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Review: Ubuntu Dapper Flight 5Friday, March 24. 2006
The Ubuntu Linux distribution launched itself into the Linux community only eighteen months ago, and in that short amount of time has managed to gather a considerably large amount of publicity.
The fifth alpha release, Dapper Flight 5, was released on March 10th, 2006; the final release of Ubuntu 6.06, codenamed "Dapper Drake", is expected in June, after founder Mark Shuttleworth recommended a six week delay to iron out usability issues. This release will be promising considerable more than Ubuntu's earlier releases - making a big grab for the commercial desktop by supporting it for five years. Five years is a long time, and clearly the Ubuntu people want to make sure it's every bit as good as it can be. So how is it stacking up so far? InstallationThe distribution's new boot-up splash screen provides a number of menu options; three different installation options (standard, OEM and server), a CD defect test, a rescue option, a memory test and a hard disk boot option. This is quite a departure from Ubuntu (and Debian) boot CDs to date, where options other than the default are selected by typing the name of a profile at a command prompt. Beyond that point, installation is fairly standard for a Debian-based distribution; first there's a language chooser, then a location chooser and finally a keyboard selector, with a handy process to help determine what style keyboard is being used if the user isn't sure. Next, the user is asked for a hostname and then the installer starts the disk partitioner, which gives two simple options - use the entire disk, or use the entire with LVM - and a more complex manual option. The last two steps, before package installation starts, are to determine the timezone and to create a user account. Unlike Debian, Ubuntu installs all of the required packages in a single installation stage. This is incredibly handy for a set-and-forget install. Unfortunately, this process is let down half-way through, when the user is prompted to configure the screen resolution. It would be much better if these questions could be asked at the start of the installation, so that the user can leave the system to install itself and walk away. Otherwise, the installation of the system was painless and trouble free, including the installation of the bootloader. Booting and Logging inUpon boot-up of the newly installed system, the user is presented with the now-familiar brown on black Ubuntu splash screen. Boot messages are displayed in a small area below the Ubuntu logo, without all the technical details typically provided during a Linux boot. This will, at least, make booting the operating system a far less confusing process for the novice user. The login screen is stock-standard gdm login display, with an Ubuntu theme. Nothing out of the ordinary here; options to change the language, shutdown, reboot, session choices (GNOME, failsafe, etc), remote XDMCP login. There was also an option to configure the login screen itself, without needing to physically log in - unfortunately, that crashed my X xsession as soon as I started it up. DesktopThe Ubuntu desktop is quite uncomplicated; based around GNOME, it has a brown backdrop with an Ubuntu logo displayed on a distant horizon and two panels, one across the top of the screen and the second across the bottom. The upper panel has a number of menu items on the left, and some small applets, including a date/time display, running on the right. The bottom panel contains the list of active windows, and the waste-paper basket - a novel location for this, out of the way and consuming little desktop real-estate. For those who don't like the positions of these panels, they can be easily dragged to another edge of the screen; there didn't, however, appear to be any way of altering the size of them. The leftmost menu on the upper panel is labeled "Applications", and it serves as a Windows-style "Start" menu; GUI-based applications are listed under a variety of categories, and the final option in the list launches an application for adding or removing software. To the right of this is the "Places" menu, which allows the user to launch the built-in file-browser at various locations - their home directory, their desktop and the "computer", a catchall location that provides file-browser access to the root filesystem and any removable device that may currently be plugged into the system. Inexplicably, it listed my system has having eight floppy disk devices, which I found rather odd given that the PC I installed it on didn't have any floppy drive in it at all. The user is able to log out by way of an icon on the far right of the upper panel; clicking on this brings up a window with Log Out, Switch User, Lock Screen, Sleep, Hibernate, Restart and Shut Down options. The Hibernate option didn't work for me; while the machine saved its state and turned itself off with ease, rebooting wasn't so smooth - it went through the motions, but at the last minute, just as X was starting up, the screen filled with garbage and the machine hung. Same story with the Sleep option. I'll put this down to my machine's ATI Radeon 9200 graphics card. File management is handled with GNOME's Nautilus. Fortunately, it has been placed in browser mode, so it doesn't open up a new window every time a folder is clicked on, as would otherwise be the Nautilus default - I'd love to know how that behaviour ever passed the usability test. SecurityIt's very pleasant to see an install that does not have hundreds of unneeded services running by default. Upon initial install, there were only three TCP ports in use; one for the CUPS printing system, and two for HPLIP (HP Linux Printing and Imaging System). These were bound only to the loopback interface, and hence were not accessible from the outside network. On the UDP side of things, the only port bound was that being used by the DHCP client program, to receive responses from the DHCP server. One disappointing omission from the default installation is that of wpasupplicant, which provides WPA key negotiation for secure wireless networks. Without this, it isn't possible to use Ubuntu on anything other than open wireless networks, or those using the WEP encryption method, which has now been shown to be trivially simple to break. Wireless networks are now so commonplace that users should be encouraged to be using WPA wherever possible. Of course, this need not be a problem for