Dulce et decorum est pro Distro mori

A long time ago, in an analogy far, far away, a battle was being waged. It was not, as some might tempt you into believing, a confrontation between good and evil. Nor was it precisely an economic revolution - an overturning of all that has come before. These predictions have, of course, been made before. And on the eve of every battle, they are made again. So if we close our eyes, just for a moment, and believe...

A giant software empire stands poised on the brink of world dominion. Their rule is not a benevolent one. OEM taxes cripple the populace and DRM spies are everywhere. Spyware bandits terrorise innocent citizens, while malware and viruses run rampant. Both the police force and health-care system are on the take. They provide no public welfare, and run their own protection rackets on the side. The people suffer, and yet the Empire, concerned only with its own profit, spends its budget on propaganda and prepares for the imminent release of its next operating system.

Many refugees have fled across the waves to iCountry, where everything is white, mayhap even translucent, and beneath the Empire’s mighty shadow, a band of daring rebels struggle to free the desktop. But the rebels' main strength is also their Achilles heel. "Choice!" they proclaim, and ‘choice’ they offer. Deb or RPM? Vim or Emacs? Gnome or KDE?

And from time to time, rising up from deep within this pool of vibrant chaos, an occasional Champion will emerge. Linus Torvalds, Richard Stallman, Patrick Volkerding, and lately, some might claim, Mark Shuttleworth. Many developers will follow their flag, many more will not. But for a moment in time, however brief, the light of Open Source shines strong.

Romantic, idealised, and contentious as this view may be - a certain amount of creative flair goes a long way to explain Ubuntu's sudden rise to fame. We all know the story behind the distribution, but harder to explain is its enormous popularity. Much of this, I believe can be attributed to sheer Internet presence. When you hit a problem with Linux and Google for it - you're as likely to come across the solution on Ubuntu's forums as not. Or else the Wiki. Or perhaps someone has already scripted a workaround. Certainly, I myself was completely unaware of Ubuntu until I encountered a problem with dual monitors using Fedora Core 3 and went searching.

And now, it is April, 2006. 6.04, in Versionspeak. Six flight CDs have come and gone, and I have watched them all pass before me. Moreover, it has been nearly eighteen months since the first Ubuntu release, and a lot has been promised. So much so, that Canonical have decided to break one of those promises and delay the release of Ubuntu 6.04, now 6.06, in order to accommodate them. The next version of Ubuntu, codenamed 'Dapper Drake', is just around the corner. Will the rising brown star continue to rise? Or will burn up on entry with the Earth’s atmosphere, leaving behind nothing but a smattering of *buntu derivatives.

A Little Spit and Polish Never Hurt Anyone

This is not a review. It is not fair to review a work in progress. It is not a preview either. Such has already been done. Besides, all too often both views degenerate into a list of everything that does not yet work. And! And! Even reviews of released Linux distributions often do little more than enumerate features that haven't been added yet, but are already present in the author's current favourite. So I won't cover in any great depth what is and is not in Dapper. If you want to mark for yourself each stride forward, please visit the testing pages linked to above. It will tell you what you need to know, and has pretty screen-shots besides.

I will not hide my bias either. Ubuntu is my Darling. It cradled me in its soft, brown arms, soothing the burns and blisters of years of Windows and RPMs. I will say this: Working with Dapper on standard desktop hardware is a pleasant experience. I have an AMD64 3500+ processor, 512MB of ram, a GeForce 4200, on-board sound and Ethernet, plus an old prism-based 11mbs wireless card. Nothing too new, nothing too old. Not even a printer or scanner to bang my head against.

Now let us take an x86 install CD. The graphical boot menu is a nice touch. In earlier versions you could hit the F8 key and everything would... sparkle. This is now gone, as it was never meant to be in the first place. Hit 'ENTER', and we are back into the blue, text-based installer.

I do not subscribe to the opinion that a text-based installer is an automatic black mark. Answering a few quick questions is no hardship. A user who has never installed an operating system before won't have anything to compare against. Besides, if you don't know what you're doing - any installer is intimidating – pretty blue bubbles or not. The live CD now features a graphical installer, which I am not man enough to fiddle with pre-production. But I do hear tell that Canonical's eventual plan is to only ship the live-CD via Shipit. The installer and server CDs will still, and always, be free for download.

