Review: Ubuntu Dapper Flight 5
Paul Dwerryhouse <paul@dwerryhouse.com.au>
March 24, 2006
Desktop
The 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. [1]
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.
Security
It'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.
[1]. Conrad Knauer has pointed out that the width of the panel can be altered by right clicking on it and then selecting "Properties"
Copyright © 2006, Paul Dwerryhouse