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Dapper Drake Hits Ubuntu Servers

linuxbeta writes "Ubuntu 6.04 (Dapper Drake) daily builds have hit the Ubuntu servers. Dapper's goals: Substantial polish and integration, software discovery and installation, make network-wide enterprise updates easy to manage, consider LSB and related certification standards and support for deployment of Dapper on mission-critical servers. Screenshots have already surfaced."

7 of 259 comments (clear)

  1. Polish by nine-times · · Score: 3, Interesting
    Dapper's goals: Substantial polish and integration

    Glad to hear it. I love Ubuntu. In my experience, it's the easiest and most reliable Linux distro to setup and maintain. Apt is great, and Synaptic makes it easy. A lot of things are just done the right way.

    However, being a new distro, it's lacked a little polish here and there. Nothing big, but just the sort of thing where, if I were to set my parents up on a Linux machine, I'd be more confident in the presentation that SuSE or Fedora provide. I'd be really confident that Ubuntu would work correctly, and it might be my choice of distros for that reason, but I'd be more confident that Fedora would *look* like a professionally-created OS.

    So I think polish is a good place to focus right now.

  2. Re:Ubuntu Linux... by idlake · · Score: 3, Interesting

    As a former fan of SuSE, I do not think I'll bother buying their products if they go with GNOME as their default desktop, rather than KDE.

    Well, and as a former fan of RedHat and Ubuntu, I think I may be installing SuSE as my primary system. SuSE has been a great distro, except for shipping with KDE as its default desktop.

  3. My take on ubuntu. by Lussarn · · Score: 3, Interesting

    I recently switched to use ubuntu in my desktops (from gentoo). It's been mostly painless but there are gotchas with breezy 5.10.

    Multimedia support is close to non existant. I have source installed mplayer, dvd::rip and avidemux (And a few libraries they depend on). That brought multimedia up to par with my gentoo install altough much more hassle than gentoo.

    Default kernel is non preemptible which just sucks if you like me do some heavy multitasking. It's not unusual for me to have 5 mencoders or a couple of compiles going and without preemptible kernel the system is close to non responsive, the problems show up even if you only encode one movie. A kernel compile fixes the problems but some people probably don't want to recompile the kernel (Or have the skill to do so).

    Default firefox is slow. For some reason the default firefox is amazingly slugish. I downloaded a new from mozilla.org and problem is fixed. Still annoying.

    Gentoo has amazinlgy good documentation. Not something against ubuntu but coming from Gentoo it's a big loss.

    Main reason for switching was getting a reasonably new gnome desktop with good package stability. With gentoo you have a too much of a moving system with new releases of packages way too often and too inconsistently. So far ubuntu has been great in that regard.

    All in all it's one of the best desktop distros right now.

  4. Seems to be a long lasting release of Ubuntu by Ace+Rimmer · · Score: 5, Interesting
    There are a few features which would be really nice [missing in comparison in other distros] -- but not planned:

    • A possibility of an offline installation. One can't setup Ubuntu well without Internet access. It would bevery useful for example if one could choose "extra" packages not found on official CD (at least some i18n stuff and reasonable multimedia). At least you would be able to pre-download packages (and all dependent packages! before installation). This would be also pretty nice for multiple installations (small bussines usage).

    • An automatical detection of BIOS RAID during installation process (a pretty common thing on modern computers and usually well supported in Linux). Now you have to do really nasty hacks to get it working (see ahref=https://wiki.ubuntu.com/FakeRaidHowto/rel=ur l2html-13444https://wiki.ubuntu.com/FakeRaidHowto/ > ).

    • A possiblity to switch all bindings from one app to another of your preference. You can now do it for WWW and email. It would be great to have it for text (gvim anyone? ;), video (xine/mplayer), audio (xmms) instead of politically correct but unusable default applications.

    • Reasonably restrictively set firewall setup by default (maybe shorewall)

    • A good backup application (at least system recovery, etc settings snapshots, home dirs backup).

    • Some sort of graphical system messages reporter for desktop users (sniffing logs, reporting serious problems). Something like security update icon on the top bar). Smarttools should also really be installed by default.

    • Disabling completely disfunctional features like "hibernate" on standard desktops ... I installed Ubuntu at least 20 times on different hw and I haven't found a PC on which this would not cause a complete hang up.



    Anyway, Ubuntu is a really great distro. I've moved from Debian to Mandrake (now Mandriva) becouse of outdated packages needed for a workstation ... now I'm back (even though to its desktop cousin). It's becouse it is much simpler and most of things just work out of the (unlike mdk, gentoo and others.) -- and still can be tweaked easily by a poweruser!

