[NBLUG/talk] Ubuntu 6.0

William Tracy afishionado at gmail.com
Mon Aug 21 17:20:32 PDT 2006


Woohoo! My first Ubuntu 6 CDs arrived in the mail today. :-) I'm
writing this under the live CD now.

I've already downloaded and burned my own XUbuntu 6 CDs, so all that's
really new to me now is seeing how Canonical chose to package the
"official" discs. There's still the cardboard booklet, but now there's
only one CD. The CD is also a little harder to get in/out that with
the older packaging.

Right now, there are two available CD images for each Ubuntu flavor:
the "live" CD and the "alt" CD. The live CD provides a desktop when
booted, and a GUI installer. The alt CD has the text mode installer.

So, on the up side, the install is significantly less intimidating; on
the down side, it is significantly buggier. The first time I burned
XUbuntu discs, I tried to install it on my friend's laptop; no matter
what I did, the GUI installer locked up during keyboard detection. The
alt install was fine. It makes me slightly nervous that you are forced
to burn your own disc if you get into a similar situation.

Another footnote: Don't even bother trying to resize partitions from
within the GUI installer. It's extremely prone to locking up. If you
go under the System menu and grab the "Gnome Partition Editor", resize
the partitions, and *then* run the GUI installer, you should be fine.

I don't want to be a wet blanket. :-) The GUI installer is a *big*
step forward, I just have some misgivings about dropping the curses
installer so quickly.

What I would really like to see is the GUI installer and the curses
installer on one disc (is it *really* that hard?). I would also like
to see an option to launch the GUI installer without all of Gnome in
the background on low-RAM machines. There could be a startup option
that launches, say, TWM, and then runs the installer in full-screen
mode on top of that.

Anyway, I am eagerly looking forward to Ubuntu 7. In the meantime, I
now have five Ubuntu 6.06 discs to spring on unsuspecting friends! :-D

William



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