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.