The installer itself has been tweaked so that it no longer requires a reboot after the initial set of packages has been copied off the CD. It also does its best to ask all questions up front. The only spanner in the works is (still) X configuration. If you have a reasonably well behaved monitor, it will run straight through until the you hit desktop, but monitors that are not detected automatically will ask you to pick a resolution half-way through. I was amused to see that, perhaps as a side-effect of this tweaking, the installer now claims it is 'downloading' packages even when it is simply copying them off the CD.

Up until Flight 4, the Dapper artwork had not significantly changed. It looked much the same as Breezy. But daily updates catapulted my system into a brilliant orange, slowly fading to a light pastel that may or may not delight your eyes. I find it rather more neutral than the previous brown, and find myself hunting backgrounds to match. As opposed to 5.10, where I would pick a background and then search for a theme to match.

There are an increasing number of minor cosmetic changes. The icons have been overhauled and there are little touches of orange everywhere. Most done rather nicely, I thought. The system notification pop-up has improved markedly since the early Flights. Ejecting a USB-drive now flashes a pop-up asking you to wait while the OS finishes writing data to the drive before unmounting it. The main menus have tool-tips, as does the workplace switcher. The menus have been reorganised and, with mixed results, 'simplified'.

As I sit here writing this, a patch just went through that collected all the removable media and mountable drives into a single sub-menu of the 'Places' menu. This is change was so natural and intuitive that, merely seconds after the patch was replied, I can barely remember how the Places menu used to look.

All system tools and GUI configurators now sit in their rightful place under the System menu. No more hunting back and forth between 'Applications --> System Tools' and 'System'. However, as part of this process some other things you might want have been hidden. If this is the case – the menu entries are still there and can be re-enabled via the menu editor. On this topic, I must applaud the decision to put the Scanning menu item back in. The previous decision to remove it because scanning could be accessed through The Gimp was laudable, but misguided. Less disruptive, the Gconf editor is now MIA. However, I would have never even noticed this if I hadn't been playing with Xgl and Compiz (see below).

But all these cosmetic changes are almost beside the point. Dapper is faster. I daresay this is one area in which your personal mileage will vary. And no doubt much of the improvement comes from the optimisation of Gnome 2.14. But I, for one, can feel the difference. Ubuntu boots faster, Gnome starts in seconds, tool-tips appear instantly and menus snap open without a moment's delay. Even Openoffice appears to start faster and run smoother. It's a subtle thing, and perhaps even the lighter theme contributes to the feeling. But by contrast, Ubuntu 5.10 feels heavy and sluggish. An incremental release cycle on a short timescale can lead to a feeling that each release is a little inadequate. But I dare anyone to go back to Ubuntu 4.10, or even 5.04, and then sit down at a Dapper machine without smiling. In comparison, it's a whole new playing field.

But does it work?

So we have a shiny, new OS. What can it do? Regarding multimedia - we now have Gstreamer 0.10. This, and Totem, have generated much angst on the development lists. I don't have much multimedia content to experiment with, but after installing all the Gstreamer plugins and support for encrypted DVDs, I had no problems playing anything from my small collection with the default players. The one exception was an IMA ADPCM encoded .wav file which stuttered horribly if you tried to seek through it. No matter, the command line tool 'Sox' converted it to Ogg/Vorbis, and Totem was happy again.

Our Kodak digital camera still works - no regressions there, as do HDD Camcorders. But this is no surprise as both are just USB mass storage. The CD/DVD burner built into Nautilus functions the same way the native Windows burner does. It has received a small face lift, but I still don't like it. So far, I have failed to find an intuitive way of using it. It requires having at least two Nautilus windows open. One to display the burning folder, and one for dragging/dropping. Also, you cannot easily see how much space the items dragged into it are taking up. However, it is easy to change the behaviour of Ubuntu's 'create data CD' button to launch something else. Like GnomeBaker or K3B. I have done this, and am content.

