“The Ubuntu team is proud to announce the release of Ubuntu 6.06.1 LTS, the first maintenance release of “Dapper Drake”. This release includes both installable Desktop CDs and alternate text-mode installation CDs for several architectures, for Ubuntu, Kubuntu and Edubuntu. Xubuntu is also included, although commercial support for it is not available from Canonical.”
Canonical is doing well so far with the Dapper release. I’ve found that every version of Ubuntu from Warty –> Hoary –> Breezy –> Dapper is a huge but logical improvement on the previous build. It’s amazing how one Debian Developer with a dream (Mark Shuttleworth) can build a community and one of the most popular desktop Linux distributions in a few years.
With Debian Etch being released soon, the version of Ubuntu after the current development one (Edgy) is poised to benefit quite a lot while also helping out Debian. It seems like many of the Debian <—> Ubuntu developers are playing nicer together.
Yup, but dapper was a bit buggy, after a fresh install there were always like 200MB of upgrades possible, not really a good sign for a few months old OS, but the 6.06.1 should solve a lot of those problems. Ah well I’m gonna go for edgy soon :p me doesn’t like stability, so boring…
I disagree with you there…Have you ever tried to install, say Fedora 1-2months after release? Unless you use a respin, upgrading with development tools weighs in at more like 3-400MB. It sometimes has less to do with the distro and more to do with the actual packages installed.
If the maintainer patches, Ubuntu, Fedura, SUSE , whoever, patches…not a real sign of how good the distro is, just because it has alot of patches to install.
Yes but outside the packages, what’s different about other distros?
Precisely my point, there truly isnt much difference in the core when it comes to packages. The difference between gaim 1.5 on Fedora versus Ubuntu is slim to nothing. To say a distro is unstable based on the number of patches is a huge assumption. I would argue that the majority of the patches for most distros and most packages are bugfixes not necessarily brought on by something the distribution itself did wrong or improperly.
Distro differentiate themselve by how the implement the packages and intergrate the OS as a whole. SLED is a perfect example of this. Particularly to end-users, they could care less, most of the time,whats under the hood, they are much more concerned about things “just working”.
Ah well I’m gonna go for edgy soon :p me doesn’t like stability, so boring….
And I’ll take the boringness of “it just works” (allowing me to complete my projects) any day.
OTOH, “wild” code doesn’t get tamed unless the pioneers go out there and explore.
Sometimes those aren’t bug fix updates but feature updates which the distributor believed wouldn’t introduce problems. For example, a new version of Gaim is only going to break Gaim if it’s broken so you can test Gaim and then send out the update for it even if it’s only a feature improvement and not a security fix.
he is no longer one debian developer with a dream when he is worth GBP 400 million and pouring millions to hire some of the best gnome and debian developers. ;o)
That’s a new versioning scheme. Wonder if this is only for LTS releases or for normal releases too.
It’s a good thing nevertheless, it’s nice to know that you can download a more secure and stable version that you don’t have to upgrade immeadiately.
yeah these ‘point’ updates are provided because its the LTS version.
Just a question, do you know if the “Slab” (the new suse gnome menu) is in that release and if search (that is beagle) is just as well integrated in this release as it is in SLED – just curious.
nope SLAB is not in this release. This is simply a security updated point release for dapper. Think of it like a windows CD that includes service pack.
SLAB most likely won’t be default in ubuntu at all ever since it requires mono. Even the version of beagle that comes default with ubuntu is a precompiled library that doesn’t require the mono package to be installed. There is however an effort to create a similar panel applet to SLAB that is ubuntu-centric called the Ubuntu System Panel. Its at version 0.31 now and is already very usable
http://www.ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=222546
Actually we’re on the 0.33 – 0.34 release now.
I haven’t had much chance to work on it lately, but I certainly use it a lot 
Slab is written in C and doesn’t require Mono. But even if it did, Ubuntu edgy will install mono by default.
The beagle library you’re refering to is a C wrapper to beagle. It’s only used when the beagle daemon is running, and as you know that requires mono.
Mono is already included on the default installation of Ubuntu Edgy betas, and Slab is written in C. I personally don’t like the usability of the new slab menu. It seems like it brings the problems with the Windows start menu and combines them with the problems of the Mac menu. To me personally, it feels like the worst of both worlds. I love the current menu, which feels like a much improved version of the Windows start menu. Some quick launch applications at the top of the menu would be nice, but I think its important to keep the fast and easy menu categorization for all program, including the lesser used programs, and not hiding them away in another window like OS X does. I love the current menu and hope that the slab menu is rejected by the community. Usability wise, it feels horrible to me. Sure, it does look good and have all of the next generation features, but thats about it. I hope it gets revamped to make launching applications that aren’t pinned easier and have better categorization of everything.
Out of curiosity, does anyone have a link to a good torrent of this release? A quick Google search didn’t find anything.
will it become a Gnome standard?
will SUSE also use the Slab in the KDE desktop?
this respin idea, a-la Fedora, is a good thing, i wish SUSE would do it.
