Introduction

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".

Since its first release, Ubuntu has been extraordinarily successful. A lot of users began to use it and very few went back to their old distribution. It also participated greatly in attracting new people to GNU/Linux. Of course a few things were said about Canonical Ltd. not having a viable business model, the distribution's success being only a consequence of a trend of the moment, and Ubuntu being a bad fork from the Debian project. But as releases went by, and the distribution simply getting better, it soon became clear to a lot of people: Ubuntu was the most popular distribution.

A lot of things made its success. It is based on Debian Sid and inherited a great stability and a base from which it created up to date and numerous packages. It uses APT, which a lot of Linux users consider to be the best package manager. It benefits from a range of fast FTP mirrors. It comes as a single CD download, and for those who are lacking a good Internet connection, it is shipped all around the world for free! Finally, its release cycle is fast. The Internet is full of documentation about Ubuntu, and it has a huge community of users which help each others on forums, wikis, IRC channels and even local support groups.

D-Day: Dapper-Day

As soon as Ubuntu arrived, the GNU/Linux landscape was changed. I knew this release was going to make a lot of noise, and it did!

The Dapper Drake dance went crazy on the Ubuntu IRC channel. A few hours before midnight, people gathered with only one thing in their mind: "When is Dapper going to be released?", "Where are the ISO files?", "What's going on here, is it 00:00 American time or GMT?" etc... Seveas had to change the channel topic and beg everybody to be more patient. When one of his friend showed up, he even said: "Welcome to hell!". Ubuntu hadn't announced any time for the release, simply a date. But an incorrect announce had been made on "The Fridge" and the consequences were terrible. So, that morning, on Dapper Day, I decided to go to sleep :)

Later in the afternoon, kubuntu.org published their release notes, quickly followed by ubuntu.com. Both distributions appeared in distrowatch.com and I took the opportunity to read everything while downloading the two ISO files. Both release notes were very interesting. I will however cover Kubuntu in a separate review (being a Kubuntu user myself, I will probably have a lot to say). The Ubuntu release notes can be found here:

http://www.ubuntu.com/download/releasenotes/606

As I am only interested in the distribution as a desktop user, I will not cover the server features, innovations and long term support that were added in Dapper Drake. Malcolm Yates wrote a document about that, aimed at professionals, and he probably says things better than I could ever have:

http://www.ubuntu.com/news/606released

After reading all of this, I couldn't wait for the download to finish. Fortunately this was quite fast thanks to the fast FTP mirrors and the fact that each distribution only came as a single ISO file. Note that if you're interested in installing Ubuntu on an x86 desktop platform you only have one CD to download, this one:

http://releases.ubuntu.com/6.06/ubuntu-6.06-desktop-i386.iso

Launching the Live CD and installing Ubuntu

Ubuntu always provided a single CD download for installing the distribution on your machine. The installer however was text-based, and the CD had no other purpose but to allow you to install the operating system on your disc. A Live CD was also available for demonstration purpose.

With Dapper Drake, things changed, and for the best. Like Mepis, Mandriva One and others, Ubuntu now provides a Live CD called "Desktop" which once booted also provides a graphical installer. This way the user can try Ubuntu or show it to his friends without installing anything, and he can also proceed to the installation without rebooting or downloading another CD.

For system administrators who want an efficient way of installing operating systems without having to boot it from the CD, Ubuntu also provides and "Alternate" CD. However it is made quite clear on the Ubuntu website that the "Desktop" CD is the preferred way to install Ubuntu.

When you boot on the Desktop CD, the first thing you see is a menu which offers the following options:

• Launch or Install Ubuntu (which you can use to boot the Live CD and play with it, and eventually from which you can then install Ubuntu on your hard-drive).
• Start Ubuntu is Safe Graphic Mode (just in case you have problems with Ubuntu recognizing your graphics card, which wasn't my case)
• Check CD for defect (it's always a good idea to test the integrity of your media before installing an operating system. This can avoid chaotic behavior and a lot of trouble)
• Memory Test (same here, although you're more likely to scratch a CD than to damage your RAM)
• Boot from First Hard Disk (now this is a great and simple feature. How many times did you break Lilo or Grub?)

