Ubuntu 6.06 LTS released

Cormic

The latest version of Ubuntu has just been released. The version codenamed "Dapper Drake" is available free to download or free on CD.

I am currently doing the update to my version 5.10 at the moment. I am quite excited about this release. I found 5.10 to be excellent on both my laptop and desktop.

I will post anything of interest that I find. I hope I won't encounter any issues

Khannie

I'll probably upgrade myself this weekend. Just wanted to see how many people had issues with the dist-upgrade first. Syxpak said his one went fine. I notice they have the latest nvidia drivers in the Dapper apt repository. Niceness.

oscarBravo

Upgraded to beta a few weeks ago. Just one gotcha: make sure your kernel upgrades. Mine didn't, and I had problems booting. I downloaded a beta live CD, used it to boot my install, got a new kernel and fanny's yer aunt.

Balfa

Ugh. It totally sucks. I grabbed the standard i686 desktop CD off their website. At first I thought it was pretty nifty that it booted into a full fledged OS (live CD) from which you do the installation (there's an "install" icon on the live cd desktop).

But the installer didn't tell me the whole difference between hardware clock and system clock like breezy did, and the whole timezone and clock configuration was a little confusing in general, because the time on the gnome panel was different to that in the install dialogue And on top of that, I went to change the time in the dialogue and clicked OK and it crashed. The unexpected error dialogue asked me to send the details to the developers, so I agreed to, but then it wandered off asking me which application broke, and it only had a paltry few in the list, none of which were anything install or time related. So I gave up and started again at the install icon...

This time I didn't try to change the time, but when I came to partition manager, I did my usual thing (same thing I did going from hoary to breezy) of deleting the ext3 and swap (hda3 and hda4), leaving the stupid dell partition and my original windows partition and asking it to just use all the free space in whatever way it felt best.... except this time there's no option to do that. I had to manually create a new ext3 and swap. It's not a show stopper, but it's a huge step backwards for a "linux for humans".

Then, to top everything off, the partition manager crashed as well, asking me to go to the dev website and submit a crash report. But, unlike my hoary live cd, this one failed to find my wireless network, so I couldn't get to their website

I started again and this time it's working and almost finished copying the system files to the hard disk. I never had any problems like this with hoary or breezy. All in all, a pretty wretched experience. I hope they come out with a 6.07 pretty soon. For a suposedly super-stable long term support version, this is totally botched.

Balfa

AND it didn't prompt me to set up any networking stuff so I had to manually go in and enter my ssid and wep, etc.

AND it goes all funky colours when I shut down.

Again, not the end of the world, but a big disappointment.

Khannie

Jaysus....that's a pretty horrific experience alright.

steveland?

Only bothered re-installing on my laptop (had Hoary on my PC and then upgraded to Breezy but barely ever use it) when I looked up the chipsets of the laptops sound card, network card, pcmcia slot etc and saw they were all natively supported by Linux.

Installed Breezy and upgraded straight away to Dapper (couldn't be bothered downloading a new iso) and it all went smoothly except for the new wireless driver... so I'm just going to stick with Breezy for the moment... if it ain't broke don't fix it...

Cormic

I have not had a chance to take a good luck at the new install as it is one of my machines in work. I will be able to take a good look at it in the morning and I will post how I find it.

mneylon

I've been running it since early beta without any serious issues. Nice to see the graphics develop as the release date drew closer

Khannie

I still haven't had the inclincation / balls. I want to back up my current setup first....but that's going to be effort....and I'm lazy....and everything works atm....so I'll probably leave it 'til this weekend.....at the earliest.

zilog_jones

I upgraded the apt way (changed sources.list) from breezy. Took about 3 hours in total (was only getting about 80-100KB/s at work), and *most* things seemed to go ok.

One weird issue was that it decided to change my NIC from eth0 to eth1 (even though I have no other NIC and never had), which of course killed my net connection totally until I realised this. I also had to re-configure VMware Server, which also meant I had to get the latest kernel headers and the latest GCC (kinda weird that it didn't update them O_o). But everything else went ok... I think....

Some nice new features:

- OpenGL works on crappy Intel on-board graphics now (I'm using an i845G I think)
- Adept finds apt updates automatically in KDE
- Text seems more legible in general in KDE
- Probably something else I forgot that works better

...hmm, it seems OpenOffice has disappeared...

philologos

its tough to get around wireless networks with it unfortunately for some first time users but it's manageable with a bit of help on the ubuntuforums.org, i've ran it since the flight test versions, Linux takes a while to get it exactly as you want but when you have it your way it works perfectly

Cormic

Ok. First day of using the new version and I found it fine. I like the new Human theme. The only problem I have found so far is that Synergy (great app for using an single keyboard and mouse with two systems) has stopped syncing screensavers. I am sure I will figure it out when a get a few free moments.

