BANGALORE, INDIA: There are a lot of distros available online that provide you ease of installation, usage and more importantly support for a variety of hardware, such as digital cameras, cards readers, USB drives and more. Fedora, OpenSuSE and Ubuntu are the major players in the field of Open Source and free operating systems and specifically Ubuntu and OpenSuSE have established themselves as easy to use and feature rich OSes for novices.

And even within Ubuntu, you have a lot of editions available, one of them being the latest Ubuntu 7.10. So, the question arises that with so many editions that work fine with almost any hardware specs, why another distro? Why 'Ubuntu Ultimate 1.6'? Well it aims to reduce the pain of installing other applications and is good for networks with bandwidth constraints.

The distro is best for novices and even experts who want a ready-to-use and free distro. It is based on Ubuntu – Edgy Eft 6.10 (based on Debian), which includes a large number for software, for home users to power users, pre-added with this distro. So, what are the applications and drivers you get with Ultimate, in addition to the ones you get in the usual Ubuntu distros? Well, you get out-of-the-box IPod support, Google Picasa, ClamAV anti-virus, QDVDAuthor - DVD authoring software, and many more.

Apart from all these daily-use applications, you'll find applications such as NmapFE, Wifi radar, Wireless Assistant and Wireshark for monitoring network activity in your office. It also provides Nessus, which is an application for doing vulnerability analysis of your office network. For Open Source developers, it provides a complete solution with IDEs such as Ajunta IDE, Bluefish editor and gPHPedit. It also has Quanta Plus, which is a stable and feature rich web development environment, and Kompare which helps a developer to view changes done to his code.

Installation
The installation process is the same as with other Ubuntu editions. When you insert a DVD and boot up the system, it initially boots up with live distro so that you can use and feel it before installing Ubuntu Ultimate on your system. A unique feature of this distro is that it provides you the option of choosing the video driver to install--NVIDIA or ATI, whereas in other distros you have to download drivers from the respective websites before installing them. Even in OpenSuSE, after the completion of the installation process, you have to browse to the OpenSuSE website and then do a one-click installation.

The most interesting part is that when you install Ubuntu Ultimate on a system where Windows is already installed, and you want to dual boot the system, then it provides you the option of importing data from firefox, IE, wallpapers, user pictures, My documents, My music, My pictures and Outlook Express from Windows. It has a 2.6.22 kernel, which is a stable yet old kernel. Unlike other distros, including Ubuntu 7.10, this distro includes wine which is used to run Windows applications on Linux.

Apart from Open Office 2.3, you can find AbiWord 2.4.6 which a free word processor and gnumeric spreadsheet which is an alternative to Open Office and other commercial spreadsheets. And gnumeric is part of GNOME desktop environment. Looking at its multimedia section, this is the only distro which has all possible media players installed. Starting form Banshee music player to MythTV, Rhythmbox and VLC, which is a free and Open Source player, and plays mostly audio and video file formats.

Bottom Line: This edition of Ubuntu comes bundled with useful software and Beryl animation makes it a direct competitor to Windows Vista