Saturday, March 17, 2012

Ubuntu 12.04 Precise Pangolin LTS: Review of the next gen OS

Well, I was pretty much disheartened with Ubuntu 11.10 not really clicking with my 9 year old PC. It's specs were impressive in 2003 but not now. 2.4 GHz Pentium 4 single core processor with 1 GB DDR RAM and 200 GB IDE HDD - nothing to boast of today.

Ubuntu 11.10 with Unity won't load on my system. So, I had to be contended with Ubuntu 11.04 (which ran real smooth in classic mode!). Today I thought of testing Ubuntu 12.04 LTS loaded on a pen-drive. It took some time to load from the pen-drive (around 5 min.) but the programs ran real smooth after loading.

I am posting this blog entry from 12.04 LTS only!

I used to hate Unity till I used this baby! Unity had its glitches in 11.04 & 11.10 but it looks really polished in 12.04 LTS. Mind it, 12.04 is still beta and by the time final distro comes out, I guess it will be more refined.

Below are a few snaps of the distro (running on a 4 GB pen-drive) from my desktop.


With a little bit of background change (one of my favorite wallpapers).


The uber-cool transparent Dash-home giving the different options. I migrated from Ubuntu 11.04 to 12.04 and did not see much noticeable changes in the application list. Rhythmbox music player, of course, replaces the previous Banshree music player and we have a few new programs like Archive manager. Tomboy notes is gone but the usual applications like Libreoffice suit (Writer, Calc, Impress, Draw), Firefox 10.0, Empathy, Gwibber, etc. are all there. VLC, Chrome and Cheese would have been a nice addition to the list but I'll manually download these apps once I start using 12.04 on a regular basis.


Finally the system specs! Frankly, my system crashed at Windows XP SP3, it can't handle it! That's when I started using Ubuntu a year back and became a fan of it. Super cool Ubuntu 12.04 loads like a charm without any glitch on this antiquated configuration and runs with a decent speed.

I hope this gives a glimpse how improved the OS is as of now. Loading Unity was not at all possible in Ubuntu's earlier versions but 12.04 LTS runs superbly smooth. Thanks to the developers at Canonical for coming up with this upgrade. Amazing!

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