Ubuntu 6.06 released
Archives Forums/Linux Discussion/Ubuntu 6.06 released
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| For all those who care, Ubuntu 6.06 (Dapper Drake) has been released! www.ubuntu.com My experience with it since the 4th Alpha version has been marvellous. All the artwork (exception being boot splash, but I got a new one) is vastly improved, and there are many nice, subtle features which improve ease of use such as built in support for more wireless cards, a nicer update manager, nice installer... etc. Also a newer version of Gnome, which apparently can be set up to rival the appearance of Vista... The synaptic package manager has been cleaned up, and when an Ubuntu installation CD is inserted it can automatically open the package manager using it as a repository. The release brought on a redesigned home page, too! I much prefer the new home page, as the old one looked like some nutty touchy-feely children's charity and probably scared off thousands of people. So, I think it's pretty nice :) Now that I've learned how to run my Windows installation straight through Ubuntu with minimal performance loss, I'll never need to touch it again! (That is, on my expendable computer. My good computer will probably always be on Windows...) |
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| Rival Vista's interface? Vista looks ugly! GNOME and KDE look better I think.. But I'm a minimalist Fluxbox/Blackbox man. I should really check out Ubuntu. Everyone says it is really good and I've never tried it. |
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| Sounds good, Mr. P, thanks for the notice. I have a spare partition, so I'll try it out alongside 5.10 (which I just recently got accelerated video working on <g>). I've learned how to run my Windows installation straight through Ubuntu with minimal performance loss How's that? I've been rebooting and swapping boot drives in BIOS to switch between Ubuntu and XP. I haven't tried starting XP via Grub - I'm not sure I trust it with XP, which is my "real" OS (since when I use Grub to start 98, I have to do a hard reset during shutdown). However, XP can see the Ubuntu drive as letter U: via "IFS Drives", so moving files between them is easy. |
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| I use Grub on my machine to dual boot between Ubuntu and XP. Only once had a problem with it. After running an update of Ubuntu, XP was removed from the list of available OS's in Grub. Luckily I had backed up my Grub settings files, so it was a quick fix. I guess Ubuntu just felt like taking over my machine. :-) Ragnar p.s. I guess he's talking about running window through Wine or something like it...right? |
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| Also a newer version of Gnome, which apparently can be set up to rival the appearance of Vista... I assume you are referring to the combination of Xgl and Compiz. They can do some very nifty special effects, including (for those who haven't heard of them): - Windows which wobble as they are moved around and resized, and zoom in and out as they are closed. - Coloured drop shadows on windows - Place the 4 desktop screens on the sides of a giant 3D cube which can be freely rotated. - Translucent window borders - OS-X Expose-style tricks. Some screenshots of users' experiments can be found here - http://www.compiz.net/viewforum.php?id=12 I have it on my Dapper desktop, but don't use it because Xgl is noticeably slower (or seems so) at basic 2D drawing operations. It also uses more CPU time and can lag somewhat if you have a lot of CPU-intensive tasks running in the background (desktop search, compiling large C++ projects etc.) The 3D effects need some polish before they can be used in an everyday working desktop - although if you turn off the more fancy effects like wobbly windows it becomes usable. |
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| Does this release finally work with ATI cards from the start? |
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| Does this release finally work with ATI cards from the start? Alas, I do not believe it does... I haven't tested it myself, but I haven't seen any mention of the issue being resolved.I think they're coming a bit closer though. They have a newer, faster, smarter, cooler installer, so it may be able to figure out if it can (and should) use that proprietary ATI driver from the start. ...But don't blame them; blame ATI. Why these companies keep information on their drivers so closed off is beyond me. The way they're going, we would have no hardware available if Microsoft stopped supporting Windows. Anyway, don't take my word for it! Search their Dapper forums for your video card (or just ATI) and the answer should hopefully be there. |
