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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."
I sure hope that they've fixed the VIA C3 bug that was present on the last distribution, 'Breezy Badger'. I tried installing it on an 800MHz C3 system and it was unstable to the point of being unusable. I can't remember the exact details, something about the C3 missing one of the Pentium instructions.
Ed Almos
The more corrupt the state, the more numerous the laws. - Tacitus, 56-120 A.D.
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.
OK, I see a new installer has been released. Any word on how it compares to other installers? It looks pretty much like the Debian installer, and the (gulp) RedHat installation has been pretty easy for some time.
What's the "killer feature" for this installer?
What are you eating? isItVeg?.
I hate the Drake!
Be a real patriot: Question authority. Think for yourself. Formulate your own conclusions.
I tried installing Ubuntu PPC on my Opteron machine. It was sooooo unstable! I can't remember the exact details, something about the Opteron missing some of the PowerPC instructions.
Cyric Zndovzny at your service.
Speaking of the look of Ubuntu, why do we always get screenshots in these things? Right now, Dapper looks like Breezy. Which looks like... Gnome with a brown theme.
I care, and since it's posted here, there are probably others as well. Don't like it, don't read it.
I enjoy getting info on Linux distros on Slashdot, their updates etc. It sure as hell beats having 2000 Google stories and 5 "infomercials" for some dude looking for money to fund some science project. If you're tired of these submissions, just choose to ignore Linux threads in your preferences page.
If you don't like GNOME, like myself and many others, feel free to try Kubuntu. It offers all the goodness of Ubuntu, but replaces GNOME with KDE.
Of course, you can still install and use GNOME software, although I don't know why you'd want to do that when you've got the power of KDE available to you.
Cyric Zndovzny at your service.
I don't really see the point of screenshots or reviews at this time. It's way too early for it to have changed much - visually - (if at all) since Breezy.
Actually, many of the more advanced developers are switching to Ubuntu because it does offer all the power of Debian, while also being more up-to-date and developed quicker.
It allows serious developers to focus on programming and software design, rather than painstakingly maintaining their computer system(s). After all, productivity is a must these days, and Ubuntu does much to increase it.
Cyric Zndovzny at your service.
Don't blame the screenshots. After all, they do just show GNOME. GNOME is a very small part of Ubuntu. Many Ubuntu users even choose to ditch GNOME in favour of KDE (thus Kubuntu).
The main thing to focus on is the fantastic package management system, the up-to-date packages, and the overall integration of the system. It's a distro that just works, and that is exactly what a busy user needs.
Cyric Zndovzny at your service.
Indeed. It will be quite interesting to see if Red Hat and Novell/SuSE will be able to match the momentum of Ubuntu/Kubuntu.
I know many people who have become disenchanted with the Red Hat and SuSE distros. While they were near, if not at, the top of the game once, they may not remain there much longer.
I'm aware of a number of people, myself included, who gave Fedora Core a try. And frankly, we were not impressed. I had the installer crash on me, and the others I talked with ran into a multitude of other problems. They were simple problems that shouldn't exist in a modern distro.
Meanwhile, there's all the nonsense with Novell/SuSE switching SuSE to GNOME. SuSE has been a KDE-based distro for years, and it has worked very well. 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.
Some of the people I know went back to Slackware, others to Debian, and myself to Kubuntu. Until Red Hat and Novell/SuSE get their acts together, Ubuntu/Kubuntu may very well have a strong future.
Cyric Zndovzny at your service.
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.
How hard is it to change? Two levels down, IIRC, and you don't have to click apply, unlike on my XP machine. The brown theme is minimalist, it's earthy, and it's a *really* welcome change from the stupid industrial blue/grey offend no-one look of a corporate release.
To reply to another post, the XP Blue theme sucks big time, but the Energy Blue one, which comes as default (I believe) with Media Center, is rather easy on the eyes. However, I really, would NOT mind a Gnome themed desktop, and if I could use it without the need for a stupid hack like WindowsBlinds/ThemeXP/whateverthefuck, I would.
I really don't know why there is such a big fuss. Change it if you like. Use Kubuntu.
Sheesh.
The Ubuntu development releases are often quite stable, even while undergoing constant changes and development. If you want to be on the cutting edge, while still having a quite stable and usable system, the Ubuntu development branch is very useful.