the more technical user; wpasupplicant is available in Ubuntu's "universe" package repository, but using it requires that repository be first added to the system, and then the package must be explicitly downloaded. Furthermore, wpasupplicant's configuration is quite difficult. It would be nicer if it was part of the default install, with a simple configuation tool. Ubuntu is notable for not using a root password, and Dapper is no different to previous releases in this regard. Instead of using su to change to a privileged account, users use sudo to execute commands with root privileges, and they are prompted for their own password before the commands run. Previously, I had been of the opinion that this would be incredibly annoying; however, in practice, the system remembers that the user has entered their password for a short period of time, which makes performing administration tasks quite smooth. PrintingUbuntu, like most modern Linux distributions, uses CUPS as its default print system. Adding a printer is straightforward - there's a Printer item, under the System menu, which, when selected, displays a file-browser window with an Add-Printer button. The only problem that I encountered while trying to add a networked printer on a nearby Windows machine was that during the final step, it seems that the "Install Driver" button is the logical button to press - it isn't. MultimediaFor some reason, I was under the impression that it was in the multimedia area that Ubuntu would really shine. To be fair, if the entire world used only free, patent-unencumbered media formats, it probably would. Ripping CDs to ogg files is a breeze; insert your audio CD, and up pops the Sound Juicer program, which lets the user play and rip tracks at their leisure. Creating a custom audio CD with mix-and-matched ogg files is similarly easy, using the Serpentine CD burner. And burning a CD from an ISO image couldn't be simpler - it's just a matter of right clicking on the icon. The default movie player, Totem, had no problems with streaming ogg files from the web. This, however, was where the simplicity ended. The Ubuntu CD provides only codecs that are freely available in a GNU sense; for this reason, the only media formats supported out-of-the-box are ogg/vorbis and ogg/theora. Support for other formats, notably mp3, which has a number of patent issues surrounding it, must be downloaded from Ubuntu's other archives (entitled "restricted", "universe" and "multiverse"). The Ubuntu people provide a wiki-page with detailed instructions on what needs to be done to get these codecs going. Enabling mp3 support was quite simple, and while it worked for playing static mp3 files from my desktop, I simply could not get Totem to play live mp3 audio streams. Moving onto formats that are even further up the proprietary path, when support for Microsoft's Windows Media format was enabled, Totem appeared to go through the motions of playing the stream, but there was no sound at all. One annoying problem that I found was with the handling of mime-types; at one point, from Firefox, when clicking on a link to an ogg-stream, I accidentally selected the handler as "download" and set it to "always perform this action for this type of file". Unfortunately, I could find no easy way of fixing the mistake I'd made. One of my major criticisms of the GNOME desktop is the "dumbing-down" of its features in the name of usability. The Totem media player suffers from this in a major way; most particularly, the lack of a stop button when playing media. Apparently these buttons are now passe; we're supposed to press the Play button to both start and stop playback, which is less than intuitive and quite unlike the interfaces that hardware media devices have had historically. DVDs posed further problems. While reading and writing data DVDs presented few issues, I was unable to play encrypted DVDs using either Totem or the unsupported xine/gxine players. This was despite the fact that I had downloaded and installed libdvdcss; I've never had any problem playing such DVDs under Debian, using Christian Marillat's extra packages. I was unable to make Totem even play unencrypted DVDs; fortunately xine came to the rescue here. ProductivityUbuntu's primary web-browser is Firefox 1.5.0.1. Epiphany is available as a supported alternative, as is Konqueror, if you want to download all the KDE libraries that will be dependencies. In the unsupported universe repository, there's Mozilla and, my favourite, Galeon. Instant messaging is handled with the swiss army knife of IM programs, gaim. It has support for Jabber, AIM/ICQ, MSN, Yahoo, Napster, IRC and even the esoteric (well, outside Poland) Gadu-Gadu system. The default email reader is Evolution 2.5.91. Being a dedicated mutt user, I've never really seen the need to use Evolution in the past, so I took the opportunity to try it out. It certainly seems full-featured enough, with a combined calendar, tasklist and memo suite. It has support for a wide range of protocols with which it can talk to mailservers; the standard POP and IMAP support, but also Novell Groupwise and Microsoft Exchange, which would certainly be a boon for those who are stuck on corporate networks with obstinate Exchange administrators who refused to turn on standards-based support. I've worked on such networks, and they're not pleasant; Evolution should hopefully free up many IT staff from the need to have a both Linux box and a Windows machine on their desk. Of course, no distribution would be complete without an office suite, and like most other distributions now, Dapper ships with OpenOffice version 2.0.1. Having been using Openoffice 2 on Debian for a number of months now, I was pleasantly surprised that the Ubuntu people have done quite a bit of work on their version of the package. The Debian packages of this program have had a custom theme applied to them and look terrible - to the extent that the whole suite appears to be little more than a toy. Under Ubuntu, however, the toolbar icons are smaller, without the annoying colours, giving it the look and feel of professional office software, as it should. There was a strange problem with the Openoffice menus, however. Menu items, after being selected, would remain their highlighted orange colour. After this, the menus themselves would appear transparent, making them very confusing to read. A later update provided a fix for this. Hardware SupportOf course, one of the major issues with any given distribution is its