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Ubuntu 6.06 Reviewed
Mark writes "This year has been a huge step forward for Desktop Linux users. First, Fedora Core 5 was released and featured the new Gnome 2.14. Then SUSE 10.1 showed us how well applications could be integrated to make a desktop look great. Now it was time for Ubuntu to release their latest version: 'Dapper Drake.'" Oh yeah, the inital review is good, too. Worth checking out for desktop Linux users.
Wow...I made a simple change to my sources.list file and ran sudo apt-get dist-upgrade and 15 minutes later I went from Breezy to Dapper. No reboot required. Bravo to the Ubuntu team!
XGL?
This year has been a huge step forward for Desktop Linux users.
I know that people here frequently complain about things like duplication of effort and forking as things that dilute the impact of Linux and free/open source software on the world. I tend to be of the opposite opinion. You want something geared at the business desktop with good integration and commercial support? Get SuSE. You want something that carries the name of a recognized brand? Get Fedora (yes it is still in many places considered the standard, just look at how many hosting providers provide is as the primary or only platform). You want something different that has a reputation for rock solid stability? Get Debian. You want a user-friendly Debian? Get Ubutnu.
The point is that the diversity is what makes these things possible. None of those things would be done nearly as effectivly under a "one size fits all" approach.
It's not ready for grandma to use, and as such, it's not an XP replacement. It still takes many keystrokes to get MP3 and video codec support. Want a binary nvidia driver? Due to ideological reasons, you'll need to manually enable universe and install it. And exotic wifi protocol support is still spotty (but better). Try explaining all that to someone who is computer illiterate. All they know is that this stuff works automatically in XP or OSX.
Not that I'm ragging on Dapper Drake; I installed it the first day it came out. But it is being touted as an XP replacement when it isn't. I think it is only a marginal improvement over the last version in terms of ease of use for people who aren't already savvy. The improved theme certainly looks good, but that only goes so far when you are looking to replace XP for normal users. I think the Ubuntu team really needs to rethink leaving out MP3 decoders and regular codec support. Microsoft doesn't seem to have 'licensing issues' when they ship XP with those features, and neither does Apple.
In a nutshell:
So overall, I'd say, "excellent" on the visuals, apps choices, functionality (so long as wireless networking or network printers are not needed).
IMO, desktop users will be happy. Notebook users will be less than happy.
From the Ubuntu website http://www.ubuntu.com/ />, alternate is for:
* creating pre-configured OEM systems;
* setting up automated deployments;
* upgrading from older installations without network access;
* LVM and/or RAID partitioning;
* installing GRUB to a location other than the Master Boot Record;
* installs on systems with less than about 192MB of RAM.
Sounds to me like something that could be invaluable to people not necessarily running the latest and greatest.
I'm sorry, but you cannot review a whole operating system in two days. Sure, you can get the immediate "ease of use" and an idea of the speed of things. But it's only when you start using it properly every day for at least a month or more, you can appreciate whether an Operating System is good for you, or not.
Saying that, Ubuntu already won me over at Breezy. With the new Gnome 2.14, Dapper is much faster again.
I have been checking on Kubuntu for about a year now. I always said Kubuntu is not yet but has great potential. That was mainly because of the work that has already been done and the resources FOSS makes available. Add to that the a rich guy and you get the great potential. I used to throw away the CD I burnt but yesterday was the first time I was not disappointed with it and I even went ahead and installed on one of the desktops I have. Draper Drake is a milestone to Ubuntu and Linux. Great distro over all. It is clean, fast, reliable and robust. I think it will be the envy of many including MS.
The desktop CD boots into a live session and lets you install from there, with very few options that can be changed.
The alternate CD boots into the old text based installer, and allows more options to be configured.
I don't much care for the desktop method of installing.. it didn't even ask if it was OK to install GRUB, just went ahead and did it.
While Ubuntu is, IMO, the best Linux distribution out there, it still has issues. For example, I noticed that, in that default installation, there is a boot option for "Recovery Console," which simply gives anyone who starts it root access to the computer without a password. While it can be disabled by editing a configuration file, something like that should never have been added in the first place.
Also, after installing Dapper on my computer in one location and then moving to another network, my ability to use DHCP suddenly disappeared! I'm sure I can get it back, by Mac OS X and XP didn't give me any trouble. (Though, to give credit where credit is due, XP died completely, because of a hardware upgrade, which, didn't affect Dapper at all.)
All in all, though, not to be overly negative, I recently set up Dapper on a school development computer and got Apache, PHP, PostgreSQL, and SSH working in a matter of minutes, so, to the developers of Ubuntu, kudos.
Probably the two biggest issues that many have with Ubuntu are that it takes extra work to install MP3 support - not to mention every other codec or player.
