Review: Ubuntu Dapper Flight 5

Paul Dwerryhouse <paul@dwerryhouse.com.au>

March 24, 2006

Hardware Support

Of course, one of the major issues with any given distribution is its support of the wide variety of hardware it might be exposed to, and Ubuntu performed very well, at least with the hardware that I had on hand.

All of the hardware inside my desktop PC was detected properly at boot time, and virtually everything worked immediately - the only exception being the Hauppage analog TV receiver, which required software from the unverse repository to be installed before it could be used. I had no problems with the onboard or PCI USB adaptors, the PCI firewire card was detected straight away, and even the Marvell Gigabit ethernet interface, which had given me plenty of problems under Solaris 10, worked properly. The onboard sound card, of the AC97 variety, worked straight out of the box.

Furthermore, my ATI RV280 graphics card worked perfectly - including support for accelerated 3d graphics.

Ubuntu had no difficulty detecting my USB memory stick and my iPod, popping up icons in the top left part of the desktop when these were plugged in. Files could then be transferred to and from each just by dragging and dropping.

I initially plugged the iPod as a USB device; under Debian, I'd had much trouble ever getting the firewire interface on it to work, due to kernel bugs. Under Ubuntu, however, it worked perfectly.

The default Dapper install doesn't have specific iPod software, so it can't be used for much more than contacts (vCards from Evolution) or as a file storage device, out of the box. For transferring music files, it was necessary to download gtkpod, from the universe repository.

I encountered a fairly serious problem with my Canon Powershot G5 camera, however. Ubuntu managed to detect the camera accurately, but when trying to import photos, it failed with the cryptic error message "The path file:///DCIM/120CANON is not absolute". I wasn't able to find any way to sort this out, but fortunately there were no problems importing the same photos when I inserted the camera's flash card into a USB reader.

As a quick test, I copied the Ubuntu installation from my desktop across to my Sony Vaio laptop, and quickly booted into it - there were no problems there, on the hardware side of things, either. My Sony memory stick card was detected, the Intel Centrino ipw2100 wireless card worked properly and the system detected that it was a laptop and displayed a battery monitoring application in the upper panel.

Software Updates and Installation.

Being an alpha release, with Ubuntu Dapper still in development, packages are still being updated regularly. At the top right hand corner of the screen there was a small note indicating that updates were available for download.

Clicking on the update icon brought up the Software Updates manager, presumably a graphical interface to either apt-get or the aptitude utility. Downloading new updates was very simple to do - little more was required that a cursory glance through the list of updates and their descriptions - and then pressing the "Install Updates" button. When finished, it prompted for a reboot, since a new kernel had been installed.

Under the hood

Flight 5 uses the Linux 2.6.15 kernel; it's likely that this will be the version used in the final release also, despite the fact that 2.6.16 is out now. Preemptive multitasking has been enabled in its configuration, to optimise the distribution for desktop use. By default, the system is installed with a kernel that should work on any Intel (or AMD) i386 architecture processor, but there are also kernel images available that are optimised for use with later model AMD k7 and Intel i686 processors.

The system is able to read and write all major Linux filesystems; ext2, ext3, xfs, reiserfs and jfs; this immediately gives Ubuntu an advantage over Redhat Enterprise, which has only support for ext2 and ext3.

The default installation has no support for C development; rather, the Ubuntu developers have concentrated on Python, and a CD install of the distribution provides Python programmers with a large range of libraries; there's support for LDAP, GNOME, PostgresQL, MySQL and SOAP, just to name a few. The only supported integrated development environment is the limited, but otherwise useful Idle - this isn't supplied on the CD, however, and must be downloaded.

C programmers, naturally, have access to GCC 4.0 and the huge range of development software available for Linux, in the Ubuntu archives. The compiler is available in the main archive, but all IDEs for C development, including Anjuta and KDevelop, are in the unsupported universe archive.

Java programmers are well served in the universe repository with IBM's huge IDE, Eclipse. Obviously Sun's JDK is not available, due to its non-free nature, but here the GCC people have come to the rescue, as their compilers not only have support for compiling Java programs as Java bytecode, but are able to compile native binaries also.

Verdict

So, when and why would you choose to use Ubuntu? I would have no hesitation in rolling it out in an office environment, where the primary applications required are a mail reader, office suite and web browser, and where multimedia applications are fairly low in priority. And while I may not use it myself, the prospect of paid support from Canonical is likely to be a good way to swing management types on board, also.

I would probably even consider deploying Ubuntu onto the desktops of low-tech family members, where the most complex multimedia task ever likely to be performed would be to rip a few audio CDs and then mix and match some tracks back onto a new CD.

For higher-tech family members and friends, I would probably be more likely to use plain old Debian, with Christian Marillat's excellent archive of multimedia packages.

In all, Ubuntu Dapper looks like being a very promising release. The supported applications work nicely together, the desktop integrates most of the day-to-day tasks that a user needs to manage their computer and, importantly, it is pleasant to use. My only concern is with the multimedia support. I understand how the Ubuntu people have their hands tied with regard to less-than-free media formats, but it unlikely that users are going to want to be stuck with just ogg vorbis audio and theora video; it would be nice to see the process for downloading support for other codecs streamlined - and for the codecs to work correctly when used. [3]

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[3] Vincent Riboulet has directed me towards Easy Ubuntu, which should do the job of streamlining the installation of codecs and multimedia applications.