Slab (a modified version) is reviewed for inclusion in Fedora.
https://bugzilla.redhat.com/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=199681
Slab is a GNOME panel applet and is incompatible with KDE applet mechanisms. Someone could rewrite a similar implementation for KDE however.
would be completely useless since no one knows what KDE 4 is gonna look like, first wait that, after that applets are easily added and there’s a framework to create such and awfull slab function stuff.
Personally, I’d hate it if it became a GNOME standard. It’s way too navigationally bulky (if what you’re searching for is not immediately present) and it displays too much information that you have to hunt through if all you need is a location or a system setting or a new program. If I want to search for an app, the deskbar is a much quicker way that doesn’t get in the way.
That being said, I don’t see a problem with it being a standard panel option, like the deskbar. The standard GNOME menus (sans deskbar or SLAB) could be present since it’s simple and clean and easy to understand. However if you wanted to augment it with the deskbar or replace the standard GNOME menu with SLAB or Gimmie ( http://beatnik.infogami.com/Gimmie ), it’d take only a few mouse clicks.
I agree, i think more distrobutions should issue respins, but i think its a matter of manhours…Most of the public distros dont have really long lifecylcles, therfore i don’t think they place alot of importance on maintenance respins. I suspect we will see more respins of LTS because of the long product life cycle.
I just installed 6.06 (not 6.06.1) on my laptop, and to my utter amazement, my Linksys WPC11 wireless card worked immediately out of the box! Bloody excellent!
Not sure about other people’s experiences, but the GUI installer in Dapper needed some attention. On Monday I had to wipe Ubuntu off of my laptop and install Windows XP on it (needed XP for a class I’m taking in .NET, and couldn’t ever get VMWare going). So, after installing XP, I booted off of the Dapper CD and went to install it as a dual boot machine. I went to the manual partition and told the installer to use 50% of the available space. The installer started going, but after an hour of it sitting on the partition screen, and no activity on the drive, the machine was locked up. Once I had rebooted I discovered that the partition headings were seriously hosed.
I’ve done fresh installs with Dapper on my laptop, without setting up the dual boot, and it worked fine. However, I’m a bit too timid to try to setup the dual boot again considering how long it takes to get everything with XP installed and secured. Has anyone else here seen the same problem with setting up the dual boot? The laptop I have is a HP n5150.
Edited 2006-08-10 14:03
The graphical installer stalls on anything less than 512mb of RAM. Its terrible.
I tried partitioning on a 256MB system and it just sat there for a few hours(I had the time to watch).
The text mode install is much better than the GUI version, and makes it easier to get the install done. I just got my Dapper CDs in the mail, for distrobution at my school. I hope those have a text installer.
That doesn’t match my experiences.
The install I did this morning took around 20 minutes from start to finish.
That was on a VM with 256MB of ram allocated to it.
VM=Virtual Machine?
Did you run the install from an image or the actual CD?
I did 3 installs:
2 Celeron D computers with 256 MB of RAM and onboard video and
1 400 MHz Celeron (Slot 1 type) with 256MB of RAM and onboard video
On the first two, it stayed there for a few hours with no response after the partitioning screen (it was hitting the CD freq though)
on the 400mhz celeron, it was just too slow. On both, I fixed the problem by adding some Ram temporarily.
The actual distro runs just fine in 128mb of Ram — no problems. Its just the live CD and installer.
It takes longer. I wouldn’t call it stalling. I know because I did it last night on a 256Mb laptop. The initial CD startup and the partitioning are the worst offenders because they require either a lot of memory or a lot of swap patience.
Outside of those two issues, pretty good.
Broadcom wifi support, not so good. Ubuntuforums has two warring camps between bcm43xx and ndiswrapper, with plenty of wounded unhappy with both since the Dapper release broke ndiswrapper.
It isn’t Ubuntu’s fault that Broadcom support is native to 2.6.17, but maybe some of it could be backported.
The shipit cds are the desktop ones unfortuantly
My laptop actually has 512MB RAM in it, so I don’t think memory is the problem. I think the partitioning portion of the installer has a bug in it. Like I said, if I want to wipe the entire drive clean, it’ll install fine. But, if I only want to partition off 50% of the drive, then that’s where it throws a fit at.
I had the same problem with Dapper. I went to resize some partitions to install it, and it just hung on the partitioner. I downloaded the alternate cd and did a text mode install which worked very well for me.
The GUI partitioner is not robust. Building a Mythbox requires an XFS partition, and the Ubuntu LiveCD’s GUI partitioner chokes on trying to make XFS partitions. Random combinations of partition sizes also yield failures; I resized a Windows laptop last night from 20Gb (no Windows swap, oddly) to 5Gb NTFS/100Mb FAT32/1Gb swap/remaining ext3 and it choked until I redid it with 150Mb FAT32. No real explanation why.
Fixing it needs to be a priority, even if the need for XFS is pretty unlikely.
Maybe reading the linked article would have been a good idea before you start complaining about something.
TFA says:
* Fix gparted crash if xfs_db fails (#50909).
Ya think that might be the XFS bug you are talking about?
