So, I got adventurous last night and installed the Gutsy Gibbon Beta on my laptop. The hard disk that came with the machine had died, and I have replaced it with a new 7200 RPM Seagate job, so a reinstall was needed anyway.

So far, really, so good. The only real problem that I have had so far, is that gnome-panel keeps crashing at random, but that might have something to do with my very highly tweaked, and personalized gnome settings. I’m planning on playing with it over the next few days to see if I can fix the issue.

Pros:

• My Broadcom Wireless Card, actually works.
• Installing the restricted drivers (Broadcom and nVidia) was completely painless.
• 3D Desktop, courtesy fo Gnome 2.2 is pretty funky.
• Disk intensive stuff runs faster than it did before, courtesy of the new Seagate, I am sure.
• Flash, and assorted other multimedia crap was WAY easier to get working on this, than it was previously on an AMD64 system
• The box seems more responsive. This could either be the new disk, or it could be lighter software. My guess is the disk.
• My FireWire DVD-RW actually works. I could only use it for CD’s before for some reason. I prefer to use it for ripping, over the internal.
• The Headphone Jack finally works.

Cons:

• It runs hotter. The CPU fan is constantly spinning up.
• Openbox displays a couple of strange behaviors that I have not been able to correct.
• It’s definitely still a beta. Stuff breaks between upgrades, and requires a bit of manual fixing at times.
• Xine complains about dropped frames, when playing full screen movies.

I’ll tinker with it for the next few days, I am going to try to use it “The Ubuntu Way” (go go gui config toys and apt front ends) rather than “The Debian Way” (go go command line apt and txt editors), let’s see how it goes.