ARTICLE

Ubuntu 6.06 Review
Contributed by Clement Lefebvre in Reviews on 2006-06-02 08:17:47
Page 3 of 3

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.


Article Index
Ubuntu 6.06 Review
Inside Ubuntu
Conclusion
 
Discussion(s)
Excellant Review
Written by remo on 2006-06-02 11:23:33
Your review makes me feel i've gotta make some space to install dapper. Myself being a longtime gentoo fan. Still i would like to test dapper out. Great review to a great distribution.
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Wonderful distro
Written by Henrik on 2006-06-02 18:50:41
The networking features have really gotten an overhaul in this release. On the last release I had trouble surfing the LAN without some mingling, now it works out of the box, wonderful.

World of Warcraft also runs alot better in wine now, though I don't know if that's an improvement on wine's part or ubuntu's.

And to even further discredit my Linux-knowledge, Ubuntu was my first go at Linux, I feel almost ashamed for not trying out other distros, but heck, if it works the way I want to I don't see a reason to switch :-)
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IRC client
Written by voksi on 2006-06-03 01:50:41
After instalation you can user Gaim for IRC or irssi - text based IRC client. Probably, the best there is. You can use them in Live session too.
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excelent review, even better os
Written by pilly on 2006-06-03 02:45:58
I don't think I could ask for a better os for my laptop. Hands down the best one I've found bar none. I belive in using the BEST tool for the job (I also have a mepis file server, and a gentoo media server desktop/myth frontend) and dapper is pleasnt to look at and snappy. And I don't usually like gnome, still I find it more portable than kde. dapper has really raised the bar... thank-you to everyone that helped in creating it... easy to see why it's the most popular. keep up the good work.

if you have an older laptop, like I do (presario 700
1.3 Ghz) you owe yourself to check it out. All it'll cost you is a blank disk.
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Gentoo fan - Me too
Written by Eddie303 on 2006-06-03 03:31:22
Hey, I used Gentoo on my desktop, but now on my new laptop I run Dapper, and it is way less to fiddle with it, the single problem is that Dapper does not have as many packages as Gentoo has in portage, that was important to me... The other thing... I already tried to sbstitute Gentoo with Breezy, but I could not make lirc to work, on my desktop I used it to control tvtime and xmms...
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Dapper Drake
Written by Pieter on 2006-06-03 05:18:37
I have used all the Ubuntu distro's to date. mostly out of interest due to the SA connection, but also because I like the idea of choice (MS or Linux) and the principles of open source software.

I have a selection of about 30 distros at home which I continuously update and test (on VMware) and this must be one of the easiest and most complete distro's I have ever used.

I know it is a bit unfair under VMware as it is a defined environment, but I tried the live CD on my Siemens Fujitsu T4010 TapbletPC and it worked mostly out of the box, other than for the TabletPC pen, which after a reasonably simple fix (Thanks Google), even that worked. Sound, WiFi, Pad Mouse etc, and this is a reasonably new laptop version!

Great distro, and a really nice review, not too technical and written in the ubuntu flavour (ie not condascending)

Thanks for your efforts
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What about Hibernate and Suspend??
Written by José Pinto on 2006-06-04 07:36:35
Your review is very good but I was intrigued why didn't you mention what is, for me, the best desktop improvement: The ability to Suspend, Hibernate and Switch between user sessions.
I have an HP dv1255ea and all the drivers (including sound, 3D, wi-fi and card reader) we're successfully installed.
Also, Ubuntu nows mounts existing NTFS drives by default.
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Too many changes in only six weeks
Written by Cristian on 2006-06-04 11:27:37
I've been using ubuntu for a year now, and it rocks. I use it as my desktop, on servers and even in a cluster enviroment for physical simulations.
But the last week when i saw the changes of Dapper RC, i felt frustrated, the delay of six weeks, that was intented for the final polish of ubuntu, translations, artwork, bugfixes, was used for adding a new installation method with a graphical installer?. I think it do not match the objectives of a long term support release, it throws away all the polish work done before.
I think the new installer is the right direction to take, it's faster and graphical, but it was introduced in the six weeks for polishing the system. It's a huge change and it's not tested like the rest of the release. I think the delay weeks where for adding this installer, not for making the system more stable. If you pay attention you can see that the whole system is very clean and eye candy, but the installer is far away from being at the same point, i even discovered a bug, not critical, but it shows the inmaturity of the application. If you make a partition and then you right click it for "moving or resize" and change the size by writing the numbers in the spin box insted of clicking the arrows that adds or substracts a unit to the value it holds you don't get enabled the apply button, but if you click one of the arrows it enables it.
How can this be a LTS release with an installer tested for only a week, and with a GUI bug on it?
It seems far more stable the flight CD 7, with the old Live CD and Installation CD.
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LIRC
Written by Major Lockup on 2006-06-04 12:18:05
Lirc in ubuntu is not as it should be indeed. It was a bitch setting up microsoft's remote (usb_mce2 is not included!).
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What about Hibernate and Suspend??
Written by Ian on 2006-06-04 14:09:48
I just installed 6.06 on my Toshiba A45-S120 laptop. Suspend and Hibernate work fine! Only problem I have found is that when it suspends I lose my wireless connection until I reboot.
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16.000 packages
Written by Camilo on 2006-06-04 15:51:05
Did you look at http://packages.ubuntu.com ?
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Re: Too many changes in only six weeks
Written by James on 2006-06-05 15:42:42
The installer has been tested for over a month. I remember seeing it way back in flight 6, might have been around before then.

