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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.
from the new-and-improved dept.
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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Screenshots show nothing new (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Screenshots show nothing new (Score:5, Interesting)
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).
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Re:Screenshots show nothing new (Score:5, Informative)
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oblig (Score:3, Funny)
Pointless (Score:5, Insightful)
Polish (Score:4, Interesting)
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.
Theme (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
My take on ubuntu. (Score:4, Interesting)
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)
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.
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Seems to be a long lasting release of Ubuntu (Score:5, Interesting)
Anyway, Ubuntu is a really great distro. I've moved from Debian to Mandrake (now Mandriva) becouse of outdated packages needed for a workstation
Re:VIA C3 Bug (Score:5, Insightful)
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It's not an Ubuntu bug. Your hardware is flawed. (Score:5, Funny)
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Re:VIA C3 Bug (Score:4, Informative)
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Re:VIA C3 Bug (Score:4, Informative)
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Re:Ugly Theme (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Must every thread be used by you for proselytiz (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
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Re:You're right, the GNOME file selector has to go (Score:4, Interesting)
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.
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Re:Maybe it's just me (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
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Re:Ubuntu Linux... (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
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Re:Ubuntu Linux... (Score:4, Interesting)
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.
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Re:Ubuntu Linux... (Score:3, Insightful)
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.
Re:What is new with ubuntu? (Score:3, Insightful)
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.
Re:Ok, it's been released... (Score:5, Insightful)
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Re:Ok, it's been released... (Score:4, Informative)
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Re:Ok, it's been released... (Score:4, Interesting)
Regards,
Steve
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