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.

Painless Upgrade

[Anonymous Coward]

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!

Re:kubuntu

[Anonymous Coward]

-2 days :)

Re:But does it run...

[piquadratCH]

But does it run XGL?

With a little work, yes [ubuntuforums.org].

If you're question was whether XGL is the default, the answer is of course no. XGL is unstable and it's future is uncertain as it's 'competitor' AIGLX [wikipedia.org] is included in Xorg 7.1.

Me experiences

[QuietLagoon]

I just finished spending about 3 hours on a test install on my IBM Thinkpad notebook.

In a nutshell:

• install was flawless. Very clean, very fast. I like the LIve CD initial install, then the icon to do the full install.
• apps install were a good selection, not the usual Linux overwhelming "install all apps I can find". Organization of the apps on the menus was nice.
• I like the admin capability, instead of having to bounce to root when I want to do something. Much more thought out than Microsoft Vista's harassing UAC.
• wireless support was lacking. It saw my Atheros 802.11abg PC Card, but could not do anything with it. I could not connect to my wireless network, even when I cycled security down to 'no security', i.e., it could not connect to a wide open access point.
• I tried to send a test page to a network printer (a share on a Windows box) , and the whole notebook hung solid. Power-down required to get it moving again.

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.

Re:Desktop/Server/Alternate

[jmataya]

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.

Re:Painless Upgrade

[shreevatsa]

The many (equivalent) ways to upgrade to Dapper ("Ubuntu 6.06") are detailed at https://wiki.ubuntu.com/DapperUpgrades [ubuntu.com]. This, of course, is assuming you're already running Breezy ("Ubuntu 5.10").

Re:Painless Upgrade

[Anonymous Coward]

http://www.ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=87262 [ubuntuforums.org] Oh and by the way, this is nothing new to debian based distros. They all work this well. Viva apt!

Re:Desktop/Server/Alternate

[swab79]

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.

Good, but...

[freakified]

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.

MEPIS: (K)Ubuntu with codecs

[rbrander]

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.

Re:Painless Upgrade

[shreevatsa]

You can first install the 5.10 to your hard disk, and then do the changes as above [ubuntu.com] to get upto 6.06. Read https://wiki.ubuntu.com/Installation [ubuntu.com] for a more detailed description of everything. Some of those instructions mention Breezy (5.10) — it's only been two days since the new version came out, so those pages haven't been completely updated yet — but I expect most of them to work for the new Dapper too.

BTW, the version numbers are actually release dates, so 5.10 (not 5.1, actually) is 2005 October, and 6.06 is 2006 June.

Re:Painless Upgrade

[HankB]

sudo bash
cp /etc/apt/sources.list /etc/apt/sources.list.just-to-be-safe
vi /etc/apt/sources.list
1,$s/breezy/dapper/g
<esc> wq
apt-get update
apt-get dist-upgrade
shutdown -r now

During the dist-upgrade step you will probably have to answer some questions about using new config files vs. existing modified ones.

You do need to reboot if you want the new kernel running. (2.6.15)

Afterwards you might have to tweak some things like the wireless drivers or display drivers. I had to download the synaptics driver because the new one has bugs that manifest for 64 bit systems.

But it really is that easy!

-hank

Re:Pretty nice

[Council]

To both parent and GP, I figured out how to do this. It takes some work, like many things in Linux, but is doable.

http://www.ublug.org/ubuntu/twinview/twinview-howt o-breezy.html [ublug.org] This may help.

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 /etc/fstab). From that point on, selling Ubuntu to him as easy-to-use was something of a losing battle.

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.

Re:Good, but...

[smash]

While it could be seen as a security "issue" - there's nothing to stop someone booting a knoppix CD, linux boot floppy or any other number of options to get root on a Linux machine they have physical access to.

If you're paranoid about your users getting root on the box, physically secure it for a start and deny them shutdown permission (to reboot to the boot menu) you'd be better off...