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| ...But don't blame them; blame ATI. Why these companies keep information on their drivers so closed off is beyond me. I'm sure they have their reasons, although they haven't stated them publically in a satisfactory manner which has led some to believe that they might be ah. 'underhand' ones. Still, the good news is that installing binary drivers from NVidia and ATI is considerably easier than it used to be. I cannot remember with Ubuntu Dapper ships restricted drivers by default - try it and see. |
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| Thats it, Im trying it out! EDIT: well, that didn't go too well.. It booted well enough, but when it was time to enter the desktop, it bombed out my monitor/hdtv. Well, that was my venture into Linux this year. |
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| Does this release finally work with ATI cards from the start? It seems to work fine for my Radeon 9600. My "test" in previous Linux installs has been how well the ship in Digesteroids explodes. It has always been slow and jerky for me in all flavors of Linux including default Ubuntu 5.10. Only after I installed the accelerated drivers in 5.10 did it explode as well as it does in Windows. However, when doing a clean install of 6.06 (after removing 5.10), I didn't have to do anything special - it exploded as in Windows by default. So, I haven't bothered with the "special" ATI driver since things seem to work well enough already. But, if desired, the instructions for installing the special ATI driver for 6.06 are simpler than for 5.10: https://wiki.ubuntu.com/BinaryDriverHowto/ATI#head-5ead174a0b3294527486cd4d71ded66b40003f25 |
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| Ooops....I did it again. :-P Started Ubuntu and went to the Update menu. Hey, there was an update for 6.06. Clicked on it, and it began to download and install it. Brilliant, I thought. After an hour or so, when it was almost done something failed and I was warned that I might have an unusable system. Rebooted. Windows was again gone from Grub, but worse was that Ubuntu wouldn't boot. Eventually got it to boot in Recovery mode, and put Windows back on the Grub menu, but now my Linux install seems a bit broken (only boots some of the time). It seems to have upgraded most of itself to 6.06, but I don't know which parts I'm missing. I'm guessing that if I try to re-install Ubuntu from scratch from a CD, I'll break Grub entirely and have to install XP again too. I like the look and feel of Ubuntu, and Gimp runs better on it than on either OSX or WinXP, but I'm starting to wonder if it's worth my effort. Still haven't gotten my soundcard working with it. Got Blitz working the first time I installed Ubuntu, but the second time I failed to get it working at all. Maybe I should just wipe the machine and go with XP. Hmmm... Ragnar |
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| They seem to have broken Nvidia 3D driver support for me. It worked with a simple update last time (or was it EasyUbuntu that did it?). No joy this time... hopefully someone will sort it out soon-ish. |
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| I like the look and feel of Ubuntu, and Gimp runs better on it than on either OSX or WinXP, but I'm starting to wonder if it's worth my effort. Still haven't gotten my soundcard working with it. Got Blitz working the first time I installed Ubuntu, but the second time I failed to get it working at all. Maybe I should just wipe the machine and go with XP. I think their strict 6 month release schedule is getting to be a bad idea.The first anyone saw of the final release candidate was on the day of release, and before that things of all sorts were still being adjusted. It seemed fine at first, of course, but anything beyond 2 days on the same setup would be beyond what the Beta testers tested... (except those without a reliable network connection, such as myself, but I have it on one of those computers that just doesn't break). A week of extra time would have gone a long way, and because of Ubuntu's nature, they should be able to get away with holding it back for a few days. It seems to work fine for the most part, though, so maybe you're just unlucky :P |
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| Looked at the Ubuntu forum and found a lot of people were having the exact same problem I was having. Messed about with it a bit more, with no luck. :-( Decided to just drop the whole thing. Restored the MBR for WinXP. Deleted the partitions with Ubuntu, and combined them with the my "files" partition for XP. So now I've got 30gigs of extra disk space, and no Ubuntu. Guess, OSX have will have to cover my *nix needs for now. Ragnar |
