As was to be expected, a flurry of reviews of Ubuntu Dapper Drake, released yesterday. LinuxForums reviews Ubuntu and Edubuntu/Kubuntu, while ReviewLinux sticks to just plain Ubuntu: “Dapper Drake is a huge step forward since Breezy Badger. I was impressed in many ways. The package management got even better than before. The artwork is fantastic. The networking features are great. Gnome is fast and responsive, and the desktop is full of little applets, applications and shortcuts which make it very easy to do most common things.”
I’m really impressed how things “Just Work TM” in dapper. Here at work, all of our servers run SLES9 and several of the other system administrators on our team run suse or sled betas. One of the guys was asking me how to get hibernate working on his laptop and I gave him a dapper cd. Suspend to ram worked perfectly with dapper, what can I say?
One of the things that really bothered me about showing off Linux to new (potential) users was the difficulty in installing new software. Thanks to how gnome-app-install is prominently displayed at the bottom of the Applications menu and how integrated apt/synaptic is into Ubuntu, that worry is gone. One of my buddies was impressed when I searched for vmware-player, installed it, and it worked just like that. After seeing Xgl and compiz work flawlessly, I’ve got my girlfriend’s roommate wanting to try out Linux also.
Ubuntu 6.06 is one of the best Linux distributions I’ve ever set my hands on. I’m sold.
I am really not impressed about how things “Just Work” in dapper. They do not. I had high hopes for dapper. I download the iso, burn it, and wait a billion years while it loads, then the screen goes blank.
So, I restart and go into Graphics Safe Mode. Then I get a ton of X Sever errors. It doesn’t detect my hardware.
I got an Acer TravelMate 8100. Things just work in lala land.
I am really not impressed about how things “Just Work” in dapper. They do not. I had high hopes for dapper. I download the iso, burn it, and wait a billion years while it loads, then the screen goes blank.
So, I restart and go into Graphics Safe Mode. Then I get a ton of X Sever errors. It doesn’t detect my hardware.
I got an Acer TravelMate 8100. Things just work in lala land.
I guess your video chip isn’t supported. Try editing /etc/X11/xorg.conf. Find the section that looks something like this:
Section “Device”
Identifier “ATI Technologies, Inc. Radeon Mobility M6 LY [Radeon Mobility 9000]”
Driver “ati”
BusID “PCI:1:0:0”
EndSection
On the “Driver” line, change it to read “vesa” and reboot. The vesa driver works for just about any video chipset.
If you’re in text mode, you can use “nano” as an editor.
It’s a LIVE CD. I can’t edit anything and save.
“It’s a LIVE CD. I can’t edit anything and save.”
Yes, you can!! Try it (using sudo since it’s obviously a system file) and see. You can use Synaptic or the even simpler application installer to install new software while running the LiveCD. There’s not many things you can’t do on the LiveCD. You can even save your settings to a USB key and issue the “persistent” option at the boot prompt to save your settings across LiveCD sessions.
That said, it is a shame that the LiveCD won’t work out of the box on your system. I know there was a very late (two days before release) regression bug having to do with Radeon 7500 support, but I’m not completely sure if that particular problem has anything to do with your experience.
Anyways, Linux-based LiveCDs have come a long way since the early days of Knoppix. Things like unionfs and improved initramfs have made them a lot more usable. If you don’t mind the occasional latency of your optical drive spinning up when starting applications, the Ubuntu LiveCD is an acceptable OS in its own right.
I am really not impressed about how things “Just Work” in dapper. They do not.
It shouldn’t be a surprise to an OSNews reader that an OS doesn’t support all the hardware configurations available on the market.
Report a bug and better luck next time. In the mean time, you can try to hack your way around the problem.
heh, you give the average OSNews reader way too much credit!
Ubuntu 6.06 is one of the best Linux distributions I’ve ever set my hands on. I’m sold.
what do you mean Ubuntu 6.06 is one of the best Linux distributions? when all the major linux distros like suse and mandriva,etc. Use the same linux kerenl,Xorg window system and gui like gnome and kde as the (K.ed,u)buntus. the only difference betwen them is the package manager few use RPMs and the other few use deb.