Re:Here is why it is a big step

[BJH]

Nah, that's Slackware.

j/k ;)

Re:Dapper is good, but it's not there yet.

[shreevatsa]

It's not ready for grandma to use

Grandma can use it easily enough if you set it up for her. Take a look at this [knightwise.com].
(Also consider it just proof of concept; you might not want to do exactly the same things. For example, it's better (IMHO) to do things the right way [ubuntu.com] than to use automated options like Automatix or EasyUbuntu.)

Good for desktops, bad for certain laptops.

[goofyheadedpunk]

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 [ubuntuforums.org] and the bug report [launchpad.net].

Re:Me experiences

[Junta]

-Wireless support:
Funny thing there, install networkmanager (and probably the gnome applet to go with it) and a great deal of the complexity goes down. It's surprisingly easy. At least with my ipw chipset. It configured things for WPA or WEP or wide open. It lacks LEAP support and therefore I couldn't use just that and had to do more advanced things, but if you just need wide open, WEP, and WPA support it will make configuring the wireless Windows-easy.

-Remote print support:
I recently wrestled with printing to a windows desktop system with attached printer, but the bad side effect wasn't as you described. In my case, the target windows Box print queue would hang, requiring restart of the windows print spool service. The workaround was to disable bidirectional support under the ports tab of the printer tab on the windows box. At least in my case with an hp printer/hpijs, you can't do the bidirectional support on a windows server, but hplip would support it locally, but that won't help to access a windows printer.

So wireless support they left out the thing that makes it much easier by default (don't understand why), and with that it would have been very nearly perfect there.

Print support to a Windows shared printer was quite evil and obscure google searches were required to figure it out. It was nothing that Ubuntu itself could have done much about, since HPLIP doesn't support remote printing, and HPIJS supports remote printing, but not the bidirectional features. Add to that the only work around is a server-side print config change. However, I imagine this to be a fairly frequent for Ubuntu users and probably should be documented somewhere prominent.

Re:Painless Upgrade

[InfiniteWisdom]

You don't even need to modify sources.list directly.

$ gksu update-manager -d

Will tell you that a new release is available will do everything for you.

Re:Desktop/Server/Alternate

[crwl]

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...

Re:They CAN'T "rethink" MP3!

[Andrew Tanenbaum]

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.

MP3 in Free Distros

[xenocide2]

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 [fluendo.com], 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.

Re:Pretty nice

[Locutus]

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

Re:Painless Upgrade

[misleb]

Not to take the wind out of the Ubuntu sails or anything, but such upgradability has been a feature of Debian for a long time now. Ubuntu just inheritted it. I have a Debian desktop that was once installed 8 years ago with Debian 1.2 or something like that and through the years it has been upgraded from one stable release to the next (and sometime unstable/testing). The HD was also moved into faster boxes.

-matthew

Re:But there are so many bugs...!

[Billly Gates]

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.

Re:Painless Upgrade

[palumbor]

Well I love Ubuntu, but the upgrade was *not so painless* for me and a few other users according to the forums. The upgrade process seems to fail on specific motherboards upon detecting that PCMCIA does not exist. If you are upgrading from Breezy, the kernel has no support to restart the detection or for this instance, fail out. Upon restarting the system, you are left with a hodge-podge Breezy/Dapper install that fails even in safe mode due to the newly introduced PCMCIA junk. If anyone is seriously considering using the GUI upgrade system, check that your motherboard works. If someone runs into this problem -- Boot using any live cd and just rm everything related to PCMCIA in etc so the system fails PCMCIA check, but at least does not hard lock. From here you can dist-upgrade the remaining packages from Dapper and everything should work fine. Once the new kernel has been installed, PCMCIA detection isn't a problem... Other than that, it seems speedier than Breezy and I'm loving the fact that SMP kernel is now integrated into the main -- saves me a reboot or three.

