Know more about Ubuntu 7.10

There are a lot of distros available online thatprovide you ease of installation, usage and more importantly supportfor a variety of hardware, such as digital cameras, cards readers, USBdrives and more. Fedora, OpenSuSE and Ubuntu are the major players inthe field of Open Source and free operating systems and specificallyUbuntu and OpenSuSE have established themselves as easy to use andfeature rich OSes for novices.

And even within Ubuntu, you have a lot of editionsavailable, one of them being the latest Ubuntu 7.10. So, the questionarises that with so many editions that work fine with almost anyhardware specs, why another distro? Why 'Ubuntu Ultimate 1.6'? Well itaims to reduce the pain of installing other applications and is goodfor networks with bandwidth constraints.

The distro is best for novices and even experts whowant a ready-to-use and free distro. It is based on Ubuntu – Edgy Eft6.10 (based on Debian), which includes a large number for software, forhome users to power users, pre-added with this distro. So, what are theapplications and drivers you get with Ultimate, in addition to the onesyou get in the usual Ubuntu distros? Well, you get out-of-the-box IPodsupport, Google Picasa, ClamAV anti-virus, QDVDAuthor - DVD authoringsoftware, and many more.

Apart from all these daily-use applications, you'llfind applications such as NmapFE, Wifi radar, Wireless Assistant andWireshark for monitoring network activity in your office. It alsoprovides Nessus, which is an application for doing vulnerabilityanalysis of your office network. For Open Source developers, itprovides a complete solution with IDEs such as Ajunta IDE, Bluefisheditor and gPHPedit. It also has Quanta Plus, which is a stable andfeature rich web development environment, and Kompare which helps adeveloper to view changes done to his code.

Installation
The installation process is the same as with other Ubuntueditions. When you insert a DVD and boot up the system, it initiallyboots up with live distro so that you can use and feel it beforeinstalling Ubuntu Ultimate on your system. A unique feature of thisdistro is that it provides you the option of choosing the video driverto install--NVIDIA or ATI, whereas in other distros you have todownload drivers from the respective websites before installing them.Even in OpenSuSE, after the completion of the installation process, youhave to browse to the OpenSuSE website and then do a one-clickinstallation.

The most interesting part is that when you installUbuntu Ultimate on a system where Windows is already installed, and youwant to dual boot the system, then it provides you the option ofimporting data from firefox, IE, wallpapers, user pictures, Mydocuments, My music, My pictures and Outlook Express from Windows. Ithas a 2.6.22 kernel, which is a stable yet old kernel. Unlike otherdistros, including Ubuntu 7.10, this distro includes wine which is usedto run Windows applications on Linux.

Apart from Open Office 2.3, you can find AbiWord2.4.6 which a free word processor and gnumeric spreadsheet which is analternative to Open Office and other commercial spreadsheets. Andgnumeric is part of GNOME desktop environment. Looking at itsmultimedia section, this is the only distro which has all possiblemedia players installed. Starting form Banshee music player to MythTV,Rhythmbox and VLC, which is a free and Open Source player, and playsmostly audio and video file formats.

Bottom Line: This edition of Ubuntu comes bundled with useful software and Beryl animation makes it a direct competitor to Windows Vista