Openoffice is still Openoffice. Not as 'feature complete' as Microsoft Office, sure, but I don't think it needs to be. It has handled everything I've asked of it so far, and I ask a lot more than your casual home user. The Gimp has just about weaned me off my Photoshop addiction. The updated applications in Dapper do not reveal, to casual inspection, any more features than in 5.10. I do not have a microphone, and thus have not tried Ekiga – the replacement for Gnomemeeting.

At first blush, that's about the extent of it. This may disappoint a few people - but it makes sense when you consider that the vision for Ubuntu’s Dapper release is 'polish'. The confluence of Openoffice 2, Firefox 1.5 and Gnome 2.14 provides a powerful synergy. The culmination of years of hard effort seem to have come to a head, and the Dapper release of Ubuntu aims to stitch them into a powerful, cohesive system that will age gracefully over its three year desktop cycle. So no, we should not expect to see Great New Things in Dapper. That is not what this release is about. But if our expectations are suitably flexible, if we can be content with Breezy, but better, there is no reason not to be pleased with Dapper as it currently stands.

Digging Deeper

But under the surface, there are some new things. A huge community effort has managed to squeeze the Network Manager into Dapper, easing the woes of many wireless users, and bringing easy configuration of WPA networks within reach. Plus, Gnome has been compiled with support for Beagle. Beagle is not yet in the 'Main' repositories, but if you install it many applications will be aware of it, and use it to assist their searches.

We must try Xgl. Sure, it doesn't do anything we haven't seen done better on a Mac. Also, we have the root window. We can rip open Fluxbox and run the GLMatrix screensaver as our background. How's that for eye candy, eh? E17 can pull similar tricks, too. But I detect a deeply rooted fear, disguised most often as a blunt arrogance, that people would rather be playing solitaire in a window with a translucent title bar than actually working in one without.

And so... Xgl and Compiz packages have been included in Dapper. They work, too, so long as you have a supported video card. Installation is not much harder than apt-getting a couple of packages, copy-pasting some text from the HOWTO into your GDM configuration file, and hitting Ctrl+Alt+Backspace.

Your windows will wobble! So will your little tool-tips, and menus. There will be fading, and drop-shadows, and you will rejoice! You may also become thoroughly annoyed. Especially as a bug now causes 'Shift+Backspace' to kill your X session. On the other hand, there are some generally useful enhancements. Inspired by MacOSX, you can hit 'F12' view all your open windows at once, and bring one to the foreground with a single click. That much, at least, is very useful – even if the wobble is not.

There is now an 'example-content' package. I'll be honest, I don't know if the install CD will advertise its presence. But it is there, in /usr/share/example-content, and the Live CD places a symlink to the folder on the desktop. It contains a few tasteful wallpapers (gone post Flight6), Openoffice documents, PDFs and media samples. A treasure-trove of 'click and discover'. None of it is particularly useful, except as demonstrations of what can be done with Openoffice. And proof that Dapper can really can play media files - despite Totem's often unhelpful error messages.

Happily Ever After

I like Ubuntu. I just do. There's a simplicity about it that appeals. Every successive release adds an additional layer of abstraction between the user and the 'plumbing'. While some might pass this off as soft-hearted pandering to a demographic that was never meant to use Linux in the first place, 'Debian for the Lazy', there is a gentle delight in taking a smooth, working OS and working your way down into its innards.

We already have a vast number of distributions that require you to stack up bricks until you have built yourself the personalised desktop of your dreams. Those who build from the base up will learn more than those who do not. But I estimate a great many more people would be willing, or encouraged, to dig down. To take a curious peek under the hood, and nip, tuck and tweak to their liking.

So it is no disservice to the Open Source community to make software simple and easily configurable, as long the inner workings are never more than a command-prompt away. Those less inclined to poke and prod within do not have to, aside from installing a few non-free codecs... Flash... Java... Ndiswrapper... Maybe wrestling with some hardware demons if they are unlucky. Okay, so pre-configured distributions like Mepis and PCLinuxOS make this a little easier. But there is an energy and vitality behind the Ubuntu community, almost evangelistic in its fervour, that is hard not to absorb. Only the most hardened and bitter hackers would not wish, in at least one ventricle of their hearts, a little success upon Ubuntu. And, little by little, it is getting there.

Dapper won't blow your socks off... but rest assured, the hooks are going in, and slowly, slowly, release after release, something truly spectacular is being created.