(My DSL is down again. Speakeasy will send a new DSL modem. I should be getting it tomorrow or Wednesday. So this blog won't be out in the world for a few more days.)
I downloaded and installed Ubuntu 6.06 (Dapper Drake) on my IBM ThinkPad T30 this weekend. The big motivator for me to try out Ubuntu is its sun-java5-jre packages as Mike Shuttleworth announced at JavaOne.
Here's my very brief experience report:
Ubuntu 6.06 has the least intimidating installation process I've seen. When you boot to the CD, the default action (after 30 seconds of waiting time) is to boot to the live CD and present the user with a working Gnome desktop, just like in an already installed Fedora Core 5 workstation. On the desktop is an "Install" icon.
Running the "Install" program doesn't at all feel like an operating system installation process, except the partion management part. (This will erase all data, are you sure you want to do it?)
Since everything is on one CD, after answering all the questions (username, password, date, time, etc.) I clicked on the OK button. When I came back a while later, everything is done. All I have to do is to reboot the machine.
Only the very basic programms are installed. The installation process insists on a minimum of 2GB hard disk space and 256BM swap space. The typical installation put 1.4GB of stuff on the hard drive.
Almost everything on my laptop worked: the wireless network card, the wired network card, the on board sound, and the video card. The USB stick worked too. The volume control buttons on the ThinkPad also worked: a little dialog scale thingy showed up when I pressed the buttons. The builtin dialup modem did not work out of the box.
The default power management setting for closing the laptop lid is "Blank Screen," which is not what I expected. I tried to change it to "Hibernate" but it had trouble hibernating. So I changed it to "Suspend," which seems to work.
Multimedia is always a struggle on Free Linux systems. Ubuntu has builtin support for the Ogg set of audio/video formats. MP3 and Flash is not installed. I search the web for "Ubuntu MP3 Flash" and got a bunch of Ubuntu 5 instructions. Since I'm not familiar with Ubuntu, I don't know which instructions to follow. With Fedora, there is a one stop shop where I can visit and execute a bunch of commands to get MP3, QuickTime, wms, Flash support. I know there should be something similar for Ubuntu 6.06. I just don't know where it is yet.
Finally, the Java support is almost an undocumented feature. After the big announcement at JavaOne, you would think that installing Sun Java5 JRE is a breeze. Again, maybe I'm not searching the web the right way. I can't figure out how to install the Sun JRE. I know somewhere in there the command "apt-get install sun-java5-jre" or "apt-get install sun-java5-jdk" are involved. Alas, there are configuration files that I need to edit before those command will do what I want.
If you know of a website where that information is spelled out, please let me know. Thanks.
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