Khannie

I did my dist-upgrade over the weekend. I did run into a few problems.

switched to console only and killed the x server to minimise the number of running X apps. Changed my sources.list file to the recommended one...ran apt-get update, then dist-upgrade.

Came back in the morning and it had done the downloading. Asked me about a bunch of config files (as I had made changes to the default...mostly through Automatix). I just took the new config files. Then it crashed on pcmcia upgrading. I rebooted, no joy on the recovery grub target . Went to an old 386 kernel (default is k7-smp for me) and it continued from there. I had to run a dkpg command (that I can't remember) and the installation continued.

Then it finished. I rebooted. No X. Not impressed tbh. X server complained of the opengl module not being available so I copped that it was a driver issue. I did and apt-get install nvidia-glx (luckily knew this package name) which conflicted with nvidia-settings (obviously the problem). startx then brought me in.

Overall, not a noob-friendly upgrade by any stretch. Pretty disappointed with that.

On the plus side though, the new gnome feels very very polished. Lovely artwork.

zilog_jones

Yeah, I hear 6.06 doesn't like the nvidia-settings package at all, but it doesn't need it.

I did a fresh install and only had one problem - after installing the nvidia drivers, if I tried the vga=791 boot option in grub none of the console displays would work - I'd either get a blank screen or some corrupted junk. So I've had to put up with ultra-chunky 40-line text for the time being.

Besides that everything was fine. There's power management stuff now on the desktops, so you can put the PC into standby or hibernate - that feature didn't seem to install onto my upgraded system (running kubuntu). And scarily, my new Netgear wireless NIC worked straight away!

wayne040576

There's been a lot of talk on distrowatch.com recently about how it was a disappointing release. I installed in on my laptop last week and was annoyed to find that they still haven't got wpa support out of the box from the interface tools. You have to download networkmanager for gnome (some job if you have no connection) to do it. I did that and got it up on the network but when I switched over to kde it stopped working again because networkmanager is a gnome applet.

TomTom

I previously had issues with ubuntu and my PC but this install was flawless. No issues in install or running so far and it's picked up every and is working great.

Khannie

Things get worse. When I connect up my PSP now (which should just appear as a memory stick to the computer), it launches "rhythmbox", which falls all over the place trying to make the PSP into an MP3 player. I close it, and it proceeds to eat 100% of a cpu (doing nothing). I try to remove it with synaptic and it tells me that I'll have to remove "ubuntu-desktop" if I wish to do so.

Benefits of upgrade: 0
Downsides of upgrade: 3

philologos

I might change from Ubuntu to Debian as they have made such a bollocks of the wireless network...

zilog_jones

I doubt Debian will be much better regarding wireless networking - Debian's primary a server OS, so desktop app's and WLAN stuff probably don't have much of a priority, especially since Ubuntu is much more well designed for desktop use.

philologos

hmm just going back on my comment about wireless connectivity, I tried it on my newer PC with a ralink 2500 wifi card and it connects straight out of the box. I shall install the AMD 64 edition on this computer so

Edit: Dapper AMD64 works fine, dual booting it with windows for the time being

kdouglas

had a few problems with the upgrade process myself, i used apt to update my work machine and all went grand, until i rebooted, the latest kernel hangs at boot, so i had to revert to an old one, Xorg 7 doesnt like my old xorg.conf and will only display on a single monitor whereas i had a dual screen setup under breezy/xorg 6. And my sound card disappeared for some bizarre reason.

All in all, a bad upgrade experience, i think i may just rebuild the machine with a fresh installation, but i havent had a chance to do it yet, too much work to do.

wayne040576

kdouglas wrote:

had a few problems with the upgrade process myself, i used apt to update my work machine and all went grand, until i rebooted, the latest kernel hangs at boot, so i had to revert to an old one, Xorg 7 doesnt like my old xorg.conf and will only display on a single monitor whereas i had a dual screen setup under breezy/xorg 6. And my sound card disappeared for some bizarre reason.

All in all, a bad upgrade experience, i think i may just rebuild the machine with a fresh installation, but i havent had a chance to do it yet, too much work to do.

I had originally tried to upgrade as well and it was a disaster. Network and wireless cards stop working and I kept getting spots appearing on the screen during shutdown. A few other problems as well so I just did the clean install. Even after that I was close to putting pclinuxOS on the laptop (due to Ubuntu's lack of wpa support). I already use pclinuxOS on the desktop and it's fine. One of the best distros I've used in ages (next to kanotix).

philologos

kdouglas wrote:

had a few problems with the upgrade process myself, i used apt to update my work machine and all went grand, until i rebooted, the latest kernel hangs at boot, so i had to revert to an old one, Xorg 7 doesnt like my old xorg.conf and will only display on a single monitor whereas i had a dual screen setup under breezy/xorg 6. And my sound card disappeared for some bizarre reason.

