The varied flights of Ubuntu Dapper Drake

The first time I got introduced to Ubuntu was when I installed Ubuntu Breezy 5.10 on my PC. And when Canonical released the beta version of the next major Ubuntu release called Dapper Drake, I decided to download and install it on one of the free partitions on my machine. On the other hand, I could have just upgraded from Ubuntu Breezy to Dapper Drake by modifying the sources.list file to point to dapper and then doing an apt-get dist-upgrade.

But since Dapper Drake is still alfa release - its stable version is slated to be released in June - I felt it would be prudent to install it on a separate partition. The ISO image of Dapper drake I downloaded was named flight 4. In fact Canonical has chosen to call each succeeding stage of Dapper beta culminating to its final release in June this year as flights.

So when I installed Dapper Drake flight 4, a couple of months back, I got the latest version of Gnome 2.14 bundled with it but not all the changes were included. For example, there was no integration of beagle search with nautilus file manager which is a feature of Gnome 2.14. This could be because Gnome 2.14 was released just before Dapper Drake flight 4 was released and so the developers had hastily bundled Gnome 2.14 in it and missed incorporating all the features.

Any way, I found the installation similar to Breazy but the applications were more responsive and took up lesser memory. Then I found that after every couple of days, I was prompted to upgrade the software to the latest versions. The upgrades were not just security fixes but contained additional features. And each upgrade was over 100 MB in size. After one such upgrade, when I opened nautilus, I was pleasantly surprised to find Beagle search integrated with it. Beagle search has the capability to search within files for a particular keyword. It searches within a large variety of files including PDFs. Also the deskbar applet - an applet similar to spotlight in OSX was the latest version which can be configured to search Google and Yahoo directly from the desktop.

Fig: Beagle search integrated with nautilus file manager.

And one thing I noted was after each upgrade, one or another improvement was visible though I suspect there were a lot of features being added and improvements taking place under the hood. For example, the X server bundled with flight 4 was not the latest version of X.org free X server. But after one of the upgrades, it installed the latest X server version 7.0 . With a bit of tweaking, I was also able to successfully configure the latest trend in the desktop special effects called XGL spearheaded by Novell and co.

Fig: Dialog box listing the updates for the system.

Another aspect of Ubuntu is its stress on userfriendliness. Installing security patches and software updates is a clinch which even a person who has just started using computers will feel comfortable about. Each of these actions related to system administration are conveyed to the user with the aid of eye catching message balloons.

Fig: Prompts the user for rebooting the system after a major upgrade.

But at times, the upgrades have also been problematic. Like after one such upgrade which was a major one at 225 MB download, I found that my X server refused to start automatically. The problem was with the installed proprietary NVidia graphics driver which did not work with the X server. So I had to disable the nvidia driver and tweak the xorg.conf configuration file to get X to work again.

Another problem which I currently face is with the Gimp software that is bundled with Dapper Drake. When I close any one of the numerous dialog boxes in Gimp such as the layers box, the whole software dies on me and I have to restart it.

Fig: A remind to users that this is not the final version of Dapper Drake

But I believe these are minor hiccups which will be ironed out by the time Canonical releases the final version of Ubuntu Dapper in June. Overall, this is one distribution which is going to find wider acceptance in the GNU/Linux user community. And the fact that they actually hand out free Cd's of the distribution to any one who need it draws even more people towards trying out this distribution.