    --

    :wq

  5. Re:Screenshots show nothing new by Homology · · Score: 4, Interesting
    Is it just me, or do the screenshots not really show anything new? I mean Ubuntu is cool and all, but these are just screenshots of Ubuntu, and does not even include the new enterprise management stuff.

    Yet another "review" of yet another Linux distro consisting mostly of screenshots Gnome/KDE along with the installer. They are all so very superficial, and quite frankly, quite booring. I'm pretty sure that the distro maintainers are not that happy themselves with these "reviews".

    As an example, this is almost never seen in a review: Upgrading a machine (desktop/server/whatever) from and older version to the newest version and reviewing that. Or reviewing the package lifecycle in a version of a distro (does the upgrades work? breakes anything? Are upgrades properly tested by the distro/package maintainers? etc etc).

  6. Re:Ok, it's been released... by LnxAddct · · Score: 3, Interesting

    Its funny how you just assume Debian provides a "better system". I used to run Fedora and Debian side by side, but anything other than Debian stable would break my system monthly. I had a lot of things installed on it, but nothing too exotic. I got sick of going to #debian and getting blasted for expecting stability if I'm not running Debian Stable, and than being told to fix it myself or that I should have read < insert link > before I went updating. The truth is that the Debian community is a bunch of elitists. My Fedora server just runs nice and silent without me having to do anything, updates itself and things don't break because the packages are well tested. Debian has reported several times that they are running short on help, they don't have the resources to put quality into their 10,000 packages. Fedora comes with a standard yum repository that has thousands of apps, and adding a second repo, like DAG's or the soon to released RPMForge, puts the number of available apps on par, if not above, that of Debian. As it stands right now, all my servers and laptop run Fedora. Debian doesn't cut it anymore, and Ubuntu isn't server oriented, but even on the desktop side of things Ubuntu doesn't take security serious enough. Also, you can praise apt all you want, but as anyone who has any experience with it knows, the second apt breaks it breaks like hell and does not want to be fixed. Its crazy that some users in #debian told me they've spent weeks figuring out what was wrong and fixing apt and that I should just do the same if it breaks. Screw that, things like that don't happen on Fedora. And as far as installing goes... Ubunutu is not easier and is severly lacking. To install than Red Hat is easy as hell even if you're installing it on a few hundred machines at once, the gui, text mode, or kickstart are all easy to work with.
    Regards,
    Steve

  7. Re:You're right, the GNOME file selector has to go by donscarletti · · Score: 3, Interesting
    I am not a Windows user. I am a Linux user. Why the hell would I be care about Gnome if I was a windows user? And that screenshot you have is from DIA, not Firefox. I have Firefox open, in Gnome right now and my save as dialog looks nothing like that one.

    You are a KDE zealot. You don't care about the facts regarding the dialog, you don't care about the design decisions behind the save as dialog and I'd wager that you wouldn't care if it copied the dialog from KDE, windows or OSX. You just want Gnome to look bad because you plain don't like it. Look around you, is anyone else trying to reignite the desktop wars on this thread? No, everyone's mature enough to realise that both desktops are doing a lot of good things.

    I'm a Gnome user, but I'm not telling everyone that KDE sucks and to use Gnome. I was being so objective on this subject that you thought I was a windows user. This cannot be denied because it is there in your own writing. I switched to Gnome from being a very loyal KDE user three years ago because I found the attitudes behind KDE were in need of a bit of maturity. What you are displaying exemplifies this. Gnome and KDE are very different environments. They appeal to very different people, when I was a loyal KDE guy I loved it because of the amount of fun stuff they manage to pack in, the options, the huge number of fun included games, the sticky button right on the left hand side of the window bar for quick tying down of windows, the big pretty applets, the power and integration of KFM and later Konqueror. But these days I like Gnome because of its sleek, uncluttered appearance, it's focus on making the most common tasks faster to do, the widgets being small but very readable. As a developer, I also prefer GTK+ to QT because of its community focused development methods and its focus on having excelent high level language bindings (pygtk (python), gtkmm (c++), gtk# (c#)) rather than encoraging everyone to use its native API.

    If you want to help KDE you should maybe spend some time developing it, or maybe praise their developers every time there is a positive story on KDE on slashdot. Trying to convert everyone to KDE whenever there is a gnome story on slashdot doesn't help anyone and doesn't really make you or KDE look good. Try not to do it in the future, thanks.

    --
    When Argumentum ad Hominem falls short, try Argumentum ad Matrem