Review: Ubuntu 8.10

[Administrator]

This review kicks off a multi-part review where I'll be looking at the up-coming releases from Ubuntu, Fedora, Open Suse and Mandriva. Alphas, Betas and Release Candidates are usually reserved for testers, developers or the Linux hardcore, though these early snapshots are just as important to the Linux gaming community. The reason for this is simple; Newer kernels support newer hardware and the newer the distro, the newer the packages (more importantly – game packages).

Gamers are hardware junkies. You'll never hear of a hardcore gamer that's still using a PII and a GeForce 2 MX – you're hardcore if you upgrade your PC components every couple of months or wait in anticipation for the next big graphics card coming from the Nvidia or AMD/ATI stables. This brings about a problem if the kernel you're using isn't going to support your brand new motherboard, soundcard or fancy network card (with a knife as a heatsink, no less). While you could roll your own kernel to get the support you need, most Linux users prefer to move to the next version of their distro of choice. This is where these reviews will come in handy, here you'll get to see what's new, what's the support like and how easy is it to install, suck down some game packages and frag the night away. On to the review...

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