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Dapper Drake Hits Ubuntu Servers

Posted by CowboyNeal on Sat Nov 12, 2005 10:56 AM
from the new-and-improved dept.
Upgrades Announcements Operating Systems Software Linux
linuxbeta writes "Ubuntu 6.04 (Dapper Drake) daily builds have hit the Ubuntu servers. Dapper's goals: Substantial polish and integration, software discovery and installation, make network-wide enterprise updates easy to manage, consider LSB and related certification standards and support for deployment of Dapper on mission-critical servers. Screenshots have already surfaced."
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[+] Linux: Mark Shuttleworth Proposes Delaying next Ubuntu 382 comments
Beuno writes "Mark Shuttleworth has proposed on the ubuntu-art mailing list to postpone the 'Dapper Drake' release by 6 weeks. He lays out the reasons pretty clearly: the delay should make the release a more user-friendly distro. He has also called up a community meeting in April 14th on IRC for community input. Is it really worth delaying the release for more then a month just to polish it out a little bit?" Commentary on this also available from the Tectonic site.
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  • I sure hope that they've fixed the VIA C3 bug that was present on the last distribution, 'Breezy Badger'. I tried installing it on an 800MHz C3 system and it was unstable to the point of being unusable. I can't remember the exact details, something about the C3 missing one of the Pentium instructions.

    Ed Almos

  • Screenshots show nothing new (Score:5, Insightful)

    by nharmon (97591) on Saturday November 12 2005, @11:04AM (#14015466) Homepage
    Is it just me, or do the screenshots not really show anything new? I mean Ubuntu is cool and all, but these are just screenshots of Ubuntu, and does not even include the new enterprise management stuff.
    • I agree...there seems to be nothing new from the screenshots. But I know there is something to be appreciated as compared to the last releases. What about Kubuntu? Should we expect KDE 3.5? When it comes to Ubuntu, I only touch the KDE based one. And with superkaramba to be integrated, nothing compares to it.

      One thing though...I love the Tahoma and Times New Roman fonts. Unfortunately, I have to copy them from Windows make my environment look good. The Tahoma font itself is very small 252 kb I wonder why n

      • Speaking of fonts, try XLinSans as a desktop and application font. To me it's absolutely beautiful. At http://temcat.narod.ru/ [narod.ru] you'll find a DEB for it made by me from AltLinux RPM package.

      • Re:Screenshots show nothing new (Score:5, Informative)

        by Chandon Seldon (43083) on Saturday November 12 2005, @12:05PM (#14015739) Homepage
        The microsoft web fonts are available on any debian-derived distribution in the "msttcorefonts" package. The list is: Andale, Arial, Comic Sans MS, Courier New, Georgia, Impact, Times New Roman, Trebuchet, Verdana, and Webdings. Unfortunately, Tahoma has not been authorized by microsoft for redistribution, so you'll need to manually move it from a Windows installation if you want to use it. It would probably be better to use one of the excellent free fonts included in Ubuntu, because then you can redistribute the font you're using if you want to. The Bitsteam Vera family are my personal favorites.

    • Re:Screenshots show nothing new (Score:5, Interesting)

      by Homology (639438) on Saturday November 12 2005, @11:57AM (#14015701)
      Is it just me, or do the screenshots not really show anything new? I mean Ubuntu is cool and all, but these are just screenshots of Ubuntu, and does not even include the new enterprise management stuff.

      Yet another "review" of yet another Linux distro consisting mostly of screenshots Gnome/KDE along with the installer. They are all so very superficial, and quite frankly, quite booring. I'm pretty sure that the distro maintainers are not that happy themselves with these "reviews".

      As an example, this is almost never seen in a review: Upgrading a machine (desktop/server/whatever) from and older version to the newest version and reviewing that. Or reviewing the package lifecycle in a version of a distro (does the upgrades work? breakes anything? Are upgrades properly tested by the distro/package maintainers? etc etc).

  • OK, I see a new installer has been released. Any word on how it compares to other installers? It looks pretty much like the Debian installer, and the (gulp) RedHat installation has been pretty easy for some time.

    What's the "killer feature" for this installer?

