this girl drives a tank

xubuntu (dapper)

Most people familiar with Ubuntu know that the latest release codenamed "Dapper Drake" was released recently. (Actually I think the beta release only carries a codename now and officially this release is called 6.06 LTS, which makes me wonder where the number 6 is coming from, have they had 5 prior releases?)

I downloaded the Ubuntu version and Xubuntu, the Xfce4 Desktop version as I usually remove Gnome and install Xfce4 anyway. The first thing I noticed was that you had to boot to the live CD desktop and then click on an install icon to start actually installing the OS.

This struck me as a bit odd that they wont let you jump straight into a text based install right off the bat. I then noticed that there actually is no text installer anymore :( You have to do it with the GUI and have to sit there for 2 or 3 minutes whilst the desktop loads and then start installing.



The other thing I really do not like is the GUI partitioner, ok it's not too bad in that it is intuitive and you can even just stretch out the partitions with your mouse to the size you want, but, you cannot specify percentages as partition sizes,you must instead use MB or GB and worse, you cannot set the mount points on the same page, so lets say you make 3 primary partitions and an extended partition containing 3 more logical partitions, you then have to go to another page where you get to enter which one of the 6 partitions you want as boot, home and so on. Perhaps this is too much for my feeble short term memory but why not let the user assign this at the same time?

If you want to crash the installer, don't create a swap partition and click on the forward button, when a dialog box pops ups warning you about having no swap space, click on the back button to fix this error and presto!, the installer will then crash.

This release did not recognize and subsequently offer to configure my pcmcia wireless network card, which the last 2 versions of Ubuntu did, I don't know if they dropped support for this because they cannot legally distribute the driver or what exactly happened but I am left with no networking at all which as we all know simply sucks.

Lastly, the xscreensaver is on by default, and picks an opengl screensaver, despite having no video card driver capable of displaying opengl applications.

So I suppose I am not that impressed with "Dapper" and being the fickle type that I am, I suspect it wont last long on this laptop if something prettier and more interesting comes along. :-)

Update: My roomate walked in and suggested we call this guy :-)