Also, far, far more then the installer was worked on during that six week period. Having downloaded a total of well over a gigabyte of updates from flight 6 to release, I'd say pretty much everything got tweaked. Most of it was "under the hood", but surly you can see the speed difference between breezy and dapper? A huge portion of that optimization happened during the final 6 weeks of dev. I remember at least one update where it was announced 10 seconds of boot time had been eliminated.

Oh, and there was a lot of new artwork and theme changes done within those 6 weeks also.
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Am i the only one REALLY unsatisfied?
Written by Michele on 2006-06-06 18:17:56
(first of all excuse the bad english, i'm italian!)

Well, the upgrade to dapper has just f****d up ALL of my 3 breezy boxes. A lot of programs that used to work with breezy (mplayer, totem, videolan, skype, openoffice) just get frozen up, cups and the samba shares browser don't work ON BOTH my laptop and my desktop. And mldonkey on my server gives quirky errors and refuses to get removed...

Really nothing serious, indeed, but alle these bugs left me a feeling of something unstable and still immature, and a really bad mood, so i think i'll get back to my good old debian for the server and suse for the desktops.
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Needs better wifi tools
Written by fuji on 2006-06-07 07:54:58
Setting up a wireless connection with WPA2 security on a bcm43xx chipset is a nightmare. You end up using the console to set things up. This should be automatic, like on Mandriva.
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Re: Am i the only one REALLY unsatisfied
Written by on 2006-06-09 13:30:12
Who's fault is that? You didn't test the upgrade on a test box or in a virtual PC situation using something like the freely available VMware Server. You went ahead and blindly upgraded your PCs that were basically "production machines". And then you complain about it!
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ah
Written by Dan on 2006-10-29 19:55:32
ahahaha, you jerk
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Where/How do I?....
Written by Ricky J on 2006-06-11 16:32:41
Where do I download a full desktop version of this ubuntu 6.06 that installs with no hitches, including the wireless card drivers for my laptop?
I must not be geeky enough...I have trouble with all linux products going to this cmd line that I don't know what to do with. What do I do with that!? Any help you coul give would be greatly apriciated. Thanks
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Ricky, this isn't the place to ask for
Written by Nate on 2006-06-13 22:33:59
The CD for installing a full desktop version of Ubuntu Dapper Drake (which is version 6.06) can be found at http://mirror.cs.umn.edu/ubuntu-releases/6.06/

You probably have an intel x86 computer.

Burn that ISO file to a CD and use it to boot your computer.

As for problems with your wireless card and linux in general, I'd suggest you go to http://www.ubuntuforums.org

But don't just post on there. First find out what kind of wireless card you have, and search for it on the forum. If you have a problem, it may have already been discovered by someone else with the same hardware, and fixed! Usually, hardware problems can be remedied with a bit of scavenging for knowledge.

As for the command line, it's in no way necessary to learn to use the command line to use linux, so it's okay to be resistant to use it! But just so you know, learning the command line takes a bit of work at first, but makes things very easy! The command line is so useful once you know how to use it. Feel free to shy away it, you'll be able to survive fine without it. I just suggest you give learning it a shot, it provides you with all sorts of valuable tools in running linux.
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Re: Too many changes in only six weeks
Written by Matt Zimmerman on 2006-06-14 21:45:21
The new installer was a key planned feature of the 6.06 LTS release from the beginning, and was by no means added during the delay.
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Re: Am i the only one REALLY unsatisfied
Written by RatFink on 2006-06-17 18:01:49
Sure it's his fault he caused himself grief by not testing, however as he stated a lot of the problems were not show stoppers and even the best testing cannot find everything. Secondly VMware has a hardware configuration vastly different then most PCs so it isn’t the smartest thing to test something on. But I don't see him complaining much about that other then him being disappointed. But the problems he is having according to him stemmed from the distribution. If the upgrade is broken it may be something he can fix himself but it doesn't help others looking to upgrade.
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I have a M400 and... proble with the pen
Written by carlo on 2006-06-24 01:41:15
What is the fix for the pen... perhaps it could work in my toshiba m400 too... thx
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Which config did you go with ?
Written by Kukania13 on 2006-06-26 22:47:28
I have the same wireless chipset on my laptop, bcm43xx; even though Ubuntu 5 offered driver for dis chip in their recent kernel I couldn't get it running. The only way I could use wireless with this chip was by running ndiswrapper 1.8! Could you tell me if you got it running , with this distro version ? and how ?
Many thanks.
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memory stick reader does not work
Written by Nuno Silva on 2006-10-21 07:56:32
Hi,

I'm really happy with Ubuntu 6.06 distro too.

However, I could't manage to put the memory stick card reader to work.

However, you say:

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

Can you please explain what did you do to put the memory stick to work?

Best.
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floppy support
Written by Nick on 2007-02-08 13:47:26
Ubuntu 6.06 was the first Linux distro that worked almost out of the box on my machine (I had to search for an ATI driver to make the refreshment rate usable though). Thanks to it I understood the basics of Linux and Software Libre philosophy and finally stopped using M$ software. The only thing which is still bothering me is the absence of floppy support -- this release does not read them properly and corrupts them often. I understand that floppies are nearly extinct nowadays, still some people need this backward compatibility.
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this is how I used Drive Image 2002 with
Written by Avt on 2007-08-10 00:40:43
after putting back a (drive image 2002) backup this is how to repair Ubuntu Inode error seen as a popup from Dapper on bootup:



Boot to ubuntu Dapper live cd then

sudo su to become root then type:

umount /dev/sda7 return

fsck.ext3 -f /dev/sda7 return

fsck.ext3 /dev/sda7 return

mkdir /mnt/sda7; mount /dev/sda7/mnt/sda7
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help
Written by kaeli on 2008-06-30 13:47:35
please explain to me how to install adobe flash player
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