    • Re:Ok, it's been released... (Score:5, Insightful)

      by nine-times (778537) <nine.times@gmail.com> on Saturday November 12 2005, @11:32AM (#14015600) Homepage
      Why does an installer need a "killer feature"? Isn't it enough that it's an easy/efficient/effective means of getting the system installed?

    • Re:Ok, it's been released... (Score:4, Informative)

      by cmdr_tofu (826352) on Saturday November 12 2005, @11:38AM (#14015625)
      Well having done over 400 Debian installs and 1 Ubuntu install (Breezy Badger), I feel comfortable saying that the installs are different. Sure you have the comfortable and simple Debian CUI, but you do not have to answer any questions! I think the entire installation asked me about 4 questions. It is easier than a Redhat install, but you get the advantage of the Debian package pool and the Debian package system. One oft overlooked feature of Debian is the sheer number of quality tested packages available. The installer works as well as Redhat's but you end up with a better system that has much more software easily available through apt. Ubuntu has a long way to go before it can come close to Debian's track record, but I think it's off to a good start.

      • Re:Ok, it's been released... (Score:4, Interesting)

        by LnxAddct (679316) <sgk25@drexel.edu> on Saturday November 12 2005, @01:59PM (#14016258) Homepage
        Its funny how you just assume Debian provides a "better system". I used to run Fedora and Debian side by side, but anything other than Debian stable would break my system monthly. I had a lot of things installed on it, but nothing too exotic. I got sick of going to #debian and getting blasted for expecting stability if I'm not running Debian Stable, and than being told to fix it myself or that I should have read < insert link > before I went updating. The truth is that the Debian community is a bunch of elitists. My Fedora server just runs nice and silent without me having to do anything, updates itself and things don't break because the packages are well tested. Debian has reported several times that they are running short on help, they don't have the resources to put quality into their 10,000 packages. Fedora comes with a standard yum repository that has thousands of apps, and adding a second repo, like DAG's or the soon to released RPMForge, puts the number of available apps on par, if not above, that of Debian. As it stands right now, all my servers and laptop run Fedora. Debian doesn't cut it anymore, and Ubuntu isn't server oriented, but even on the desktop side of things Ubuntu doesn't take security serious enough. Also, you can praise apt all you want, but as anyone who has any experience with it knows, the second apt breaks it breaks like hell and does not want to be fixed. Its crazy that some users in #debian told me they've spent weeks figuring out what was wrong and fixing apt and that I should just do the same if it breaks. Screw that, things like that don't happen on Fedora. And as far as installing goes... Ubunutu is not easier and is severly lacking. To install than Red Hat is easy as hell even if you're installing it on a few hundred machines at once, the gui, text mode, or kickstart are all easy to work with.
        Regards,
        Steve

  • oblig (Score:3, Funny)

    by BushCheney08 (917605) on Saturday November 12 2005, @11:05AM (#14015480)
    I hate the Drake!

  • Pointless (Score:5, Insightful)

    by MoogMan (442253) on Saturday November 12 2005, @11:12AM (#14015515)
    I don't really see the point of screenshots or reviews at this time. It's way too early for it to have changed much - visually - (if at all) since Breezy.
  • I'm excited to hear about a new release of my current favorite desktop linux distro. However, can the brown default theme please die? I realize that the goal of Ubuntu is "linux for human beings", and utilizing what appears to be human skin tones for a theme is an interesting idea, but it just doesn't work. Look at some well designed color schemes, like OS X's Aqua, or even... (don't shoot me please!) Windows XP's Luna. They both utilize neutral grays, a lot of blue, and other primary colors. That much brow

  • Polish (Score:4, Interesting)

    by nine-times (778537) <nine.times@gmail.com> on Saturday November 12 2005, @11:26AM (#14015571) Homepage
    Dapper's goals: Substantial polish and integration

    Glad to hear it. I love Ubuntu. In my experience, it's the easiest and most reliable Linux distro to setup and maintain. Apt is great, and Synaptic makes it easy. A lot of things are just done the right way.