All in all, a bad upgrade experience, i think i may just rebuild the machine with a fresh installation, but i havent had a chance to do it yet, too much work to do.

it doesn't like onboard soundcards apparently according to people on the Ubuntu forum

Khannie

So I've ironed things out since the intial upgrade. Just thought I'd post here on the positive side of things. I haven't noticed a huge amount (I still use 5.10 in work), but some things that really struck me are:

Plugged in my camera (which requires drivers in windows) and presto. Recognised, asks me what I want to do with the photos on it. Very impressed.

A patch for rhythmbox came and fixed the psp issues. It still launches, but goes away when I tell it to.

Thunar: Nice windows explorer replacement (actually for xfce) but has a lovely multiple file rename option. Not available in synaptic in 5.10. Really like this. It's very lightweight and useful.

When data is being flushed to the PSP, it tells me so and asks me not to unplug the device until it's done (on 5.10 you have to watch the light on the psp, which you learn through trial and error).

Seems very stable.

Seems very polished overall.

Like the new colour scheme.

That's it.

It's a pity the upgrade didn't go smoother. The 6.06 livecd installer is great (used it to install for a friend).

Overall, my move to linux has been a very positive experience and the 6.06 polish has helped that. I'm never going back to windows.

Steveire

I'd recommend it to anyone with aptitude in windows and who wants LaTeX, or Inkscape, or any number of free photo or video editing software or more control, or anything else you can think of software wise.

Almost any problems I've had with it I've been able to solve with #kubuntu/#ubuntu on freenode, or the ubuntuforums. Not that I've had many problems, mainly just stupid newbie issues. Something I don't like though is that Skype doesn't work properly for me under Linux.

Apart from that, I don't play any computer games, so I've almost no need for my windows partition. I'm still quite curious about Gentoo though. There's a lot of fuss about it...

Khannie

Steveire wrote:

I'm still quite curious about Gentoo though. There's a lot of fuss about it...

There is alright. Those who use it swear by it. I had the gentoo installer disc and was going to install it because I was being lazy (too lazy to download the ubuntu installer) so I kick off the installation and get bored after about 10 minutes of clicking and quit. You need to be determined if you want to use gentoo.

oscarBravo

Steveire wrote:

I'm still quite curious about Gentoo though. There's a lot of fuss about it...

I used to be quite the fan, but I've come across some nasty flaws in it. I used it for a simple router platform with a bunch of vtun connections, and it occasionally arbitrarily threw in an unwanted /8 route that screwed up the routing for the whole box. I'm running CentOS in its place, and it's much better behaved.

Explosive_Cornflake

Silly question, but I've no idea how to get Irish Keyboard Layout under Kubuntu. Anyone?

mneylon

Have you installed the language?

JIZZLORD

every single time i tryed to install ubuntu for the last year it wouldnt accecp my graphics card (radeon x200 128mb), i'm now on fedora core which works, but i cant wait to go through the agony that is a linux install to see if ubuntu works!

Explosive_Cornflake

Re: Jizzlord
Ubuntu is one of the fastest distros to install, it's just a pity it comes with f all.
Re: Blacknight,
I guess I havent, but under KDE in (k)ubuntu I'm not sure how to even change keyboard settings. I was using SUSE before this, and yast handled all that for me.

Khannie

Jizzlord: The install cd is a livecd also. You should know straight away if it'll work.

JIZZLORD

i have yet to download it as i'm back on dial up for the summer, but i always got stuck half way through the install, have they got a graphical install yet, fedora was a joy to install

Khannie

Yeah, it's a livecd, and you have a full OS at your disposal while it installs. Lovely stuff really.

Steveire

The only advantage I thought the fedora install had over the ubuntu one was choosing packages to install at install time. If I remember right, it was a graphical yum. 5 cds though, c'mon. I reckon it's at least possible for Ubuntu to offer to check repositories (incl. Universe and Multiverse) at install time and do it all at once without user input

UbuntuniX

As a linux reviewer I gotta say Ubuntu 6.06 is the best distro in years

pickarooney

I found the new install CD to be awful, particularly discouraging for anyone with little experience.

- the default resolution is an unusable 640X420 or whatever, making it next to impossible to read anything that opens or to navigate around the screen. The 'change resolution' tool has no other options than this basic display, and you have to run a text-based config utility to get any other screen res.

- no mp3, divx, rm support. They're easily downloadable, but I've no internet connection at home, so it's a big pile of useless for me.

- ADSL modems - zero support from what I can make out, and I've just spent several hours unsuccesfully trying to get connected from a friend's house, with nothing to show for it but meaningless errors. The included network tools are of no help to newbies or who hasn't set up an ADSL connection before.

- it's a darker brown, but it's still brown!

