| Tyler J. Wagner (ابو پاسكال) ( @ 2006-06-07 02:13:00 |
| Current music: | Run-D.M.C. - Walk This Way |
Dapper, I Say!
Ubuntu 6.06 "Dapper Drake" went live on 1 June. (Geek translation: shiny new Linux!) I lasted one day before giving in to the upgrade madness.
My laptop is named "charcoal". For the last 8 months, I have not been kind to charcoal's dpkg database. I have cross-installed packages from Debian unstable, Marillat, the Penguin Liberation Front, and several random people who packaged stuff I didn't care to compile myself. Where packages weren't available I did compile software, including kernel modules. I also run both Crossover Office and VMWare, which are commercial packages with custom installers. My laptop runs the same software as the servers I manage, which means it's also the testbed for anything I plan to do to them. It's not uncommon to see it running Apache2, BIND, MySQL, various PHP-driven dynamic websites, and really bizarre firewall and routing configurations. In short, charcoal's filesystem on 31 May was a mess.
Dapper is a big upgrade from the last release, "Breezy Badger". So I opted to archive my files and reinstall from scratch. This was a really wise move.
I prefer Kubuntu (KDE) over Ubuntu (Gnome). Kubuntu Dapper is excellent. Out of the box, it's shiny and fast and functional. Nearly everything worked without configuration; not just on charcoal but on Jayme's cranky consumer-grade laptop too. We bought her laptop in the Baghdad markets 2.5 years ago. It had really irritating IRQ issues under Breezy and the wireless network card required ndiswrapper to work properly. Now it just works.
I am extremely pleased with the entire user experience. I spent a day playing with the new toys and migrating my old configuration files to the new system. Take my advice: move only what you need. The default Kubuntu UI configuration is nearly perfect.
For the three people on my friends list who run Linux, here are some recommendations:
1. Install KNetworkManager immediately (package "knetworkmanager"). This is what KWifiManager and the default Control Panel network settings manager should have been. If you are a laptop user, you want this.
2. Use EasyUbuntu to set up all the video/audio support and various non-free stuff, including the PLF repository you will need.
3. Install the following additional packages. You might have installed some of these with EasyUbuntu. For the casual users:
easytag firefox firefox-gnome-support flashplugin-nonfree gimp gimp-print gimp-svg grip inkscape kchmviewer xchm libk3b2-mp3 sun-java5-jre sun-java5-plugin scribus scribus-template
Privacy nuts want:
kgpg gnupg-agent pinentry-qt gaim gaim-otr gaim-extendedprefs
Network/security engineers and various geeks might want:
agrep apt-file deborphan dnsutils ethereal tethereal flip gip gtkterm iptraf iftop nmap screen sipcalc tree vim-gtk
All of those package lists are on one line so you can run "sudo apt-get install listofpackages". Try it.
I really don't care to repeat my mistakes from Breezy. No more testing server builds directly on charcoal. Instead, I will install a server build in a VMWare virtual machine, then break the VM over and over again.
ttmooney has been doing this for about a month now using Parallels, and it seems to be the way forward.