    However, being a new distro, it's lacked a little polish here and there. Nothing big, but just the sort of thing where, if I were to set my parents up on a Linux machine, I'd be more confident in the presentation that SuSE or Fedora provide. I'd be really confident that Ubuntu would work correctly, and it might be my choice of distros for that reason, but I'd be more confident that Fedora would *look* like a professionally-created OS.

    So I think polish is a good place to focus right now.

    • Just to point out that you can already get the Aqua and Luna themes for Gnome. The brown theme isn't that bad, and you can change it easily enough.

      Heck, Doesn't Ubuntu come with the standard Gnome themes too? Why not take 5 seconds to switch it to Clearlooks or one of the other themes that look great in Gnome?

      If the default theme is the basis of deciding on which OS you'd use, XP would be the worse OS in history. Lokks like computers by Fisher Price.

  • Theme (Score:5, Insightful)

    by rathehun (818491) on Saturday November 12 2005, @11:29AM (#14015586) Homepage
    Jeez, ~30 posts, and already people are complaining about Gnome, and the Ubuntu theme. You know what? I like it. I'm sure there are other people who do as well.

    How hard is it to change? Two levels down, IIRC, and you don't have to click apply, unlike on my XP machine. The brown theme is minimalist, it's earthy, and it's a *really* welcome change from the stupid industrial blue/grey offend no-one look of a corporate release.

    To reply to another post, the XP Blue theme sucks big time, but the Energy Blue one, which comes as default (I believe) with Media Center, is rather easy on the eyes. However, I really, would NOT mind a Gnome themed desktop, and if I could use it without the need for a stupid hack like WindowsBlinds/ThemeXP/whateverthefuck, I would.

    I really don't know why there is such a big fuss. Change it if you like. Use Kubuntu.

    Sheesh.

    • You the brown seems to get people stirred up for some reason. I don't like it personally but it's not rocket science to change and it does make the distro distinctive, which these days, is something unique.

  • My take on ubuntu. (Score:4, Interesting)

    by Lussarn (105276) on Saturday November 12 2005, @11:45AM (#14015647)
    I recently switched to use ubuntu in my desktops (from gentoo). It's been mostly painless but there are gotchas with breezy 5.10.

    Multimedia support is close to non existant. I have source installed mplayer, dvd::rip and avidemux (And a few libraries they depend on). That brought multimedia up to par with my gentoo install altough much more hassle than gentoo.

    Default kernel is non preemptible which just sucks if you like me do some heavy multitasking. It's not unusual for me to have 5 mencoders or a couple of compiles going and without preemptible kernel the system is close to non responsive, the problems show up even if you only encode one movie. A kernel compile fixes the problems but some people probably don't want to recompile the kernel (Or have the skill to do so).

    Default firefox is slow. For some reason the default firefox is amazingly slugish. I downloaded a new from mozilla.org and problem is fixed. Still annoying.

    Gentoo has amazinlgy good documentation. Not something against ubuntu but coming from Gentoo it's a big loss.

    Main reason for switching was getting a reasonably new gnome desktop with good package stability. With gentoo you have a too much of a moving system with new releases of packages way too often and too inconsistently. So far ubuntu has been great in that regard.

    All in all it's one of the best desktop distros right now.

    • Re:My take on ubuntu. (Score:5, Informative)

      by RandomJoe (814420) on Saturday November 12 2005, @01:26PM (#14016094)
      I've been dabbling with it (can't quite bring myself to let go of Slackware on my laptop!) and have a comment on one of your items:

      Multimedia support is close to non existant. I have source installed mplayer, dvd::rip and avidemux (And a few libraries they depend on). That brought multimedia up to par with my gentoo install altough much more hassle than gentoo.

      At first it seemed this was the case to me as well, but I have found that many (all?) of the items in "multiverse" - including Mplayer, dvd libraries, etc - don't show up in the basic/default package installer. If I search there, either nothing appears or it shows up grayed out. If I switch to the "advanced" mode and search, everything shows up (with multiple versions even) and I can get it all installed. The only thing not available in the repository was libdvdcss (think that's the name) due to legal issues but libdvdread spit out some instructions when I ran mplayer on how to install that with a supplied shell script.

