Language Selection

English French German Italian Portuguese Spanish

Quick Look at Ubuntu 6.06 LTS Release Candidate

Filed under
Linux
Reviews
-s

The highly successful Ubuntu development team released a release candidate of their upcoming version 6.06 desktop operating system. We haven't tested Ubuntu for quite a while and thought it'd be interesting to see how things had changed. We also thought it'd might be of interest to others to see how this release was shaping up.

I downloaded the i386 pc version last night and it came in fairly quickly. The md5sums matched and I burnt it to a cd. This version, perhaps it's the norm for Ubuntu anymore, was an installable livecd. With using "safe graphical mode" the livecd booted into it's trademark brown motif gnome desktop. The wallpaper was slightly different, but very similar to the one found in the last version I tested. These are always nice wallpapers, even if they are brown.

        

The menus aren't overflowing with applications, but it seems most basic categories of software are represented by at least one app. Applications include some tools it calls accessories such as a calculator, dictionary, menu & text editors, character map and a terminal. The games menu seemed the most generous including lots of gnome games to distract one from their work. These include card games, 2D board games, and some old favorites. The graphics menu includes gthumb viewer, the gimp, and xsane scanner suite. Ubuntu correctly detected and identified my scanner which wasn't turned on until seconds before opening the application.

        

Continuing through the menu, we find a subheading for Internet. In that submenu we find Gaim, Firefox, Ekiga phone application, Evolution Mail client, and Terminal Server client. In office we find Evolution again and entries for the various OpenOffice.org 2.0.2components. Under Sound and Video there is Totem, SoundJuicer, Rhythmbox, Serpentine, and a sound recorder. Totem wouldn't play any video files I had in my archive due to missing codecs or plugins, although it did play the example file included with Ubuntu. The music player did nicely.

        

Under Places we find the usual gnome routine. Some of these include Home Folder, Desktop, Computer, Network Servers, and Recent Documents. Under System are Preferences, Administration, and Help. Preferences are usually apps or tools to help one customize their desktop while Administration usually consists of system settings. Synaptic was included in the Administration menu as well as a software preference module that looked like a version selector. The Help menu had links to Ubuntu's website, wikis and such as well as a local reference.

        

All the applications opened and appeared to function well in my limited testing. Performance was very good with fast response and stable functions from every element. I found the livecd to operate very well.

On the desktop one finds an icon named Install. This is their hard drive installer. The harddrive installer is a graphic installer consisting of 6 basic steps. Overall it wasn't complicated and it appeared newbie friendly. I started the installer and was presented with a language selector. Next was a timezone configuration followed by keyboard layout and user setup.

        

After this things weren't as smooth. My case is probably atypical though. The next step starts a partitioner that will let a user setup the partitions. The first screen lets you choose a disk for it to take over or to manually edit partition table. If you chose manually, it will open qtparted. As my disk is already partitioned, I just clicked Forward and was presented with a list of partitions. Within this list is a proposed mount entry as well as the option to reformat any or all of them. It seems to randomly choose a partition for / but one can adjust it for their purposes.

        

Next one sees a summary screen and if it is to your liking, click Install. Then the installer will run a fileystem check on each partition again and attempt to format your partition in ext3. Here I encountered my first troubles. The Ubuntu fsck had problems with and became confused by my unix slices as well as several of my other partitions. Clicking continue in hopes it would just ignore them, it then complained it couldn't format my chosen install partition. At this point the installer exited and did no damage. Opening a console and mkfs.ext3 manually allowed the installation to procede past that rough spot during the second attempt at an install.

        

After it checks all your filesystem, the installer begins installing the system. It was very quick here taking about 10 minutes. Then it installs the grub boot loader without questioning the user for any preferences. I grumbled here, but it's happened before and not unrecoverable. Then it starts removing a lot of files from somewhere and shortly one is presented with a small screen with the choices to reboot or continue using the livecd. I rebooted.

        

I rebooted already prepared for the sight of grub and without fail, grub was there. No boot splash or other system chooser, it was preceded to try and boot ubuntu. Here it just sat blinking a cursor. I gave it quite some time and it never did budge. I grumbled some more at grub and booted the last livecd I burnt before ubuntu which was at the top of my growing stack of cdrs. From there I was able to edit my lilo.conf, adding an entry for ubuntu, and reinstall lilo to my mbr. Upon reboot, again, the boot kernel would not begin. After choosing Ubuntu from my lilo menu, it too just sat there blinking at me. Ubuntu was not going to boot, thus ending my excursion into Ubuntu Linux this morning. As such, I was not able to test Synaptic, the software manager. I don't know if my experience is unique nor if others had better luck as I didn't bother checking around.