Re:Painless Upgrade

[misleb]

Off the top of my head: 1.2 -> 2.0 -> 2.1 -> 2.2 -> 3.0 -> 3.1

-matthew

Re:Painless Upgrade

[MoxFulder]

I have no idea about what that alarmist warning is about. Normally, if you do upgrade rather than dist-upgrade, it'll just not upgrade all of the packages, because it will only upgrade packages which are straightforward changes from version X to version Y. When you do dist-upgrade rather than upgrade, it will also rearrange dependencies so that if package A formerly depended on package B, and now A depends on C and B is no longer needed, it will do The Right Thing.

To make a long story short, upgrade is basically just more conservative and "stupid"... I've never had a problem doing an upgrade rather than a dist-upgrade.

Re:Painless Upgrade

[advocate_one]

I didn't even need to do that... After my latest update of breezy yesterday (which updated update manager... :) ), I launched the update manager again from the menu, entered my password, and it told me there was a new version of ubuntu available... all I had to do was click on the upgrade button and follow the prompts... never once had to launch a terminal and use the command prompt...

Re:But does it run...

[octopus72]

Xegl is a way to do it because AIGLX is just another similar way to do something like XGL - put an accelerated X windowing system in a full screen X window.

DIST-UPGRADE, I repeat - DIST-UPGRADE

[shish]

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)

Re:But does it run...

[Grey Ninja]

Yes it does, but there are problems. (The same problems that exist in SuSE. No DRI being the #1). However, AIGLX is fairly stable, and I've been running it on my laptop for about 2 months now. There are some problems with playing video, and 3D graphics have a tendency to flicker, but I don't do any gaming on my laptop, so it doesn't bother me. I just make sure that I have a 2D screensaver selected, and it's fine.

Re:links?

[dodongo]

Sure enough: Here's the bug (#47371) [launchpad.net] which includes a description of what's going on... And this Ubuntu Forums [ubuntuforums.org] discussion has a fix that worked for me.

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 /etc/X11/xorg.conf

Section "Device"
        Identifier "ATI Technologies, Inc. Radeon RV250 If [Radeon 9000 Pro]"
        Driver "fglrx"
        BusID "PCI:1:0:0"
EndSection

If you first do (to make a backup of the xorg.conf file*)

sudo cp /etc/X11/xorg.conf /etc/X11/xorg.conf.backup

and then use your favorite text editor (with sudo) to change where it says "fglrx" to "ati" (make sure you DO have the quotes in there), then you should be running off the ATI driver which installs by default in Ubuntu.

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:

sudo cp /etc/X11/xorg.conf.backup /etc/X11/xorg.conf

Re:Painless Upgrade

[Ethan Allison]

Or ...

$ sed -e 's/breezy/dapper' /etc/apt/sources.list | sudo tee /etc/apt/sources.list && sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get dist-upgrade && sudo apt-get upgrade && sudo shutdown -r now

Yes, upgrade after dist-upgrade ... this makes sure everything's up-to-date.

Re:Painless Upgrade

[miro f]

all your granny needs to do is run the update manager, it will let her know there's a new version of ubuntu ready for her to upgrade if she wishes

Re:Painless Upgrade

[kestasjk]

No vi required;

sudo bash
sed -i.bak -e 's/breezy/dapper/g' /etc/apt/sources.list
apt-get update && apt-get dist-upgrade && shutdown -r now

Re:Painless Upgrade

[HiThere]

I'm not sure what it's about either...but...

This morning I was upgrading my debian Etch, and got a rather scarey message concerning xwindow-xorg. It didn't cause any problems on my system, but apparently on some systems it destroys the Xorg part without replacing it. ("So be sure you check, and replace it if you need to.") That was the first time I've seen quite such a scarey message during an upgrade, and I wasn't even moving off of Etch.

I'm not sure this is relevant, but given how similar Ubuntu and Debian still are, it could well be.