Breezy Badger) Preview was released earlier this month, so we decided to take a look. The Preview is very close to what the final release will look like and it has been quite stable on my old test box so far.

Ubuntu has plenty of documentation on the wiki site, available in many different languages. For those who don't have much experience in installing Linux distributions you can find instructions for downloading the iso image, burning a CD, installing the operating system, and beyond.

The installation is straightforward and took me about one and half hours to get to a usable desktop system. My test box is somewhat old and slow, a legacy from LWN's training days, with a few newer components. The processor is a P2-350, with 192 Mb of RAM, and a 20 Gb hard drive.

Upon completing installation I decided to get at least some of the updates that were available. The system told me there were some 370 updates available. I deselected some of them, based on the fact that this computer does not currently have access to a printer, speakers, or a CD burner. Those things belong to another box, and the monitor, keyboard and mouse are shared by means of KVM switch. Once I had the system busy downloading and installing nearly 300 updates, I starting getting some work done, logging on to the LWN server and firing up a couple of emacs windows over the SSH connection. These remote sessions were very responsive considering that the system was busy downloading updates.

I have not been using this release for very long, but so far I have not found any show stoppers. Ubuntu 5.10 Preview is a nice system, easy to install and easy to use.

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