Edited 2006-06-03 12:33
Hardly. If you look at the wiki, you’ll see that the Ubuntu folks do a lot of customization work, trying to make things like hardware support work automatically. In Ubuntu, at least in my experience, things work right out of the box. That’s not true in other distributions I tried. Fedora 5, for example, didn’t detect my wifi card automatically, while Ubuntu did.
i wrote on my blog the very negative experience i had with ubuntu yesterday…
It really saddened me and angered me because ubuntu is the no1 distro today in terms of momentum.
Browser: Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Symbian OS; Series 60/0610.04.04; 7408) Opera 8.60 [en]
I installed Dapper Drake yesterday.
ntfsresize failed during install without reason – fortunately hdd was resized correctly and data stayed intact on ntfs partition – c’mon where have gone fscking 6 weeks of extended testing?
It leaved very bad taste in my mouth…
Fonts are awful, i get dizzy after few hours of work.
MBR overwriting without my permision.
Strange refreshing problems in gnome – but it probably is gnome issue and cairo or smth (feels slow, leaved artifacts on windows from previous used widgets).
But let’s look on the bright – well, orange
– side of life:
hw detection on my lappy worked great – evrything detected correctly, every fn key works great.
ehh, I waited for this release with great hope,
maybe next time
Not to be offensive, but I’m not sure why it would sadden you it’s #1 in momentum. It obviously didn’t work well with your hardware, but apparently it works well enough with the majority of people’s hardware to have the most momentum.
Now, I can see it saddening you that it doesn’t work with your hardware.
It works fine with mine, but I think I’m going to stick with Solaris just because I rely on Java, and 64-bit Ubuntu + Java don’t mix. That said, Ubuntu is a *way* better desktop OS than Solaris right now. *Shudders*
I’m not sure how you misunderstood her comment to mean that Ubuntu’s momentum saddened her. I picked up right away that Ubuntu’s horrible performance saddened her, especially given it’s momentum. If you were intentionally trying to be pedantic, you failed miserably. If you are trolling as I suspect, you are doing a fine job.
And yes, it is a sad thing that, given Ubuntu’s momentum and huge following, this release is underwhelming.
ya know, there’s got to be a least 50,000,000 more reviews on this release. and not one of them will convince me to leave pc linux.
ya know, there’s got to be a least 50,000,000 more reviews on this release. and not one of them will convince me to leave pc linux.
If it works for you, why should you change?
my thought entirely, but that’s just for personal use. i have to admit, i’ve used ubuntu livecd with brazilian portuguese language support to demonstrate linux. pc linux doesn’t have this support from a livecd or installation.
Unfortunately I have to agree with Eugenia. I have been an “not-so-friendly” linux distributions user for a long time (in these 8 years of Linuxing I never got out of the Slack/Debian/Gentoo/Arch circuit).
This year I decided, based on my time shortage, that I could get on with a user friendly system that keeps me from “working the OS” so I can focus in “Working”.
I have been using Ubuntu for like 12 hours and already had some problems that surely got on my nerves… fortunately I had the necessary skills to repair them but wonder how a average joe user would do.
I don’t have a blog.. but I even thought in starting one just with my Ubuntu experience so I could notice the good things and bad things, since when posting we usually complain more than praise.
Then I reminded that I wouldn’t have the time for that eighter *sigh*.
I’m with Eugenia on this one. I was eagerly anticipating this release given Ubuntu’s wonderful track record in the past, and once I downloaded it and ran the LiveCD I was very impressed by the speed and hardware detection there. The installer, however, felt somewhat incomplete, and once installed it seemed that 6.06 was much less responsive than 5.10, which was never fast on my system compared to other distros. Why is the LiveCD faster and more responsive than the installed OS? Also, weird errors in certain programs, Firefox crashing unexpectedly (i.e. crashing on mundane sites like Google and OSNews), screen redraw problems, etc. Now, many of you will claim that I am having hardware detection issues but I have a very standard linux-friendly setup:
ASUS A7N8X-E mainboard (nForce2 chipset)
Athlon XP 2500+
GeForce 6600GT AGP video
160GB Samsung IDE HDD
LiteOn DVDRW
1.5GB DDR400 RAM
Everything in my computer has been fully supported by every Linux distro I’ve thrown at it, including every version of Ubuntu before this one. I’ve never had these kinds of glitches apart from early betas of SuSE.