MEPIS has recently confirmed the fears of some that Ubuntu is turning into a platform, displacing Debian itself...MEPIS is/was a KDE desktop based on Debian. The founder's concern with the stability and reliability of the Debian base recently led him to base his distro on Ubuntu sources instead.
So now with MEPIS, you get Ubuntu, except that it's KDE default, and it comes with every player (Real, Quicktime) and codec plugin for Kaffeine that can be found. Plus, the general layout of menus and the installer have won good reviews all around.
They're currently a week into beta4 on the new version based on the Dapper base and will likely have an RC1 out by mid-June.
To both parent and GP, I figured out how to do this. It takes some work, like many things in Linux, but is doable.
t o-breezy.html This may help.
/etc/fstab). From that point on, selling Ubuntu to him as easy-to-use was something of a losing battle.
http://www.ublug.org/ubuntu/twinview/twinview-how
I had to put this in the Device section:
Identifier "NVIDIA Corporation NV18 [GeForce4 MX 440 AGP 8x]"
Driver "nvidia"
Option "RenderAccel" "1"
Option "DigitalVibrance" "127" #Vary me
Option "backingstore" "true"
#twinview
Option "TwinView" "1"
Option "TwinViewOrientation" "RightOf"
Option "SecondMonitorHorizSync" "31.5-82.0"
Option "SecondMonitorVertRefresh" "50-70"
Option "MetaModes" "1600x1200,1280x1024; 1280x1024,1280x1024; 1280x1024,NULL; 1024x768,NULL; 800x600,NULL; 640x480,NULL"
Ubuntu has been wonderful compared to other Linux distros. There are still headaches, and I think it's disingenuous to say that it is anywhere near as easy to use as Windows. I gave Dapper (beta 6) to my friend, claiming this. He was happy with the install and was delighted when the first thing he saw was that it had put icons on his desktop for his Windows drive. He clicked on them, and it said "you do not have permission to access this" (because the drives are mounted by root). There was no obvious recourse (the solution being editing
It just really bothers me that literally the first thing he saw on his nice, clean desktop was broken. I have had exactly the same situation in installs on other computers (which is why I knew how to fix it). I sincerely hope this is working in the current release.
I use Ubuntu as my desktop OS, mainly because of Ion3. I love the strength and flexibility of Linux. But I no longer recommend it to those without serious computer experience. Ubuntu is trying very hard, but I think it's gonna take them a couple more years. I know this is the cliche in Linux, "ready for the desktop in five years", and I don't think it will necessarially be that long.
It's just that any OS designed for non-experts needs to do a lot more whole-system novice-user testing.
xkcd.com - a webcomic of mathematics, love, and language.
I'm a Windows user who's been looking at Ubuntu for awhile. I had tried Fedora and Mandrake in the past, but I just wasn't impressed enough to switch.
All I have to say is: wow! I burned the 'Desktop' CD, booted it up on my Thinkpad R52, and was able to play around in the OS to get familiar with the environment. Once I was satisfied that everything was running smooth (it saw all of my devices, including wireless, with no problem) all I had to do was click on the 'Install' icon on the desktop.
The installer itself was excellent. Like I said having installed other distros in the past this graphical install *in a desktop environment* was excellent. The part that I had dreaded the most was setting up dual boot (I already had XP installed). The installer saw the XP partition (NTFS) and allowed me to resize it and install Ubuntu in the newly freed space (and automatically installed GRUB). This was absolutely beautiful functionality, and I think it will really make a great transitional tool for migrating us lame Windows users over to Linux.
I am a [very] long term Windows user and Windows Admin for a large corporation witl 100,000+ desktops. I love Windows. It is a superb operating system for a corporate environment. Sure it can be a pain in the arse because of updates but its ability to be centrally managed, etc is awesome. There is nothing else that can compete with it on an enterprise level, not even the stunning OS X 10.4. However Ubuntu 6.06 is an incredible operating system. While I am a Windows user I have a lot of respect for a lot of other operating systems. Linux being one of them. Ubuntu is probably the most professional release I have ever used. It installed without a hitch on my 6 months old IBM test workstation. I am very very impressed and I take my hat off to the Ubuntu team. The delay was worth it. Easily. They [the Ubuntu team] have done an incredible job and you have to respect that. I could easily give a Ubuntu system to a new computer user and they be able to learn how to use it for general tasks just as fast as a Windows system. You only have to go to the terminal as much as you need to go to the registry in Windows so it isn't really a battle on ease of use anymore. Ubuntu has brought Linux on par with Windows in that regard. Ubuntu just need to push on hardware support so that if it fails it fails gracfully. X server critical errors need to be replaced with a more graceful drop down to 800x600z256 colours similar to what Windows does. Also the most important thing to get working (other than the graphical interface) is the network. Once you have the network up and running you can get any other driver you need to. Ubuntu worked fine with my network card but I know that it isn't perfect from reports I have read online. I hope that this is fixed in the next release (7.01?). In a nutshell. SUPERB.
