Review: Ubuntu Dapper Flight 5

Paul Dwerryhouse <paul@dwerryhouse.com.au>

March 24, 2006

Printing

Ubuntu, like most modern Linux distributions, uses CUPS as its default print system. Adding a printer is straightforward - there's a Printer item, under the System menu, which, when selected, displays a file-browser window with an Add-Printer button. The only problem that I encountered while trying to add a networked printer on a nearby Windows machine was that during the final step, it seems that the "Install Driver" button is the logical button to press - it isn't.

Multimedia

For some reason, I was under the impression that it was in the multimedia area that Ubuntu would really shine. To be fair, if the entire world used only free, patent-unencumbered media formats, it probably would.

Ripping CDs to ogg files is a breeze; insert your audio CD, and up pops the Sound Juicer program, which lets the user play and rip tracks at their leisure. Creating a custom audio CD with mix-and-matched ogg files is similarly easy, using the Serpentine CD burner. And burning a CD from an ISO image couldn't be simpler - it's just a matter of right clicking on the icon.

The default movie player, Totem, had no problems with streaming ogg files from the web.

This, however, was where the simplicity ended. The Ubuntu CD provides only codecs that are freely available in a GNU sense; for this reason, the only media formats supported out-of-the-box are ogg/vorbis and ogg/theora. Support for other formats, notably mp3, which has a number of patent issues surrounding it, must be downloaded from Ubuntu's other archives (entitled "restricted", "universe" and "multiverse"). The Ubuntu people provide a wiki-page with detailed instructions on what needs to be done to get these codecs going.

Enabling mp3 support was quite simple, and while it worked for playing static mp3 files from my desktop, I simply could not get Totem to play live mp3 audio streams.

Moving onto formats that are even further up the proprietary path, when support for Microsoft's Windows Media format was enabled, Totem appeared to go through the motions of playing the stream, but there was no sound at all.

One annoying problem that I found was with the handling of mime-types; at one point, from Firefox, when clicking on a link to an ogg-stream, I accidentally selected the handler as "download" and set it to "always perform this action for this type of file". Unfortunately, I could find no easy way of fixing the mistake I'd made.

One of my major criticisms of the GNOME desktop is the "dumbing-down" of its features in the name of usability. The Totem media player suffers from this in a major way; most particularly, the lack of a stop button when playing media. Apparently these buttons are now passe; we're supposed to press the Play button to both start and stop playback, which is less than intuitive and quite unlike the interfaces that hardware media devices have had historically.

DVDs posed further problems. While reading and writing data DVDs presented few issues, I was unable to play encrypted DVDs using either Totem or the unsupported xine/gxine players. This was despite the fact that I had downloaded and installed libdvdcss [2]; I've never had any problem playing such DVDs under Debian, using Christian Marillat's extra packages. I was unable to make Totem even play unencrypted DVDs; fortunately xine came to the rescue here.

Productivity

Ubuntu's primary web-browser is Firefox 1.5.0.1. Epiphany is available as a supported alternative, as is Konqueror, if you want to download all the KDE libraries that will be dependencies. In the unsupported universe repository, there's Mozilla and, my favourite, Galeon.

Instant messaging is handled with the swiss army knife of IM programs, gaim. It has support for Jabber, AIM/ICQ, MSN, Yahoo, Napster, IRC and even the esoteric (well, outside Poland) Gadu-Gadu system.

The default email reader is Evolution 2.5.91. Being a dedicated mutt user, I've never really seen the need to use Evolution in the past, so I took the opportunity to try it out. It certainly seems full-featured enough, with a combined calendar, tasklist and memo suite. It has support for a wide range of protocols with which it can talk to mailservers; the standard POP and IMAP support, but also Novell Groupwise and Microsoft Exchange, which would certainly be a boon for those who are stuck on corporate networks with obstinate Exchange administrators who refused to turn on standards-based support. I've worked on such networks, and they're not pleasant; Evolution should hopefully free up many IT staff from the need to have a both Linux box and a Windows machine on their desk.

Of course, no distribution would be complete without an office suite, and like most other distributions now, Dapper ships with OpenOffice version 2.0.1. Having been using Openoffice 2 on Debian for a number of months now, I was pleasantly surprised that the Ubuntu people have done quite a bit of work on their version of the package. The Debian packages of this program have had a custom theme applied to them and look terrible - to the extent that the whole suite appears to be little more than a toy. Under Ubuntu, however, the toolbar icons are smaller, without the annoying colours, giving it the look and feel of professional office software, as it should.

There was a strange problem with the Openoffice menus, however. Menu items, after being selected, would remain their highlighted orange colour. After this, the menus themselves would appear transparent, making them very confusing to read. A later update provided a fix for this.

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