Another annoying issue is multimedia support. On Ubuntu 5.10, after installing the w32codecs and DVD support I could play any common movie format and any of my own DVDs using xine-ui with no issues. With 6.06, I get errors when trying to play DivX and WMV movies in any player, and with xine-ui the user interface is practically invisible; it’s as if the program cannot draw the interface to the screen correctly. This is the case using both the “nv” non-accelerated driver and the proprietary “nvidia” driver.
I, too, am wondering why there was a delay at all if these and other issues people have experienced still exist. For now, I’m back to trying to decide between Zenwalk (Slackware done right, in my opinion) and OpenSuSE 10.1.
Could this be a PEBKAC or hardware issue?
In the LinuxForums review of Ubuntu, it was mentioned that sendmail is not included in Ubuntu, and that this was a bad thing. The author complained that many ISPs were not providing an SMTP server anymore, and so local client users need to set up their own. The problem with that statement is that most ISPs now block outgoing SMTP traffic from their non-business clients to reduce spam, so all client-side outgoing mail transports wouldn’t work even if they were included.
For that matter, the worst source of spam is the easily misconfigured sendmail. There are more secure mail transports than sendmail, and the author didn’t mention whether any of those were included.
So my question is: Has Ubuntu included a more secure alternative to sendmail in their client distribution? Or have they chosen the greater security of leaving the server stuff for the server?
Edited 2006-06-02 21:19
Ubuntu doesn’t install an MTA by default, you’ll have to explicitly install one (exim and postfix are in main, there are others in universe).
In fact, a default Ubuntu installation comes with no open external ports (not even ssh).
I for one don’t like installing a local MTA on my personal computer. One of the best things about an external MTA on a server somewhere is that it is always on and connected to the Internet (which is not always true for my PC) so it can go around sending email properly.
Local MTA feels like running your own postal services; I prefer dropping the envelope in the mailbox and let someone else handle it properly.
Does it fully support a “wirelesss” laptop out of the box? That is my biggest complaint. I would love to run Linux on a laptop, if it supported everything out of the box. Unfotunately, it doesn’t just *work*. : (
I just installed Kubuntu on my Dell 600 laptop. Wireless card worked just fine.
The only thing that does not work is the sound control buttons on my laptop keyboard. They worked fine with Ubuntu beta, but with Kubuntu final it does not work.
I have good experience with Kubuntu when compared with SUSE 10.1. Zenupdater just didn’t work with SUSE.
Tejas Kokje
Configuring the sound controls on you Dell Latitude D600 is a no brainer. Simply, click Preferences->Keyboard Shortcuts and scroll the list till you find Volume Down, Volume Up and Mute. Select one of these and Press the appropriate Volume Control Buttons on your laptop to enable them. Takes 5 seconds of your time.
This is the first Linux distro in which my Fn keys work out of the box.
I switched from SUSE 10.1 to dapper yesterday.
What a difference: Dapper is speedy, it recognises my wireless card (Intel PRO/Wireless 3945ABG) out of the box and the menu structure is well organised.
I had one small problem with my SATA disk during the installation, but after putting SATA to compatibility mode in the BIOS it was fixed.
My Laptop is a Thinkpad T60.
Excellent distro!
Does it fully support a “wirelesss” laptop out of the box?
It does, if the makers of your hardware support their products under linux. People have to understand that the whole “my hardware doesn’t work in linux” issue is mainly due to the lack of support by the hardware companies and not because of the linux people themselves.
But even then there are projects like madwifi and ndiswrapper which let people use windows drivers under linux, which is a decent alternative.