On May 29th, two days before release, an ATI bug was introduced via the xorg driver that makes Dapper unstable on certain ATI based systems. In my own case this means that my G4 is now unusable. Just as a reminder, if you think you might be affected, don't upgrade.
Just for reference, the forum post and the bug report.
What if the entire Universe were a chrooted environment with everything symlinked from the host?
More importantly (for me), the first official release of Xubuntu (Xfce) is out.
Uttering logically derived and empirically supported truths to the disciples of the orthodox establishment.
this might sound obvious but you did burn from the iso rather than unpacking didn't you?
Neither. I just went to Ubuntu's web site and wished it boots up really hard. Didn't work.
The desktop installer can install just fine on existing partitions, I did that yesterday and it worked fine. It was in fact Kubuntu, but it would be strange for them to have so big functionality differences between the installers...
you and your friend musn't be very experienced users then, as the ui for adding a windows share is very intuitive - where else would be be but the 'Places' menu? it's one click away.
i wish i was but oh well
Actually, they can. Fluendo, the makers of GStreamer, paid for a license. Canonical could include the GStreamer plugin binary legally, but because of Canonical's ideology, they won't, because the license wouldn't apply if a user recompiled it from source ----- yet they still include nVidia and ATI binary drivers, where a user can't recompile them at all.
The fundamnetal problem is that MP3s are patented. As long as Ubuntu is dedicated to giving out free and liberated software, they'll be at odds with the patent holders who hold the right ensure that neither of those goals is possible. Recently there have been attempts to work within the patent holder's framework to provide something legal and acceptable, but the closest we have is Fluendo's licencing program, which explicitly doesn't allow for redistribution, one of the key things in the GPL's operation. For example, Ubuntu can mail you a 6.06 CD containing the mp3 plugin, but it's legally questionable for you to redistribute those CDs to your friends. And MEPIS would certainly be in trouble, unless they also secured such a contract. Ubuntu represents it's distro as a "people should be able to modify and share changes" aka a Free Software distro. This contract goes against this ideal, and if MEPIS isn't aware of this contract, and chooses to modify Ubuntu in other ways, then Ubuntu's exposed the people they told could modify the software, people like they guy behind MEPIS, to hidden legal liabilities.
I Browse at +4 Flamebait
Open Source Sysadmin
True, it should be easier but the concept of privileges will be new to many many MS Windows users but they'll have to get used to it or else wait til Microsoft forces it on them in a totally inconsistant way. MSFT let them slide with running as admin for far too long and the destruction from viral infections, spyware, etc shows how flawed this is. *nix systmes have a long long lead in this regard but it should surely be easier for the user to change permissions without making it a security risk.
I'm on a KDE desktop now so I can't check to see if there's a way to put gsudo(?) in front of the call to nautilus for that drive object instead of having to edit fstab as root.
LoB
"Anyone who stands out in the middle of a road looks like roadkill to me." --Linus
The odd thing is most of those were kde specific bugs.
:-(
I remember reading at the last minute that Ubuntu decided to add kde 3.5.1 and xorg7.1. Both are only a week or two old. Bad decision.
Ubuntu is much larger than kubuntu so they probably ignored the kde bugs as most of them used gnome.
I find it disturbing but sadly these days all the distro's have these bugs. I found the livecd less buggy then suse's or knoppix so far.
But I need XP for school this summer and I will wait until next fall to install Ubuntu with kde. By then it should be more baked with less bugs.
I have been lucky in seeing no bugs at all besides my touchpad being too sensitive. I am sure I can configure that in XOrg.conf when I eventual decide to install it later.
http://saveie6.com/
Well I just tried this to see if it was that hard. Go to the places menu, hit network servers, browse to wherever, drag the share to the desktop. Thats all I did and it seems to work. The thing wiith gnome that I am learning is drag and drop everything. I couldn't figure out how to send someone a picture in gAIM because there were no menu options for it, but all you gotta do is drag the file to the chat window and it works.
There are times when you have a CD-ROM drive that simply would not co-operate. It does not matter what OS, you've downloaded the ISO, have it burnt, then put it inside the drive, change the BIOS setting to boot from the CD-ROM and simply reboot the machine.
But the darn thing would not boot.
I have this problem usually on older machines or just simply on an older CD-ROM drives (on relatively newer machines too).
My solution? Either changing CD-ROM drive and hope it works or a simpler alternative - Smart Boot Manager - http://btmgr.webframe.org/
Usually there's no problem in booting up from Floppy.. SBM floppy will boot up and present you with a menu asking where do you want to boot from. Just select CD-ROM and voila!
Well, it works for me. Even on machines whose BIOS does not even support booting from CD-ROM.
(Disclaimer - If it still doesn't work, chances are either the CD-ROM really needs replacement or it's an error between keyboard and the chair)
Peace all!