      I was quite pleased - I have a 1GHz desktop leftover from work that I installed 5.10 on, and once I found the above got Mplayer working easily. In far less time (not to mention frustration) than I've ever spent before I was watching and ripping DVDs. Very nice. This machine is now probably destined to replace my "TV computer" out in the living room.

      I haven't used it enough yet to comment on anything else, it seemed quite speedy enough to me considering the computer. I'm just about willing to install it on the laptop - that'll be the real test for me.

  • Seems to be a long lasting release of Ubuntu (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Ace Rimmer (179561) on Saturday November 12 2005, @11:48AM (#14015663)
    There are a few features which would be really nice [missing in comparison in other distros] -- but not planned:

    • A possibility of an offline installation. One can't setup Ubuntu well without Internet access. It would bevery useful for example if one could choose "extra" packages not found on official CD (at least some i18n stuff and reasonable multimedia). At least you would be able to pre-download packages (and all dependent packages! before installation). This would be also pretty nice for multiple installations (small bussines usage).

    • An automatical detection of BIOS RAID during installation process (a pretty common thing on modern computers and usually well supported in Linux). Now you have to do really nasty hacks to get it working (see ahref=https://wiki.ubuntu.com/FakeRaidHowto/rel=ur l2html-13444 [slashdot.org]https://wiki.ubuntu.com/FakeRaidHowto/ > ).

    • A possiblity to switch all bindings from one app to another of your preference. You can now do it for WWW and email. It would be great to have it for text (gvim anyone? ;), video (xine/mplayer), audio (xmms) instead of politically correct but unusable default applications.

    • Reasonably restrictively set firewall setup by default (maybe shorewall)

    • A good backup application (at least system recovery, etc settings snapshots, home dirs backup).

    • Some sort of graphical system messages reporter for desktop users (sniffing logs, reporting serious problems). Something like security update icon on the top bar). Smarttools should also really be installed by default.

    • Disabling completely disfunctional features like "hibernate" on standard desktops ... I installed Ubuntu at least 20 times on different hw and I haven't found a PC on which this would not cause a complete hang up.



    Anyway, Ubuntu is a really great distro. I've moved from Debian to Mandrake (now Mandriva) becouse of outdated packages needed for a workstation ... now I'm back (even though to its desktop cousin). It's becouse it is much simpler and most of things just work out of the (unlike mdk, gentoo and others.) -- and still can be tweaked easily by a poweruser!

  • anyone know of a screen bug un Breezy? one where after a long period of inactivity the screen won't come back up?

    On Drake (sorta):

    read thru the few comments here so far... If you don't like Gnome then use Kubuntu or even just add KDE and have a choice. This is not an isse of the distro, but of you personal choice. Same applies to the theme. If you don't like it then stop being lazy and change it.... Jeez. maybe we need a tutorial added to it to teach people that they can do this and how...(rolls eyes)

    Readin
  • I just received my Breezy Badger CDs via snailmail today, and Dapper Drake's already available? Great, just great.
    • Speaking of the look of Ubuntu, why do we always get screenshots in these things? Right now, Dapper looks like Breezy. Which looks like... Gnome with a brown theme.
    • If you don't like GNOME, like myself and many others, feel free to try Kubuntu [kubuntu.org]. It offers all the goodness of Ubuntu, but replaces GNOME with KDE.

      Of course, you can still install and use GNOME software, although I don't know why you'd want to do that when you've got the power of KDE available to you.

      • I like Gnome much more that KDE and I think it looks much better, just the default Ubuntu theme is horrible.