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| I've been using the beta of 6.06 as my main OS on both my laptop and desktop systems for the last three months and it's been remarkably stable for me. The only annoying problem that I've enountered was an incompatability with the battery in my laptop which meant that I could only use it on mains power, but this was fixed for the final version. The only times I use Windows anymore are when I use my graphics tablet (it's not a Wacom tablet and the Ubuntu drivers are quite broken), when I need to transfer music/movies to my Creative Zen Vision (which, sadly, isn't supported by Linux) and on the rare occasions I play games. |
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| I had a terrible time with it's partitioning system, they have taken the standard gnome tool and broken it horribly for the installer. Nvidia installation invoved manually editing the the conf file and replacing the nv driver reference with nvidia, so all in all a huge step backwards for ubuntu... |
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| sikd, that's the exact problem I have with my Ati-card. No bmx linux for me... again... |
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| ... and presumably you can't follow the simple steps to install the ati and/or nvidia drivers that you can easily find on the ubuntu help forums? |
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| I found the ATI instructions utterly incomprehensible when I first tried Ubuntu with its version 5.04 (the default video did run, but only slowly, so I considered getting the accelerated drivers working to be essential). There was all this manual file editing and parameter specifying, and I ended up destroying my graphical desktop - only the CLI would come up - half a dozen times (each time requiring a full reinstall since I knew of no other way to fix it) before I gave up completely. I envied how easy Nvidia cards seemed to have things under Ubuntu (from what I read, getting them fully accelerated was a snap). With 5.10, I was able to get the simpler ATI instructions working, largely because I'd learned my way around the terminal and other aspects needed with my earlier failed attempts. And with 6.06, my ATI card worked fine right after install, and I didn't need to do anything. So, I can understand if others are having trouble getting accelerated video to work - I was there myself. It was only a combination of Ubuntu getting "easier" (for ATI), learning how things worked in it, and probably some luck that things went easier later on. But I sure remember how frustrating my repeated failures were with my early encounters with Linux, both Red Hat and Ubuntu (especially the shock that any modern OS would have returned to the DOS days of manual file editing and CLI - good gravy, this isn't 1986! <g>). Now, I was pleased by several things in 6.06. For example, the now-graphical installation in place of text-based is finally up to modern Windows standards (and I loved being able to surf with Firefox while the install went on, which makes the XP installer look sad). But there are a few rough spots, like the new partitioner (I managed to wipe out my 5.10 partition, even though I never had any such troubles with the 5.10 or 5.04 text-based partitioners), and like Nvidia cards seemingly becoming as hard to accelerate as ATI cards were under 5.x (though at least some ATI cards have gotten easier). So, it looks like 6.06 is a jump forward overall, but with some steps backward in some areas. |
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| I think 6.06 was mostly just a change to the appearance of the OS and simplifying the UI a bit. I agree that a few things have gone back. For example, setting up my wireless card seems to have become an impossible task, and in my current configuration, Ubuntu will crash with the first mention of the thing. I believe Edgy Eft will be the big release for improved background stuff. Last I checked, they had a lot to say about improved drivers and less to say about UI. |
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| @JustLuke: I got it working but only NON HW accellerated. And therefore it is unusuable for me. |
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| If only Linux distro's weren't such a mish-mash of different programs and technologies, the end-user experience would be so much nicer :-/ I've updated my 5.10 to 6.06 and run Automatix (very good script!) but synaptic whinges about "skipping... arts. update manually instead". I might go for a clean install of the 64-bit version, for a laugh. |