- the setup asks you for a language and location, only offering the option 'other' if you're in a non-English speaking country and want an English OS. The time zones available are restricted to US ones. This was working in previous versions.

- the help files on setting up an internet connection are a series of hyperlinks to the ubuntu wiki... if you can read this, you don't need to

- the ubuntu forums are permanently down it seems, though that's hardly the CD's fault

Karoma

Fresh install over a different distro.,on my craptop:
- Straight-foward install.
- Configuration: Setting up timezone, etc. was a bit messed up - but it worked, and noted English(Ireland) OK.
- WLAN (CISCO aironet) set up in seconds.
- Had to apt-get a load of stuff (I should have expected it, tbh. Not a major issue and probably a good thing for the majority of installations.)
- I got rid of GNOME (It was too slow, and ugly and ...GNOME.) and put XFCE 4.4 on it. (I tried doing it the long, proper way. I gave up when the installers failed and just sudo apt-get install xubuntu-desktop - it installed quickly.)
Now, works a charm.

Zombrex

Khannie wrote:

Things get worse. When I connect up my PSP now (which should just appear as a memory stick to the computer), it launches "rhythmbox", which falls all over the place trying to make the PSP into an MP3 player. I close it, and it proceeds to eat 100% of a cpu (doing nothing). I try to remove it with synaptic and it tells me that I'll have to remove "ubuntu-desktop" if I wish to do so.

Yeah I must say I've tried Ubuntu 5 and 6 and I'm not a fan.

I encountered the remove ubuntu-desktop problem a few times, also I find the help and wiki's to be pretty crap. For some reason Ubuntu 6 is also only assigning IPv6 to my network card. I've been quickly deactivating and reactivating my card after it boots. i could figure this out I'm sure, but not sure I could be asked.

Ubuntu looks like a desktop for people who want to install Linux and then forget about it. I like playing around with my distrubution until I get it set up nice the way i like it.

Think I'm going back to Gentoo this weekend

Cormic

Wicknight wrote:

Yeah I must say I've tried Ubuntu 5 and 6 and I'm not a fan.

[snip]

Think I'm going back to Gentoo this weekend

This is one of the reasons I love Linux. If you don't like one variety you can try another.

Zombrex

Cormic wrote:

This is one of the reasons I love Linux. If you don't like one variety you can try another.

Very true

I would love to be able to say "ah feck sick of my Microsoft Windows install fecking up, think I'm going to try IBMs Windows instead" ... alas

Mach

I only have one problem with Dapper, which I had in Hoary but not in Breezy.Ita proble with X11, ever now an again the screen goses white on my laptop, and restart x with ctrl-alt backspace/f7.It works fine when I use an extrnal monitor.

Khannie

pickarooney wrote:

- no mp3, divx, rm support. They're easily downloadable, but I've no internet connection at home, so it's a big pile of useless for me.

lol.

Do any free distros come with mp3 support built in?

Personally, I consider linux pretty crippled without an internet connection. It's a very network oriented OS IMO.

pickarooney

Not sure how many distros do, but Mandriva definitely has MP3 support and I'm pretty sure SUSE has. What exactly is the fuzzy legal issue with providing mp3 playback in repositories but not on the install CDs?

Explosive_Cornflake

The fraunhofner codec is copyrighted. LAME is an open source version of it, but it is for educational purposes only Well, that's what i gather. It's a licence issue anyway.
For suse you need the Non OSS dvd version, at least anyway

WizZard

One word: Wow.

I finally took the plunge last night and tried Ubuntu on my laptop (I usually run Gentoo but had to do a disk wipe last week) - I've never seen such seamless install and pre-configuring on any Linux distro that I've tried.

Even down to the correct resolution being chosen for my widescreen laptop (1280x800). I am very impressed with it. I feel that Linux is getting closer to being a mainstream OS now.
Sounds worked (from the beginning), laptops function keys worked, hibernation worked, everything worked on first try.
The only problem for me is that the wireless support during/after install is WEP only - I use WPA2 at home. Although when I went to set up WPA2 for the wireless network it was dead simple (I did manually configure it using wpa_supplicant first, as I'm used to, but then discovered gnome-network-manager which has support for WPA).
All in all I am very impressed.

Now I have to get used to the Debian package manager again - the last time I used Debian was at least 4 years ago

I'm completely amazed at the slickness of Ubuntu and it's a credit to the developers and team that it has come this far.

Anyway, enough raving.

generalmiaow

Ubuntu is great for computers old and new. Not to mention that it can run as gaeilge.

Blowfish

Khannie wrote:

Do any free distros come with mp3 support built in?

There is now, Freespire was released a few days ago. I haven't tried it, but it seems to be more aimed at the 'normal' user rather than power users, but it looks like it would make a good distro for a laptop or media centre