          • Re:Must every thread be used by you for proselytiz (Score:4, Insightful)

            by donscarletti (569232) on Saturday November 12 2005, @01:00PM (#14015983)
            Yep, Firefox doesn't really fit in with Gnome that well. That is why it isn't "part of the gnome desktop". The official Gnome browser is "Epiphany" which is a browser based on the Geko engine. Epiphany is very consistant with the gnome look at feel (and apparently the "user experience") yet has shortcomings of its own, mainly due to it's faily constricted feature set. Ubuntu has raised quite a shit storm by its choice of Firefox over Epiphany as its default browser. There is a fair amount of politics surrounding the whole thing since many Gnome stalwarts see it as making the experience inconsistant (which is undoubtably true). Ubuntu believes having Firefox which is familiar to many windows users as the default browser will give their distro a familiar face to new users, as well as it having a far bigger featureset. The whole thing has been a political quagmire ever since its inception. To me Epiphany was a sad departure from Gnome's original "adopt rather than duplicate" philosophy. Gnome originally adopted Mozilla, Enlightenment/sawfish and Xscreensaver as parts of the desktop, while KDE had Konquerer, KWM and their own screen locking package. These days Gnome includes Epiphany, Metacity and Gnome-screensaver, all developed in house. To me it is a sad departure from the original, wider community focused viewpoint of Gnome nestling in a small niche between the applications that a user or distro chooses.

            To me, the best path for Gnome to take is to work with Firefox, leaveraging mutual official endorcement to work towards consistancy (mainly in regards to things like the file selector) rather than simply re-inventing what I see to be a wooden spoked wheel without enough tread. But the Gnome crew demands to see consistancy now and they see making their own browser to be far easier.

              • Re:You're right, the GNOME file selector has to go (Score:4, Interesting)

                by donscarletti (569232) on Saturday November 12 2005, @02:28PM (#14016389)
                I am not a Windows user. I am a Linux user. Why the hell would I be care about Gnome if I was a windows user? And that screenshot you have is from DIA, not Firefox. I have Firefox open, in Gnome right now and my save as dialog looks nothing like that one.

                You are a KDE zealot. You don't care about the facts regarding the dialog, you don't care about the design decisions behind the save as dialog and I'd wager that you wouldn't care if it copied the dialog from KDE, windows or OSX. You just want Gnome to look bad because you plain don't like it. Look around you, is anyone else trying to reignite the desktop wars on this thread? No, everyone's mature enough to realise that both desktops are doing a lot of good things.

                I'm a Gnome user, but I'm not telling everyone that KDE sucks and to use Gnome. I was being so objective on this subject that you thought I was a windows user. This cannot be denied because it is there in your own writing. I switched to Gnome from being a very loyal KDE user three years ago because I found the attitudes behind KDE were in need of a bit of maturity. What you are displaying exemplifies this. Gnome and KDE are very different environments. They appeal to very different people, when I was a loyal KDE guy I loved it because of the amount of fun stuff they manage to pack in, the options, the huge number of fun included games, the sticky button right on the left hand side of the window bar for quick tying down of windows, the big pretty applets, the power and integration of KFM and later Konqueror. But these days I like Gnome because of its sleek, uncluttered appearance, it's focus on making the most common tasks faster to do, the widgets being small but very readable. As a developer, I also prefer GTK+ to QT because of its community focused development methods and its focus on having excelent high level language bindings (pygtk (python), gtkmm (c++), gtk# (c#)) rather than encoraging everyone to use its native API.

                If you want to help KDE you should maybe spend some time developing it, or maybe praise their developers every time there is a positive story on KDE on slashdot. Trying to convert everyone to KDE whenever there is a gnome story on slashdot doesn't help anyone and doesn't really make you or KDE look good. Try not to do it in the future, thanks.

                • Firefox, in Linux, by default, does *not* use gnome dialogs. Period.

                  Funny how my 1.5 prerelease does use gnome dialogs. I'd love to find a way to force it to use the old ones, especially when it comes to choosing helper applications. The old dialogs, unlike the shitty gnome ones, let me type in an absolute path (e.g. /usr/bin/ooffice2) without Firefox loading the entire contents of every directory in that path (which, for something like /usr/bin, will cause FF to lock up for five minutes straight). Wors
            • Yes I read the same thing. I think it was in an interview/FAQ with Shuttleworth that was linked from the Ubuntu site a few weeks ago. Or maybe it was in a Slashdot article (some days they are substantially similar).