“the lack of support by the hardware companies”
That is the main reason the Linux has been taking over the desktop ever since I started keeping up with it years ago.
“But even then there are projects like madwifi and ndiswrapper which let people use windows drivers under linux, which is a decent alternative.”
A decent alternative for whom? I don’t want to have to jack around with ndiswrapper. I don’t have to do that on Windows. Windows just works. There are reasons for that certainly but Linux needs to just work as well.
Ubuntu 6.06 had the most flawless wireless install I’ve seen since I set up my mom’s iMac. My wireless card (PCMCIA no less) was detected out of box, and the system automatically detected and associated itself with my access point. It was a no-click install, really. I just booted up, went right to Firefox, and boom, I was on the internet.
Of course, I should point out all my hardware was chosen for its Linux support. My machine is a very standard Inspiron 8200 with an Intel chipset, and my wireless card is an Atheros. Things work really nice when you buy stuff from a vendor that supports Linux!
Everything worked out of the box on my laptop install a few days ago. But I’ve got intel wireless.
Not only it supports wireless cards, but now it also has Centrino support. I have a Centrino Duo on my ACER laptop and when I had the previous version of Ubuntu (5.10) I could only use wireless through a PCMCIA, even though I had centrino already.
How pleased I was when i tried dapper and found out I now have wireless up and running without any card!
but can’t. Ubuntu, or Kubuntu do not install on my hardware. The LiveCD runs fine…but it can’t install for whatever reason, same as pure debian and slackware. I’ll stick with Suse since that works.
but can’t. Ubuntu, or Kubuntu do not install on my hardware. The LiveCD runs fine…but it can’t install for whatever reason, same as pure debian and slackware. I’ll stick with Suse since that works.
Try downloading the “alternate” CD rather than the live CD. The installer in “alternate” runs in text mode. I had issues with the live CD too, but the text-mode installer ran without a hitch.
-Partioning during install is really messed up, it either fails to create file systems or makes gazillions of 0 byte partitions, I had to do it myself.
-Language support not downloaded automatically like in previous releases.
-Including incomplete icon theme as default.
-File sharing really broken, Samba doesn’t work at all, SSH with Nautilus crashes twice a second.
-Half of the KDE apps just crash randomly.
-Video playback really messed up, strange colours in Totem-Gstreamer, Xine and Mplayer, only VLC works fine. I’ve seen this bug on Launchpad day before the release and it seems it’s an issue for many Intel integrated graphics chipset users.
I’m really dissapointed with this release, even flights/betas were more stable
large, inflated (over last months) balloon just popped
just joking … i am writing this during install of Kubuntu. spell-checking just rocks
BTW few people have concerns about wifi – it’s working out of the box for me. there is always ndiswrapper as last resort
seems that KDE is better suited for me
Edited 2006-06-02 22:56
Although my disk was already resized, the consensus seems to be that NTFS resizing with Dapper is completely borked and might well completely screw up your NTFS partition.
Well, not that my one experience can prove a law, but..
I bought a laptop a month ago and the resizing of the NTFS partition went flawlessly, so it’s definately not my consensus that it’s borked. I was quite amazed actually, as I’ve had some bad experiences with installation partitioning.
LinuxForum’s review is the same one as in ReviewLinux. Don’t know if it was supposed to be obvious, but it wasn’t to me.
I joined the torrent bandwagon and started downaload of Kubuntu and Ubuntu i386 iso. Not sure why but Ubuntu downloaded 45 min before Kubuntu. I have a breezy Kubuntu laptop and K3B was quick to burn the Ubuntu ISO. I installed it on my desktop and voila, if I choose defaults options the install takes 20 min.
On Bootup, I got a shiny Ubuntu desktop, though not as fast as Arch, but boot time ws definately faster than Breezy.
What I use as normal user ::
1) OpenOffice :: 2.0 ( definately the best avail)
2) Firefox :: 1.5.0.3
3) Gaim :: 1.5
4) Azureus:: Not installed by default
5) Java :: Not installed by default
6) MP3 Support:: Rythembox is good, but does not play MP3 by default.