The menu also provides help, kernel and accessibility options, and you can set your language and keymap from here.

When you finally decide to launch the system, it automatically logs you in a Gnome environment. I tried not to look at it too much, because I knew I wanted to install the system on my hard drive and I didn't want to spoil the surprise too much. I have that complete series of Lost on DVD, and even though I could watch them all in one go, I can't wait for Monday nights when the next episode is shown on TV. I'm like that. At this stage you'd probably like to see some screenshots (although you've probably read other reviews and visited osdir.com), but I tell you: Ubuntu looks just the same once installed, and as it is faster, it is much better to look at it from your hard drive than from the CD itself.

On the desktop were two icons: One for the graphical installer, and one for a directory containing media files. I clicked on the installer and while it was installing Ubuntu on my machine, I started browsing the files.

The installer asks very few questions (as I remember there are only six steps in it). It allows you to test your selected keyboard layout, to answer a few localization-related questions and to partition your hard drive. It is also quite fast (it took about 15 minutes on my machine to install the operating system).

In the directory were a few documents demonstrating the fact that OpenOffice could read Excel spreadsheets, Word documents, and was good at creating presentations, texts and other types of documents. Selected chapters from the Official Ubuntu Book, and a few audio files were there as well. And there was even a video of Nelson Mandela explaining what the word "Ubuntu" means. I was amused and impressed. I didn't really know what to think of these files, but I had a good time going through them.

The installer finished and I rebooted. {mospagebreak title=Inside Ubuntu}

Inside Ubuntu

Speed

This first thing I noticed about Dapper was that it was faster. It took me 53 seconds from the BIOS to GDM, 12 seconds for Gnome to be fully operational and 22 seconds to shutdown the computer. It's all relative of course, and nobody has the same hardware configuration. My computer though is very small (10.6") and it's using an ULV processor which runs as slowly as possible in order no to create too much heat and to save 6 hours of battery life. On that laptop, I haven't seen any distribution boot that fast. As I remember SUSE 10.1 took me more than 2 minutes to boot. I don't want to say anything more about that, a proper benchmark would be more appropriate, but I thought it deserved to be mentioned.

Artwork

The new artwork is very impressive and I like it a lot. Since its first release Ubuntu was brown when all others were blue. It was one of its numerous controversial innovations. I liked it then already. In Dapper, the theme was made brighter with touches of orange and flashy icons. People will either hate it or love it, I guess. It gives an overall welcoming and warm impression. I also think it looks quite professional. With it comes a set of nice and pleasant sounds, funny and yet not overwhelming.

For those who definitely do not want their desktop to be brown, Ubuntu also comes with a set of beautiful alternative themes, such as ClearLooks, IndustrialTango, Outdoors, Resilience and Silicon. Also, nice Ubuntu wallpapers are included in the distribution so you don't have to go and search gnome-look.org for a replacement.

Hardware Recognition

Most of my hardware was properly configured. I have a Centrino laptop which usually has issues with Linux on the following things:

• The Sony Memory Stick Pro reader is usually not recognized and it wasn't recognized by Dapper either.
• The ALPS touchpad is usually not set correctly. It wasn't set correctly on Dapper either, although I simply added SHMConfig to /etc/X11/xorg.conf, troubleshooted with synclient and I was then able to fix the problem.
• The sound card is usually silent due to an External Amplifier switch turned on by default. It was the same problem in Dapper. It is very easy to fix though and I believe it has nothing to do with Ubuntu.
• The wireless card, an iwp2200 is usually not recognized. It was by Dapper and it worked perfectly.
• The graphics card, an i855, is usually not configured for its widescreen resolution (1280x768). The only distribution that supports this by default is SUSE 10.1. In Dapper, it wasn't. However, the package i915resolution was included in the official repositories, and installing it and simply restarting X fixed the problem.

Everything else worked out of the box. And the issues mentioned above didn't take much time to solve.