Cyric Zndovzny at your service.
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.
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.
Anyway, Ubuntu is a really great distro. I've moved from Debian to Mandrake (now Mandriva) becouse of outdated packages needed for a workstation
I just received my Breezy Badger CDs via snailmail today, and Dapper Drake's already available? Great, just great.
I like the brown theme too.
It has a 'let us stick together and respect the nature' feel.
However (unrelated to Ubuntu) I agree with a comment above about the gnome file selection dialog.
It is terribly unintuitive and ugly. I have initiated a lot of people to GNU/Linux, and I've shown both KDE and GNOME. Some like one, some the other.
However I noticed that novices which chose GNOME spend a lot more time in GNOME file selection dialogs.
Priority one for the usability of a file selection dialog is shortening the:
"where is this file going to be saved?" thought process.
The KDE f dialogs seem to make a much better work there.
To me, the best path for Gnome to take is to work with Firefox, leaveraging mutual official endorcement to work towards consistancy (mainly in regards to things like the file selector) rather than simply re-inventing what I see to be a wooden spoked wheel without enough tread. But the Gnome crew demands to see consistancy now and they see making their own browser to be far easier.
When Argumentum ad Hominem falls short, try Argumentum ad Matrem
I've recently gone all-Linux, and one of the features I miss (and I haven't seen it any place easy-to-get-to in the configs) is taking advantage of suspend-to-RAM functionality, instead of using that blasted temp file. It's so nice pressing the power button, and in a second and a half the desktop's there! No POST, no nothing, from a complete off state (except power to the MB's RAM)
OK, so I haven't googled enough, and I suspect it's just a matter of executing the correct commands when the ACPI event is triggered, but does the kernel / X / whatever support STR at all?
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
Firefox, in Linux, by default, does *not* use gnome dialogs. Period.
/usr/bin/ooffice2) without Firefox loading the entire contents of every directory in that path (which, for something like /usr/bin, will cause FF to lock up for five minutes straight). Worse, the gnome dialogs to so twice: once when I type in the path, and again when I hit enter.
Funny how my 1.5 prerelease does use gnome dialogs. I'd love to find a way to force it to use the old ones, especially when it comes to choosing helper applications. The old dialogs, unlike the shitty gnome ones, let me type in an absolute path (e.g.
I support the Center for Consumer Freedom
I amzy justyxz learningwxz Polishyzxw myselfxyzw
Case in point: OpenSUSE's SUPER and SLICK editions are totally KDE-centric, performance optimized (incl. Con Kolivas' kernel optimizations) releases with a 1-CD install available and access to SUSE's repositories for additional (KDE) apps. The KDE and Minimal versions have been GA for a long time already, but their GNOME version is still stuck at -RC1, out over 2 months ago.
So to revenge Novell the now-reversed plan to make GNOME the default desktop on the Novell-branded enterprise stuff (which the KDE fans never cared about anyway), they're now dumping the massively KDE-centric SUSE en masse, in favour of... KDE on Kubuntu, which is based on the GNOME-centric Ubuntu which in turn is based on the GNOME-centric Debian...? Sometimes this stuff works in mysterious ways. :-)
Even if KDE eventually gained parity with GNOME under Ubuntu, I can't quite see it becoming a "preferred" choice there anytime soon, if ever. Likewise I can't see SUSE, the KDE-centric consumer release from Novell, giving GNOME anywhere near parity, let alone preferred position, on that platform.
If SUSE's KDE efforts aren't sufficient to the hardcore KDE fans, perhaps their best alternatives would be to invest all their time and money into an upstart totally KDE-only distro, or perhaps they could persuade the other KDE-centric major distro, Mandriva, to drop all their GNOME and Xfce (GTK is bad, right?) support? Having recently gotten out of bankruptcy protection, Mandriva would probably welcome the huge buying power of the KDE-only fans with open arms.
Should invading one's peaceful neighbours be opposed, or rewarded with trade deals?
Anyway, it's discussed on his page in the Ubuntu Wiki:
So Dapper = last "brown" release.
"Ladies and gentlemen, my killbot features Lotus Notes and a machine gun. It is the finest available."
No stability problems or anything. Use it daily. The machine is slow but that's not a bug it's a feature.
The man who trades freedom for security does not deserve nor will he ever receive either. - Benjamin Franklin