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| Ahh... my comments about difficult Wifi no longer apply. I am writing this message through Ubuntu with my Asus wireless card. I will never forgive Asus for the death of many thousands of clumps of my hair, but I will finally be able to stop screaming bloody murder whenever I see the name. The Linux community really is amazing when it comes to technical support; problems with Dapper and my wlan card were solved and documented on the ndiswrapper wiki within a week of the final release. I needed a newer, downloaded driver from Asus and I installed ndiswrapper from source for good measure. Right now I'm a bit scared of breaking something because of the many times I've managed to screw this up before, but I'm getting used to it. Since Linux works in a way that I know HOW I screwed it up, it's a safe bet that it won't happen again. Previous screwups were: -Insane package downloading frenzy (killed entire installation of Breezy because I filled up the miniature drive partition it was on... they'd better fix that). -Installation of an alpha OS over the stable build of Breezy (I had given up on getting ndiswrapper working again in Breezy) -Painful driver installation with ndiswrapper which I insisted on trying, causing incredible instability and resulting in me reinstalling. (Once again, I forgot to make a seperate /home partition). Now all I need to do is transfer some extensions, bookmarks, and general media over to here, then get a decent computer to put this thing on and do the whole process again! Joy. Oh yes, and I have to finally compile DSLinux, which was the purpose of this whole adventure anyway. I guess I could play around with BMax now, too. Another fun thing I discovered is this amazingly nice usplash: Nice image here:  Post: http://ubuntuforums.org/showpost.php?p=1013184&postcount=13 Vinyl: I've found Ubuntu to be pretty clean distro in terms of uniformity. The only thing that doesn't look like it's an intended part of the OS is the media for The Gimp, and their choice of splash screen for that created an uproar. |
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| For any Linux newbies (like me) having difficulties installing the Nvidia drivers (with Dapper)... http://doc.gwos.org/index.php/Latest_Nvidia_Dapper ...Method 1, worked fine for me. |
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| Lol, I am just getting use to Kubuntu. BTW, why can only some of the blitzplus apps run on Kubuntu with Wine? The games with GFX seem to crash while my GUI proggys run fine... |
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| Ive made the plunge into the unknown, and completly swapped winxp for Ubuntu 6.06. Apart from the usual confusion when switching to something new, I must say im pleasantly surprised. I tried mandrake and red hat in some distant past, but they very quicky found the garbage bin. This time it looks like i have a winner. Very decent support for even the most obscure hardware. Getting my videocard/soundcard and periphirals to work was pretty easy. Appart from some minor things, I've got everything I need pretty much set up and running now. Im stilla linux n00b, so its gonna take some time to get comfortable with things like bash and the filesystem in general, but im sure thats a matter of practise. Ubuntu ftw! [edit] A note on Compiz/Xgl for NVidia users, Don't bother installing it if you are planning on using 3D apps and/or watching any kind of video/dvd on ubuntu, as Compiz thouroughly messes this up. Compiz also messes up access to the NVidia Controlpanel. The only way to get these working properly again, is to disable Compiz alltogether. Note that (nvidia-)Xgl is the defacto standard driver for nvidia cards, so you will need that. At this point, I can only get it working by booting into gnome, than manually disable GDM (~$ sudo /etc/init.d/gdm stop) from the terminal (which throws me out of gnome). Then log into the terminal and manually start X (~$ startx). Note that GDM should not be reenabled. Now all the 3d/video stuff, as well as the nvidia control panel work again. I really need to find a way to permanently remove Compiz from the system. But i simply lack the knowledge of ubuntu in general to do it atm. |
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| ubuntu is great if you have a pretty standard setup. I use to have one and i loved it, apart from the horrible blitzmax ide/alternatives :(. Once the new ide's for bmax become a bit more stable/usable i'll think about it. But now that i have a rather 'custom' setup (dual monitors, sata raid, and a few other hardware additions) ubuntu had become a pain to get working like I have it working in windows. I now have dual monitors but lost all hardware acceleration and a few other abnormalities. rather annoying when i can just boot to windows and it work in a matter of minutes. |
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| ive got both my machines running dual boot setups with ubuntu 6.06 and it works on install with my Ati 9800pro and radeon 7000 that ive got in my second machine. the only problem ive had is my old laptop with a rubbish old s3 unicrome graphics card in which just came up as a mess. i love ubuntu its great! Pete |
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