Default set of Applications

Dapper Drake comes with a really nice set of applications, such as:

• OpenOffice 2.0.2
• Firefox 1.5.0.3
• Evolution 2.6.1
• Ekiga 2.01
• Gaim 1.5.1
• The Gimp 2.2.11

It also comes with a selection of small games (that I see in every distribution and that I've never played actually...), some multimedia players and audio tools, a 2.6.15 kernel and some accessories. Together with Gnome 2.14.1 (which now offers networking and CD/DVD creation features), it provides a single application for all your basic needs. The menus are consistent, well organized and you can easily edit them thanks to an application called Alacarte Menu Editor.

I noticed that sendmail was not installed by default and this is a pity. More and more ISP stop providing their users with an SMTP server and it is not always easy for the novice user to configure it himself on his machine. I was sorry to see that no IRC client was installed, or at least made visible in the menus. There surely are better clients than Gaim for that, and IRC has become a very important protocol for community support. The channels are even presented on the official Ubuntu website, so why not give the user an easy way to access them?

Multimedia support

I am convinced that a distribution should not include support for restricted formats by default. If they are patented, proprietary, commercial, then they shouldn't be installed on the user's behalf. Having said that, a lot of us were victims of vendor-locking and now have no choice but to use MP3 and read encrypted DVDs. Hopefully this will change in the future, but at the moment, it is up to the GNU/Linux distributions not to include these technologies by default, but also to make their installation as easy as possible for those among us who need them.

In this matter, Ubuntu has a noble approach. It doesn't play restricted formats by default, but it provides great documentation on how to add support for these formats. This covers various things such as MP3, encrypted DVD playback, Flash, RealMedia, DivX...etc:

https://wiki.ubuntu.com/RestrictedFormats

Networking

As it turned out, my wife runs Windows on her computer and she has shared folders on it (I don't think she knows about that though). This was the perfect opportunity to see if Ubuntu would spot them. And it did. I didn't have to set up anything, I wasn't even asked what "workgroup" or "domain" I was a member of... I clicked on Places->Network Servers->Windows Network->Galaxy (which is both the name of the Windows workgroup and my Wireless ESSID, I suppose it was the Workgroup that was shown here)->Sun (which is the name of my wife's computer) and there I was, browsing through her shared folders.

In SUSE 10.1 it worked as well, but I had to configure the firewall and give the workgroup name. And even then, I could only access her shared folders by directly pointing to her IP address through the smb:// kio protocol.

In Dapper, you can also "connect" to a remote computer and create a linked folder on your desktop which will represent the remote file system and act as if it was mounted. This is extremely powerful, and you can use it on FTP servers, SMB shares, SSH, HTTP and HTTPS servers.

Package Management

Package managers got better and better in GNU/Linux distributions. Rug, in the recent SUSE 10.1 for instance is full of nice features that are not present in APT. However a lot of people still consider APT to be the best. The reason for this is simple: the packages are stable, there is a huge number of them and APT is fast and reliable.

In Dapper, a little applet was introduced in the Gnome desktop, which only appears when updates become available in the repositories. This is a nice feature. Also, an Add/Remove application was added to provide ease of use to novice users. This application even has the ability to show unsupported and commercial applications which are out of the scope of the enabled repositories, and to enable a repository when one of these applications is selected for install.

Finally, the Synaptic GUI and the aptitude console tool are still there. There are also very easy to use, very fast and reliable. It is hard to find anything bad to say about Ubuntu's package management. {mospagebreak title=Conclusion}

Conclusion

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 also appreciated that Ubuntu moved to a Live CD + graphical installer on a single disc. With one great application per use, a single desktop (Gnome for Ubuntu, KDE for Kubuntu, XFCE for Xubuntu) they even got room to include "free" Windows applications from the OpenCD project. Ubuntu is to Linux what Lambrusco is to wine. It's light, it's fast to use, it has a weird color, it's controversial (Lambrusco is fizzy) and more than anything else: it's my favorite! Congratulations to the team and all the people who participated in making Dapper Drake the most fantastic release I've seen so far.