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3D desktop

If your graphics card has an Xorg driver which supports 3D acceleration (mostly Intel graphics and older Radeon cards) Ubuntu will use 3D effects on the desktop – menus and windows fade smoothly in and out, the windows cast shadows, the key combination Windows key+E displays an overview of your virtual desktops. This is all carried out by Compiz, a compositing manager, which is sensibly integrated into the desktop and can, for example, correctly import themes.

Useful 3D effects - overview of the virtual desktop (click to enlarge)

Ubuntu's desktop effects settings only offer a choice between no, normal and many effects. Users who want more detailed control can, after installing the compizconfig-settings-manager package, configure and switch individual effects on or off using the ccsm program.

With newer graphics cards from AMD/ATI and Nvidia, vendor drivers need to be installed before 3D effects can be enjoyed. The "Manage restricted drivers" tool (also present in the previous version), which provides proprietary drivers for all integrated hardware, achieves this with just a single click. For AMD/ATI cards, users will also need to install the xserver-xgl package using Synaptic or another package manager. This activates the 3D desktop effects, but switches the keyboard to English. Users who want to use a different keyboard layout can use the GNOME keyboard selector applet to set the desired language.

Goodies

Multimedia applications like Totem offer to install missing codecs automatically when the user stumbles upon a format which refuses to play out-of-the-box. Tracker is a high-performance, configurable desktop search tool which, in contrast to Beagle, gets by without resource-intensive indexing and still delivers decent results.

Desktop search tool Tracker searches through anything and everything [--] from files and bookmarks to the internet (click to enlarge).

Ubuntu 7.10 includes the NTFS3G driver which enables read and write access to Windows partitions. A new admin tool allows you to run multiple monitors (or a projector on a laptop), but only within the bounds of what is possible using the X Window system and this is still patch – not every Linux driver supports all the options offered by the graphics hardware.

The power management feature for laptops has apparently been improved. Our test laptop already ran smoothly with the previous version 7.04, including suspend to RAM and a similar battery time to other operating systems. The kernel in Ubuntu 7.10 is compiled with the CONFIG_NO_HZ (dynamic ticks) option. This extension allows the processor to remain in energy saving mode longer and ensures that it is no longer woken hundred to thousand times per second by the timer interrupt. This doesn't save that much energy overall.

As in the previous version, software is installed using the "Add/Remove" tool on the Applications menu, the Synaptic package manager or the command line package manager aptitude. This represents little change compared to the previous version. As you would expect from Debian GNU/Linux and Ubuntu, the application manager installs new packages from CD/DVD or downloaded from the internet quickly and reliably – and uninstalls them cleanly.

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