Now don't get me wrong! Ubuntu is cool distro, but not cool! -- not cool enough to beat the heatwave thats hit my room. This is not why I went about installing Ubuntun, but rather because I've made some honest but rude comments about Ubuntu 4.x, so much so as to even calling it worse than RedHat. Consider this article, giving Ubuntu a second chance.
The Installation
So I set about installing the new version (5.04), to replace the older version 4. The installation went pretty much smoothly except at one place it hung trying to communicate with the gateway, where I wasn't connected to the LAN. I waited patiently for about a minute, hoping that there would be a timeout and the installer would continue/skip, but that didn't seem to happen. I ended up using the busybox console to bring down eth0, which resulted in the installer resuming. From a new user's standpoint this sort of glitch is unacceptable – there should at least be a 30-45 sec. time out, preferably with a count down.
While the text installer has its benefits such as speed, stability and portability across multiple platforms, these are all reasons why its a great installer for Debian and not Ubuntu. From the new user's point of view – a text based installer sucks! Sure winD0Ze installer is also an ugly blue screen text installer, but who wants to be like them! Mandrake, Fedora, Mepis, SUSE all have better installers than anything the Windoze guys have ever experienced and to be frank most new users of these Oses never installed it them selves thanks to OEMS.
As the machine booted it again got stuck trying to synchronize the hardware clock using an ntp server at Ubuntu, even though I wasn't connected to the net. Good thing I knew that I can just press Ctrl + C to continue the boot process, but this process should have gone into the background so as to not stall the boot process. Once the machine booted it took another couple of minutes for system finish completing the installation (similar to debian).
The Applications
The boot up GDM splash screen is elegant and polished. The logon sound is so relaxing and soothing that I could go into a trans. Once on the desktop, I thought the application menu was too simple and boring with only a very few application entries. This viewpoint is probably influenced by my preference for KDE over GNOME, which has a cluttered (in a good way) menu, so we'll leave it at that.
One of the first improvement that I noticed was the removal of the annoying “spacial browsing” -- a fancy name for a win95 technology! I was also impressed with the speed at which applications such as Openoffice loaded without the help of any external loaders. Synaptic, the graphical front end for the package management system had improved quite a lot since I last had a look at it. It now had two modes, where one resembled an idiot proof Redhat/Fedora like package selection via an Add/Remove dialog box and the other had the more advanced legacy synaptic interface. I was very much surprised to discover that the downlodable version of Ubuntu had offcial drivers for the Nvidia graphic card, which other distros don't distributed with the downloadable version. All I had to do was to tick the package and apply to install the drivers directly from the CD. Updating the xorg.conf need not be done manually anymore – all you needed was to execute ...$ sudo nvidia-glx-config enable
and restart X. Then came the biggest shock of all! Almost so that I was about to fall out of the chair. This was the first time, I had seen the inclusion of a language pack for Sinhala in any distro! Even though the package didn't actually contain any Sinhala translations or fonts, its encouraging to see that Ubuntu has actually allocated a guy called Martin Pitt to work on brining Sinhala support to Ubuntu. This is definitely a guy LKLUGErs should support and work with.
Ubuntu still falls behind
While I agree that Ubuntu has somewhat improved, it still lacks some vital multimedia features that GNU/Linux user's have come to expect from a distro that is targeted at new users, migrating from the dark side. Since testing the previous version of Ubuntu, the bottom line is that I still cant play DVDs (encrypted or unencrypted), divX, ogm, mpg and other popular movie formats, mp3 etc. Other interesting desktop applications such as Blender (3D animation), K3b (Nero like CD burning), Amarok (funky Mp3 player) or Sribus. While for there are alternative GNOME applications that are included for some of these, I think its a bad idea to rule or all KDE apps from inclusion, especially the popular ones. The same goes for ruling out any popular GNOME apps from Kubuntu (KDE based).
Other features I'd like to see include the creation of automatic mount points to access other partitions, specially any windoze partitions and some desktop icons for god sake! I also think its a mistake for Ubuntu to recompile all the Debian packages, thus potentially breaking binary compatibility with all those existing Debian mirrors. While its true that it really really sucks that Debian still doesn't have xorg, while all the other distros have pretty much migrated, this is still not a good enough reason to recompile everything. I am keen to hear from anyone who might be able to give me a better insight as to why Ubuntu had to take this drastic measure and cut itself loose from Debian.
Finally ...
In conclusion, Ubuntu seems to be making slow but steady progress as far as improving its distro, but making leaps and bounds as far as popularizing itself. With Canonical, the company behind Ubuntu, sponsering the “Software Freedom's day”, that will happen on the 10th of September, with a lot of free Ubuntu CD giveaways things can only get better for them. I am looking forward to reviewing Kubuntu, if and when I get a chance to try that out.