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.

Re:Painless Upgrade

[M. Baranczak]

Interesting. Does anybody have any details on this operation? This sounds like something I'd like to do, but the review is slashdotted and I can't find any useful information on the Ubuntu site.

A milestone

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:Painless Upgrade

[SeraphimX]

I did the same thing except when i did it and rebooted as instructed on the http://kubuntu.org/ [kubuntu.org] site. My raid 5 couldn't be found and my Xwindows failed to load, oh and i was off the network. :(

So then i figured i would try a fresh install, but as soon as i booted the live DVD, neither of my mice,Logitech mx700 and mx510 worked.

So i had to reinstall Breezy 5.10

Needless to say im slightly disapointed in Dapper Drake

Easy Dual Boot Install

[d3ik]

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.

Impressive

[ditoa]

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.

Xubuntu

[Distinguished Hero]

More importantly (for me), the first official release of Xubuntu (Xfce) is out [xubuntu.org].

Re:Painless Upgrade

[Kjella]

Yikes. Ok, the easiest route via update manager was fine, but the other two... I quote:

"EXTREMELY IMPORTANT! Make sure you type dist-upgrade rather than upgrade . The process will totally hose your machine and render it *completely unbootable* otherwise."

Is it just me or shouldn't that be impossible? Can't you at least fix the dependecy tree so that it'll barf out an error message? I mean I've used tools that are like "do it exactly this way, in this order, OR ELSE..." but that on much more obscure things...

Re:Good, but...

[Poppler]

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.

I don't love that, but it's not a big deal for most people. It's certainly not something that should prohibit average desktop users from running Ubuntu. Try holding Apple-S during boot on your OS X machine sometime, it does the same thing.
Besides, if someone really wants your data and has physical access to your unencrypted hard drive, you're screwed anyway.

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

[ridewinter]

My co-worker wasted a couple hours trying to install a second graphics card on Ubuntu, before inserting the card into a Windows machine and realizing that the card simply didn't work. IMO, that illustrates a significant reason to stay away from desktop Linux. Solving computer problems is complex enough already, adding in another dimension because of, say, uncertainty in the correctness of your config files, can greatly magnify the hassle and amount of wasted time. Yes, the time is worth it on mission critical applications, but I'm sticking to Windows for my desktop until my confidence in things "just working" increases enough to get rid of this dimension in problem solving.

Smart Boot Manager

[deunan_k]

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/ [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!

Broadcom Wireless works!

[pherthyl]

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 [ubuntuforums.org]

No more ndiswrapper, and now I can use the absolutely amazing knetworkmanager!

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

[From A Far Away Land]

I think Ubuntu should have a popup for people not in the USA, to a site like Easy Ubuntu, so they can play MP3s, without editing files and manually downloading codecs. Really, Windows users don't have to do that, why should Linux users be inconvenienced?

suspend works with a little tweaking

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

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&hi ghlight=vpnc [ubuntuforums.org]

Re:Painless Upgrade

[shish]

*completely unbootable*

I did it the wrong way, and X broke horribly (the change to a modular server is a bigger package reorganisation than mere "upgrade" is designed for). However it was /bootable/, and a dist-upgrade from within the crippled box mostly fixed it.

Linux: Fun Again

[foleymon]

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.

Ubuntu install easier than XP initial startup

[jrifkin]

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.