The Ultimate Distro- The Ultimate OS

Very often I have heard my friends say that their computer has become very slow and unresponsive. Some of my friends expressed their grief on how they lost their precious pictures and files to the deadly virus that ate the files up! Well , this is an everyday affair for the average windows user. Their daily battle with virus , adware, spyware and malware. Still, they continue to use their mistrusted yet trusted one and only operating system – Microsoft Windows.

Ever since I shifted my loyalty to Linux I have been trying to find a distro which needs very less to work on, has less hassle and works out of the box.I know I still have the typical windows users’ habit of wanting everything the easy way but, frankly speaking, who does not? And we always want a system which will give us very little hassle, be fast on start-up and free from virus infection, spyware and adware.

Well, for users who are windows users, let me tell u once again , ur search ends here. Enter the world of linux, the world of numerous operating systems to choose from depending on your flavour, a world of no BSOD’s and most importantly a stable and virus free world!

Ultimate Edition 2.0 is a remastered version of Ubuntu Intrepid Ibex or commonly known as Ubuntu 8.10. It is built on the latest kernel upgrade and contains loads of updates included in it. It contains the best software of both the worlds: KDE and gnome.Unlike the previous Ultimate edition 1.9, which contained kde 3.5, enlightenment and other desktop environments, this edition has the latest Gnome2.24 as its only desktop manager.

The Ultimate Edition 2.0 has been released in 32bit, 64 bit and also has a gamers edition release (32bit) with an enormous number of games. Here’s a list of few games that are included in the gamers edition(courtesy: ubuntuultimate.info).

* Supertux
* Actioncube
* Assaultcube
* Warsow
* Wesnoth
* Glest
* Scorched3d
* Dreamchess
* Sauerbraten
* Gridwars
* Vgacardgames
* Alien arena 2007
* Brikx
* Nexuiz
* Vertris
* Openarena
* Pokerth
* Snowballz
* Chromium
* Gnome-hearts
* Open arena
* Scorched3d
* Urban terror

The biggest plus point of UE 2.0 is its capability to work out of the box. I have tried UE 2.0 in 3 different systems.
1. Dell Inspiron 6400
2. Acer Aspire 5920
3. An assembled desktop(AMD x64)

All these 3 systems had out of the box functionality with wireless cards, webcams, microphone detection, 6.1 sound card detection and network cards and even my HP Deskjet Printer. The old sonix pc camera worked very well as well as the inbuilt web-camera of acer. The camera functions were tested in Ekiga, Skype, Cheese and Kopete.

The only software that are needed to be installed are the w32codecs and ubuntu restricted extras as they are non-free.

Skype 2.0 worked without a glitch. All I did was, set sound out and ringing to pulse and sound in to intel,plug 0.
The quicktime videos on the websites work out of the box as well. No need to configure at all.
There are loads of themes and icon sets that have been included with this distribution. So, users can change themes according to their taste.
The menu is very easy to use and traditional ubuntu style. Yet, windows users who might like to add some vista-ish feel to the menu can download the gnomenu from launchpad. Its a good alternative to the traditional menu.

Empathy messenger which is not included in the basic ubuntu distribution is also included here. Users can call google talk members through this although the call quality isnt that great. But its a good alternative to Ekiga.

Wine comes preinstalled with the distribution and so u can easily install windows software. Office 2007 has been getting gold ratings from winehq and has become easy to install, practically same setup setps as one does in windows.

The only disappointment though, is that open office is still stuck at 2.4.1. Later, I found out that the builds for ubuntu were messed up by the open office developers.The released builds was very buggy and hence have been take off. Apart from this and Ekiga which also has not been upgraded, there are actually no complains.
UPDATE:

The openoffice 3.0 files for ubuntu has been updated and users can now install it from the launchpad repos.
The openoffice3.0 launchpad repo can be found in third party software section in ubunu-tweak in UE2.0. Ubuntu tweak is a nifty little software for tweaking ubuntu.It offers loads of functionalities.

Having used the last 4 Ultimate Editions, I can easily say that this is the best UE yet and the best Linux distribution in terms of working out of the box. Thee Mahn( the creator of UE) and his team of developers deserve a big applaud for creating such a wonderful remastered distro. It actually eliminates the option of having windows OS on a dual boot .

Here’s the screencast of UE 2.0(courtesy:ubuntuultimate.info)

I know you must be thinking of giving UE 2.0 a shot after watching the screencast. Just click here to get to the download page of UE 2.0. Have fun!