Will sys-admin for food
Finally!! For the first time my broadcom wireless networking card works with the open source driver! Follow this guide and it's easy: http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=185174
No more ndiswrapper, and now I can use the absolutely amazing knetworkmanager!
Dapper is a major improvement over Breezy. Synaptic is still the top reason to go with Ubuntu. You can enable all the repositories in a minute, and they are very complete and up to date. They even have VMWare Player, so I don't have to download it manually. I'm also pleased that suspend-to-ram and suspend-to-disk work with nvidia, but not without a little hassle unfortunately. After I enabled the proprietary nvidia drivers, I enabled sleep in /etc/default/acpi-support and in gnome-power-manager through gconf, then erased the word "splash" in /boot/grub/menu.lst. It looks like the splash makes the ctrl+alt+Fn terminals not work. So I don't have a bootsplash, but that's not a big deal.
i ghlight=vpnc
Another problem is that network-manager-gnome (which I think should have been installed by default) doesn't detect vpnc without this fix: http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=184122&h
Lots of people complaining about X breaking, and I had the same problem (and a load of others) -- then I realised I ran "apt-get upgrade" instead of "apt-get dist-upgrade". Dist-upgrade worked, and fixed X (and several, but not all the other problems)
I mod down anyone who says "I will be modded down for this", regardless of the rest of their comment
It sounds like for all of these regressions enabling the "ati" driver in xorg.conf will fix the major issues. Of course, the problem then is that you're running the ati driver, not the fglrx driver, which actually comes from ATI. (Confusing as hell, I know).
You should see something like this in
Until such time as ATI gets their damn fglrx drivers in line and fixes that regression, it seems like using the open source driver is the easiest alternative.
----------
* - Sorry if this is totally pedantic, but you can reverse the effects of any bad edits you make to xorg.conf by the following command:
Now say what you will. I have been playing with various flavours of linux for years but have always lost interest. Being it blowing up the machine, free beer, the 80's, recovering from the 80's, the 90's (if they really happened at all) and various and sundry things that can so often throw us off our path and: after months of frustration with trying to load up on my Walmart Basic A535 with the RAM maxed out at 512, nothing huge but we play with what we have. All the other distros and hours on google and half a pack of smokes, it was just no longer fun to play. With Ubuntu, bang, zoom, 99.94% of all my hardware was recognized (bear in mind 82.43143212334342232323_% of all statistics are made up on the spot). A quick search, couple of sudo commands and my wireless was working like a charm. I have had so much fun back playing with this. I am interested again. I am learning a ton in almost no time. The fact that my sound works, my cards work, my video was configured makes the experience so much more enjoyable. I really think that if 'new' people try this they will like this. It's nice to have converts regardless of the motivation. I make my living consulting and supporting m$ stuff and thats just the way it goes. But with a rocking home network and lots of boxes I can't wait to see what the playground becomes when this new toy joins the crew. If your new to linux, give this a try, have some fun. Nothing to lose and a wonderful new way of looking at all the things you pay to do anyway.
This past week I've install Ubuntu on my old gateway laptop, and help a friend set up (not install) XP on her
new HP laptop.
The Ubuntu install was suprisingly easy. I answered 3 or 4 questions, like my name and my time zone, and
do I want to install Ubuntu on the entire hard drive (I answered yes). After the install finished, my wireless was working
without a hitch, and I had a nice clean desktop to enjoy.
In comparison, the XP setup was mystifying, and it was *already* installed. During bootup, windows kept popping up,
sometimes several unrelated windows at once. First, a registration window came up. While we were trying to answer
the list of questions there, an Anti-Virus wizard popped up. Next a little window came up to tells use that XP had found
my wireless network, but strangely enough the registration app didn't know how to use it.
Next, a Recovery wizard popped up and recommended that we make recovery disks (using 1 double layer DVD, 2 single layer DVDs,
or 13! CDs). Another little window told use to install an XP update, so I completed that first. Then, we took the suggestion of
the Anti-Virus wizard to reboot, and we've never seen the Recovery wizard since. We even went searching the disk and the
help system - couldn't find it.
Wireless never came up by itself, we had to drill into the Control Panel to enable it.
When we were all done, we were greeted by a desktop festooned with icon/ads. There was an icon for Blockbuser,
AOL dialup, AOL broadband, MS Office 2003 60 day trial, etc.
Another point of comparison, when I inserted my USB key in the Ubuntu laptop, a folder appears with a list of files on the key. Nice. Under XP,
before I can even view the contents, I have to choose who to see it. It is a photo album? A slideshow? There were more choices than could
fit in the pop-window, one had to scroll down to see the Ubuntu equivalent option, view files.
In every way I preferred Ubuntu experience, and I'm sure my grey-haired Mom would feel the same.