In conclusion, I have mixed feelings about my experiences. On one hand the livecd booted with little issue, none if I chose safe graphical, into a fast and stable gnome desktop with sufficient stable applications. The installer is a bit clunky and I experienced some minor glitches. The system not booting is surprizing for a release candidate and I have hopes this is a minor issue or one that isn't common amongst all testers. Ubuntu fans will probably not be disappointed once all the kinks are straightened.

Re: Ubuntu never publish the computers they certified ?

atang1 wrote:

If you knew which platform and components Ubuntu is written on, you world have the template that Ubuntu used to compile all the programs to work on your computer. compatibility list no longer can tell, since too many devices are ambiguos, and need the proper firmware and operating system in the drivers. udev is still underconstruction. You are lucky that your computer can run the livecd; so please let people know the computer specifications.

Oh sorry. It's that amd_64 3700+ on the asus A8V with 1 gig of ram. I used the i386 version. Unless otherwise stated in the article, I always use the regular x86 systems to test for reviews.

atang1 wrote:

In your case, too many partitions, probably caused the installation failure. The question is, will a single partition work? Did Ubuntu have a template that will only work for a certain arrangement such as one windows, and several competing Linux systems or all the ubuntu veriaties?

You reckon? I know it was confused by some of the filesystems on it. The unix slices for bsd clones threw it for a loop and it claimed errors on some other reiser & ext2. Also, an early pre-beta installed and booted. The system was slightly different using an amd 2800+, but still many many partitions including two bsds.

Comment viewing options

Select your preferred way to display the comments and click "Save settings" to activate your changes.

More in Tux Machines

digiKam 7.7.0 is released

After three months of active maintenance and another bug triage, the digiKam team is proud to present version 7.7.0 of its open source digital photo manager. See below the list of most important features coming with this release. Read more

Dilution and Misuse of the "Linux" Brand

Samsung, Red Hat to Work on Linux Drivers for Future Tech

The metaverse is expected to uproot system design as we know it, and Samsung is one of many hardware vendors re-imagining data center infrastructure in preparation for a parallel 3D world. Samsung is working on new memory technologies that provide faster bandwidth inside hardware for data to travel between CPUs, storage and other computing resources. The company also announced it was partnering with Red Hat to ensure these technologies have Linux compatibility. Read more

today's howtos

  • How to install go1.19beta on Ubuntu 22.04 – NextGenTips

    In this tutorial, we are going to explore how to install go on Ubuntu 22.04 Golang is an open-source programming language that is easy to learn and use. It is built-in concurrency and has a robust standard library. It is reliable, builds fast, and efficient software that scales fast. Its concurrency mechanisms make it easy to write programs that get the most out of multicore and networked machines, while its novel-type systems enable flexible and modular program constructions. Go compiles quickly to machine code and has the convenience of garbage collection and the power of run-time reflection. In this guide, we are going to learn how to install golang 1.19beta on Ubuntu 22.04. Go 1.19beta1 is not yet released. There is so much work in progress with all the documentation.

  • molecule test: failed to connect to bus in systemd container - openQA bites

    Ansible Molecule is a project to help you test your ansible roles. I’m using molecule for automatically testing the ansible roles of geekoops.

  • How To Install MongoDB on AlmaLinux 9 - idroot

    In this tutorial, we will show you how to install MongoDB on AlmaLinux 9. For those of you who didn’t know, MongoDB is a high-performance, highly scalable document-oriented NoSQL database. Unlike in SQL databases where data is stored in rows and columns inside tables, in MongoDB, data is structured in JSON-like format inside records which are referred to as documents. The open-source attribute of MongoDB as a database software makes it an ideal candidate for almost any database-related project. This article assumes you have at least basic knowledge of Linux, know how to use the shell, and most importantly, you host your site on your own VPS. The installation is quite simple and assumes you are running in the root account, if not you may need to add ‘sudo‘ to the commands to get root privileges. I will show you the step-by-step installation of the MongoDB NoSQL database on AlmaLinux 9. You can follow the same instructions for CentOS and Rocky Linux.

  • An introduction (and how-to) to Plugin Loader for the Steam Deck. - Invidious
  • Self-host a Ghost Blog With Traefik

    Ghost is a very popular open-source content management system. Started as an alternative to WordPress and it went on to become an alternative to Substack by focusing on membership and newsletter. The creators of Ghost offer managed Pro hosting but it may not fit everyone's budget. Alternatively, you can self-host it on your own cloud servers. On Linux handbook, we already have a guide on deploying Ghost with Docker in a reverse proxy setup. Instead of Ngnix reverse proxy, you can also use another software called Traefik with Docker. It is a popular open-source cloud-native application proxy, API Gateway, Edge-router, and more. I use Traefik to secure my websites using an SSL certificate obtained from Let's Encrypt. Once deployed, Traefik can automatically manage your certificates and their renewals. In this tutorial, I'll share the necessary steps for deploying a Ghost blog with Docker and Traefik.