support of the wide variety of hardware it might be exposed to, and Ubuntu performed very well, at least with the hardware that I had on hand. All of the hardware inside my desktop PC was detected properly at boot time, and virtually everything worked immediately - the only exception being the Hauppage analog TV receiver, which required software from the unverse repository to be installed before it could be used. I had no problems with the onboard or PCI USB adaptors, the PCI firewire card was detected straight away, and even the Marvell Gigabit ethernet interface, which had given me plenty of problems under Solaris 10, worked properly. The onboard sound card, of the AC97 variety, worked straight out of the box. Furthermore, my ATI RV280 graphics card worked perfectly - including support for accelerated 3d graphics. Ubuntu had no difficulty detecting my USB memory stick and my iPod, popping up icons in the top left part of the desktop when these were plugged in. Files could then be transferred to and from each just by dragging and dropping. I initially plugged the iPod as a USB device; under Debian, I'd had much trouble ever getting the firewire interface on it to work, due to kernel bugs. Under Ubuntu, however, it worked perfectly. The default Dapper install doesn't have specific iPod software, so it can't be used for much more than contacts (vCards from Evolution) or as a file storage device, out of the box. For transferring music files, it was necessary to download gtkpod, from the universe repository. I encountered a fairly serious problem with my Canon Powershot G5 camera, however. Ubuntu managed to detect the camera accurately, but when trying to import photos, it failed with the cryptic error message "The path file:///DCIM/120CANON is not absolute". I wasn't able to find any way to sort this out, but fortunately there were no problems importing the same photos when I inserted the camera's flash card into a USB reader. As a quick test, I copied the Ubuntu installation from my desktop across to my Sony Vaio laptop, and quickly booted into it - there were no problems there, on the hardware side of things, either. My Sony memory stick card was detected, the Intel Centrino ipw2100 wireless card worked properly and the system detected that it was a laptop and displayed a battery monitoring application in the upper panel. Software Updates and Installation.Being an alpha release, with Ubuntu Dapper still in development, packages are still being updated regularly. At the top right hand corner of the screen there was a small note indicating that updates were available for download. Clicking on the update icon brought up the Software Updates manager, presumably a graphical interface to either apt-get or the aptitude utility. Downloading new updates was very simple to do - little more was required that a cursory glance through the list of updates and their descriptions - and then pressing the "Install Updates" button. When finished, it prompted for a reboot, since a new kernel had been installed. Under the hoodFlight 5 uses the Linux 2.6.15 kernel; it's likely that this will be the version used in the final release also, despite the fact that 2.6.16 is out now. Preemptive multitasking has been enabled in its configuration, to optimise the distribution for desktop use. By default, the system is installed with a kernel that should work on any Intel (or AMD) i386 architecture processor, but there are also kernel images available that are optimised for use with later model AMD k7 and Intel i686 processors. The system is able to read and write all major Linux filesystems; ext2, ext3, xfs, reiserfs and jfs; this immediately gives Ubuntu an advantage over Redhat Enterprise, which has only support for ext2 and ext3. The default installation has no support for C development; rather, the Ubuntu developers have concentrated on Python, and a CD install of the distribution provides Python programmers with a large range of libraries; there's support for LDAP, GNOME, PostgresQL, MySQL and SOAP, just to name a few. The only supported integrated development environment is the limited, but otherwise useful Idle - this isn't supplied on the CD, however, and must be downloaded. C programmers, naturally, have access to GCC 4.0 and the huge range of development software available for Linux, in the Ubuntu archives. The compiler is available in the main archive, but all IDEs for C development, including Anjuta and KDevelop, are in the unsupported universe archive. Java programmers are well served in the universe repository with IBM's huge IDE, Eclipse. Obviously Sun's JDK is not available, due to its non-free nature, but here the GCC people have come to the rescue, as their compilers not only have support for compiling Java programs as Java bytecode, but are able to compile native binaries also. VerdictSo, when and why would you choose to use Ubuntu? I would have no hesitation in rolling it out in an office environment, where the primary applications required are a mail reader, office suite and web browser, and where multimedia applications are fairly low in priority. And while I may not use it myself, the prospect of paid support from Canonical is likely to be a good way to swing management types on board, also. I would probably even consider deploying Ubuntu onto the desktops of low-tech family members, where the most complex multimedia task ever likely to be performed would be to rip a few audio CDs and then mix and match some tracks back onto a new CD. For higher-tech family members and friends, I would probably be more likely to use plain old Debian, with Christian Marillat's excellent archive of multimedia packages. In all, Ubuntu Dapper looks like being a very promising release. The supported applications work nicely together, the desktop integrates most of the day-to-day tasks that a user needs to manage their computer and, importantly, it is pleasant to use. My only concern is with the multimedia support. I understand how the Ubuntu people have their hands tied with regard to less-than-free media formats, but it unlikely that users are going to want to be stuck with just ogg vorbis audio and theora video; it would be nice to see the process for downloading support for other codecs streamlined - and for the codecs to work correctly when used. If you found this article helpful, consider making a donation to offset the costs of running this server, to one of these addresses: Trackbacks
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