              Anyway, it's discussed on his page [ubuntu.com] in the Ubuntu Wiki:

              Our current plan is that the Dapper Drake (Ubuntu 6.04 if we hit our April 2006 release date goal) will be the last of this first "set" of releases. So post-Dapper we have the opportunity to define a new "feel" or overarching theme. It would b

    • Re:Maybe it's just me (Score:4, Insightful)

      by MoonFog (586818) on Saturday November 12 2005, @11:10AM (#14015499)
      I care, and since it's posted here, there are probably others as well. Don't like it, don't read it.

      I enjoy getting info on Linux distros on Slashdot, their updates etc. It sure as hell beats having 2000 Google stories and 5 "infomercials" for some dude looking for money to fund some science project. If you're tired of these submissions, just choose to ignore Linux threads in your preferences page.

    • Re:Ubuntu Linux... (Score:4, Insightful)

      by CyricZ (887944) on Saturday November 12 2005, @11:23AM (#14015563)
      Indeed. It will be quite interesting to see if Red Hat and Novell/SuSE will be able to match the momentum of Ubuntu/Kubuntu.

      I know many people who have become disenchanted with the Red Hat and SuSE distros. While they were near, if not at, the top of the game once, they may not remain there much longer.

      I'm aware of a number of people, myself included, who gave Fedora Core a try. And frankly, we were not impressed. I had the installer crash on me, and the others I talked with ran into a multitude of other problems. They were simple problems that shouldn't exist in a modern distro.

      Meanwhile, there's all the nonsense with Novell/SuSE switching SuSE to GNOME. SuSE has been a KDE-based distro for years, and it has worked very well. As a former fan of SuSE, I do not think I'll bother buying their products if they go with GNOME as their default desktop, rather than KDE.

      Some of the people I know went back to Slackware, others to Debian, and myself to Kubuntu. Until Red Hat and Novell/SuSE get their acts together, Ubuntu/Kubuntu may very well have a strong future.

      • Re:Ubuntu Linux... (Score:4, Interesting)

        by idlake (850372) on Saturday November 12 2005, @11:33AM (#14015605)
        As a former fan of SuSE, I do not think I'll bother buying their products if they go with GNOME as their default desktop, rather than KDE.

        Well, and as a former fan of RedHat and Ubuntu, I think I may be installing SuSE as my primary system. SuSE has been a great distro, except for shipping with KDE as its default desktop.
        • The thing is, SUSE not only has been but will continue to be a strongly KDE-centric distro. Their plan as of last week was to make GNOME the default desktop of the Novell-branded enterprise stuff but the retail-centric SUSE was to keep doing their KDE-centric thing as usual. Heck, SUSE has historically kept their GNOME support at a bare minimum, and that is probably the root for some of SUSE's KDE fans' rather vocal dislike of GNOME. Ubuntu OTOH has its roots in GNOME and therefore its users are also genera
      • Actually, many of the more advanced developers are switching to Ubuntu because it does offer all the power of Debian, while also being more up-to-date and developed quicker.

        It allows serious developers to focus on programming and software design, rather than painstakingly maintaining their computer system(s). After all, productivity is a must these days, and Ubuntu does much to increase it.

        • It allows serious developers to focus on programming and software design, rather than painstakingly maintaining their computer system(s). After all, productivity is a must these days, and Ubuntu does much to increase it.

          Bump.

          This is very true. I know a lot of very smart people moving to Macs because "everything just works".

          I'm not quite ready to pay the Mac tax yet... Kubuntu gets me a heck of a lot closer than RH or any other distro I've used.

      • Given the choice between a distro, and exactly the same distro with a bit more polish, why go with the ugly one?

        (I have debian stable for servers, breezy for family desktops, and will soon be bughunting dapper on my own desktop)

    • Don't blame the screenshots. After all, they do just show GNOME. GNOME is a very small part of Ubuntu. Many Ubuntu users even choose to ditch GNOME in favour of KDE (thus Kubuntu [kubuntu.org]).

      The main thing to focus on is the fantastic package management system, the up-to-date packages, and the overall integration of the system. It's a distro that just works, and that is exactly what a busy user needs.

    • The Ubuntu development releases are often quite stable, even while undergoing constant changes and development. If you want to be on the cutting edge, while still having a quite stable and usable system, the Ubuntu development branch is very useful.

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