Is Ubuntu's latest release capable of meeting its lofty support goal?
Ubuntu has come a long way since its first version, the Warty Warthog. Each release has improved functionality and polish while maintaining the vision of an easy-to-use Linux system for the masses, that has kept them on top of the distrowatch.com charts for months on end. To put into perspective just how rapid Ubuntu’s rise has been, consider that the Warty release in October 2004 came a few months after Microsoft announced that WinFS would be dropped from Windows Vista.
Now the latest release, Ubuntu 6.06 LTS (codenamed Dapper Drake), promises to take things to a new level of stability and refinement while shaking up the enterprise Linux market with lofty support targets. Can a no-cost distribution compete with the likes of Red Hat and Novell? We’ll look at that shortly, but first we’ll check out some of Dapper’s new features.
One disc to rule them all
One of the original features of Ubuntu, and one that I’m glad they’ve stuck with, is the size of the distribution. By installing only one desktop environment and one set of office tools by default, the standard distribution still fits onto a single CD. As mentioned briefly last month, Dapper takes a very cool step forward by having its single install CD double as a live CD.
It’s the ultimate try-before-you-buy setup: you can boot from the CD into
a full Ubuntu desktop that’s ready to play with. If you like what you see, double-click on an icon on the desktop to fire off the installer. It’s a wonder nobody’s done it before. Some live CDs like Knoppix have tried, without managing anything as slick as this.
There’s obviously no room on the CD for both a full live system and the packages that would be used for installation, so the new installer works by copying the live system over to the hard drive, which is then customised to produce a system equivalent to what you’d get if it was actually installed from packages.
While the new GUI-based installer is similar to the old text-based one, having a nice GUI makes things look and feel a bit nicer, and makes partitioning in particular more straightforward. After asking all the usual questions about user accounts and timezones, the actual install begins.
Most of the install consists of just copying files from the CD, so it’s a quick process: my test machine completed the installation in less than 10 minutes. There’s also no further package installation required after you first boot up. If you get bored during the install, you can easily browse the Web or play a few GNOME games while you wait.
There are some limitations to the new installer, many of which I’m sure will disappear in the future. These include issues with RAID and LVM support, and there seem to be a few bugs lurking in XFS support as well. More fundamentally, there’s obviously no way to do a minimal ‘expert’ install from the live CD: the system is entirely fixed. The live CD also requires 256MB of RAM to run properly, so it might not be the best option for putting that old PC to a new use. Because of these issues, Ubuntu ships an “alternate” install CD that’s just like the old install CD, with standard packages and the text-based installer.
The new live/install CD isn’t the only new feature in Dapper of course. The UI has seen quite a bit of work in various areas, with a new default theme and icon set, new background images, rearranged desktop menus, and much nicer notifications of things like pending updates and restarts. There are also some new package installation tools, and a greatly improved ‘Add/Remove Programs’ tool.
Other new features come as part of the upgrade to GNOME 2.14. These include new search functionality, with file and folder searching built into Nautilus, and a new quick-search panel applet called the Deskbar. This works in a similar manner to the Spotlight interface on Mac OS X Tiger: type in a word or two and a drop-down box appears with matching applications, files, folders, bookmarks, and other entities. The developers took the clever step of integrating with, but not requiring, the Beagle desktop search engine. If Beagle is available it will be used automatically, but the tools will happily work without it, albeit more slowly. If you have a Google account, you can even have the Deskbar search Google in realtime and display the results, though setting this up takes a bit of fiddling.
A dapper server
Like Ubuntu 5.10 (Breezy Badger) before it, Dapper is also available in a server edition. Like the desktop edition it ships on a single CD, but keeps the traditional setup of text-based installer and a set of installable packages rather than adopting the new live CD setup. The server edition isn’t an entirely separate distro: both desktop and server versions use the same packages, but the server CD skips the GUI in favour of server applications. It also ships with kernels tuned for server work, including a ‘big iron’ kernel for systems with more than eight CPUs.
The server edition also adds support for an interesting new platform: Sun’s UltraSPARC T1 architecture. This CPU has more in common with the Cell architecture in the upcoming PlayStation 3 than with chips from Intel or AMD, with eight simple processing cores on a single chip instead of one or two more complex units. Each core is relatively slow, but Sun claims impressive overall performance for web serving and other highly multithreaded tasks.