Or how about these for the other partition problems you were having:
more defence against gparted/qtparted crashing (#47194, #48856)
I tried to install Dapper on several computers first using the text-based installer. After multiple attempts resulting in a black-screen of death, I tried using the graphical installer. The graphical installer took over three hours to load up and when it finally came up, it would not work either. I then had to go back to my 5.10 cds, reinstall from scratch, and then use apt to upgrade to 6.06. This was not the best impression for an “enterprise” release.
BTW, a word of advice to the Ubuntu team, I actually like the text based installer better than the GUI based installer. In fact, I like it better than the SuSE and RedHat installer too. It is a lot nicer and faster than the others and feels more intuitive too.
I tried to install Dapper on several computers first using the text-based installer. After multiple attempts resulting in a black-screen of death, I tried using the graphical installer. The graphical installer took over three hours to load up and when it finally came up, it would not work either. I then had to go back to my 5.10 cds, reinstall from scratch, and then use apt to upgrade to 6.06. This was not the best impression for an “enterprise” release.
BTW, a word of advice to the Ubuntu team, I actually like the text based installer better than the GUI based installer. In fact, I like it better than the SuSE and RedHat installer too. It is a lot nicer and faster than the others and feels more intuitive too.
By all means, file a bug report. I’ve had big problems with the graphical installer, but never with the text-mode (now called “alternate”) installer. It would be sad if Ubuntu regressed.
I actually like the text based installer better than the GUI based installer.
I bet a lot of people did, but when it was the default we were happy and quiet, while all the people who feel that something isn’t modern if it doesn’t have a GUI were loud in their complaints.
Maybe the graphical installer will become faster, more robust and get more options, and we’ll all be happy.
A GUI installer like Fedora’s would be awesome.
Dapper 6.06 was the first Ubuntu release that gave me troubles with the text-based installer which otherwise worked extremely reliably. The screen would just go blank after configuring XOrg. After several attempts, I worked around this using some boot options. BTW I didn’t have such problems with the Dapper Flight 3 development release.
Huh. I don’t see why you wouldn’t have upgraded using apt in the first place.
It’s not about updating, obviously if you have it already installed, you will already have the point release. The reason for a point release is for initial installs.
Ubuntu is a good distro (for fun and learn linux), but for “the real thing” it fails.
1-Where is graphic tools to install/admin the major servers (apache/tomcat/postfix/bind).
2-Where is the install/admin/reference docs for that software (ok the community is huge, but is not the same thing) ?
3-Why not create pre-configured “packages” in the installation routine to satisfy most of the uses for linux: webserver with log reports, webdesign, programming…
I know people that deal with linux are capable for install/compile software, but I prefer to waste my time with something usefull (not in search solution for install/configure bind for example…)
Edited 2006-08-10 15:14
Not to turn you into flamebait, but there are multiple answers to all of your complaints…readily available.
1) Dont even know where to start with this one. Webmin can admin them all, so for servers that would be my gui of choice. But there is a interface to fit just about any need be it ncurses based or web-based
2) Every package comes with its own documentation…And for major services there is normally a package dedicated to just documentation. ie apt-get install apache-doc
3) I know with the debian installer you do get these options in a test based install. It may be availabel in Ubuntu in a expert install, however I have never needed to do this because most admins DONT need lumped packages of programs because they install only what they need anyway.
To create packages for desktop usage would be to broad of a sword IMO. Take into consideration that the environments are so variable…the best tool for the job is a matter of opinion and best left up to the user to decide. I think Ubuntu would anger more peopel than please by making these type of decisions…stick to the basics as they have done, and make it easy for peopel to expand on their own.
I recently converted a whole family of 8 to linux a few weeks back for the first time with Dapper..Even a computer nocie can be shown how to go into Synaptic and find and install programs.
I just installed Ubuntu 6.06.1 on a desktop PC (Dell Optiplex) that had a hyperthreading P4 chip in it and I disappointingly got a single processor kernel installed (an “i386” one at that!). I don’t have access to a dual core desktop (but these are becoming increasing common), but it would be equally disappointing if a dual core desktop ended up with a single processor kernel as well.
Yes, I can use synaptic to download an i686 SMP kernel (called “linux”, which threw me a bit, being used to kernel packages being called “kernel” 🙂 ), but I’m not sure all of Ubuntu’s target audience would be that clueful.
And don’t get me started as to why Ubuntu installs the ssh client by default, but not the ssh server (like people don’t own 2 PCs or ever want to ssh into their Ubuntu box from other machines?). Either Ubuntu should install neither the client nor the server or it should install both of them, but it actually installs only one of the two! Yep, another synaptic download to the rescue again…
SLAB…
just for anyone who didn’t know, you can download the new “SLAB” menu with Automatix or install the debs here (for openSUSE/rpms and Ubuntu):
http://digg.com/linux_unix/SLED_Menu_For_Ubuntu_(Uslab)_Now_In_Repo
(copy and paste entire link to new window)
http://digg.com/linux_unix/SLED_Menu_For_Ubuntu_(Uslab)_Now_In_Repo
I really dig it. To bad the “gcontrol” panel doesn’t have search like in Novell SLED 10.1 though.
Edited 2006-08-12 03:54