7) GIMP :: 2.2
8) Evolution :: 2.6.1
9) Telnet Client:: gnome-terminal servers my purpose.
What I like about Ubuntu in 2 hours use.
1) Immidiately after installation, new updates avail notification came up. This means that Ubuntu guys are very quick with updates/security patches.
2) Synaptic Package manager, remember I had to install Java, gstreamer etc.. Synaptic can easily qualify as the best GUI package manager.
3) My sound card, video card and Lan were discovered automatically and correctly. I even got a DHCP address. I use Arch, so I could have done this, but it was nice to see Ubuntu do it without my intervention.
4) Automatix :: Do I need to say anything about this exceptionally useful tool.
5) Ability to connect to Windows Domain.
6) The best part about Ubuntu ::: The user community, for any problem that I might have faced, there was already an answer on Ubuntuforums. Automatix was the result of just a cursory look at the forums.
Next Plan–
Upgrade my Kubuntu Breezy Laptop to Kubuntu Dapper and I mean fresh install. Again from forums, most guys recommend to do a fresh install over an upgrade. By now I have developed trust in forums and will go as per their suggestions.
1) Immidiately after installation, new updates avail notification came up. This means that Ubuntu guys are very quick with updates/security patches.
It’s because of the fixed release date, they knew about many bugs at 31 of May.
I’m not finding Dapper speedy, i’ve just come from SUSE 10.1 and gnome was nippy and faster(2.12.2). I noticed in the kernel config they had kernel debug on, I mean WTF?
Other than ease of installation, would there be an advantage to using xubuntu, as opposed to debain unstable with newest xfce installed?
Thanks.
I’ve not used pure Debian with xfce, so I cannot comment on that. In my past experience, Xubuntu has done very well with the xfce desktop, although I haven’t tried it in the current version of Xubuntu. On my PC now are two Linux distros: Zenwalk Linux and OpenSuSE 10.1. Zenwalk is a Slackware derivative (the best one too, in my opinion) that uses xfce as the main desktop and Thunar as the file manager. SuSE allows you to use xfce but it’s not as nicely set up and configured as Zenwalk.
Xubuntu from 5.10 was very nicely done and I really enjoyed it; I didn’t have to change a lot to feel right at home with that distro. Personally I’m sticking with Zenwalk and SuSE for now because of issues with Ubuntu 6.06 that are unrelated to xfce (see my post above for more info).
I would suggest downloading the 6.06 Xubuntu Desktop CD as it is a LiveCD you can run on your system without installing right away. This would give a good idea as to whether it meets your needs or not.
Seems like one very solid open source tool. I have been working with smaller FOSS tools and they have gotten soild in the past few years but now Ubuntu? I’ll dload it. I do use Mepis so I’ll try the latest Mepis first which uses Ubuntu.
I want to eat Ubuntu, looks like chocolate. Also I like the new ‘authentic style’ mini game looks. Vista does this as well. Allot better then the plastic look. More waremer.
I always liked ubuntu, but isn’t it time that they include WPA-support in the GUI. Wep just isn’t safe anymore.
I still like it more then SuSe, just one application for one task. To bad it just hasn’t such a grate setup-tool as YaST wich configures almost anything (like 2 Dual Head). Hope to see more configuration tools with more options in the future (like wpa!). Going to install it anyway tho.
Edited 2006-06-03 17:33
I always liked ubuntu, but isn’t it time that they include WPA-support in the GUI. Wep just isn’t safe anymore.
I still like it more then SuSe, just one application for one task. To bad it just hasn’t such a grate setup-tool as YaST wich configures almost anything (like 2 Dual Head). Hope to see more configuration tools with more options in the future (like wpa!). Going to install it anyway tho.
Once you’ve installed it, execute
sudo apt-get install network-manager-gnome
This will install NetworkManager, which is the new system to automatically look after wireless (and wired) network connections. It supports WPA, provided your wireless card drivers do.
(Note that NetworkManager ignores any connections that you’ve set up manually, so you’ll have to set them to “unconfigured” in System -> Admin -> Networking.)