About Me

• Member of the English (United Kingdom) translation team.

• Author of GreaseMonkey script to streamline translation of English into English.

My notes on installing Ubuntu Dapper 6.06

Good:

• The livecd boots up, detects the network, firefox works, totem works etc.
• Not many questions are asked when installing.
• The questions are easy to answer.
• The installer seems to guess keyboard layout and English language variant based on selected timezone.
• bittorrent is included by default.
• When logging in for the first time, am notified of packages that need to be upgraded.
• I am notified that I need to reboot after upgrading the kernel, but I am not forced to do so.
• Simple graphical tool to add/remove common packages. Option to switch to more complicated graphical tool to install other packages.
• User switching works.

Bad:

• The livecd uses a US keyboard layout.
• The livecd boots slowly.
• The livecd hung if I tried to do anything while installing, e.g. clicking on the Examples folder, or opening a terminal window. The mouse still moved, but I couldn't switch windows. I could switch to a virtual terminal, but no commands could be run.
• After telling the installer my timezone, the wrong time is still displayed at the top of the screen.
• The installer doesn't seem to care if I want my user account to be called "root".
• The summary page of the installer doesn't say how big the partitions are.
• After the reboot, a 386 kernel is used. Surely the installer can guess whether to install a 686 or k7 kernel. The 386 kernel does not have SMP enabled, so only one CPU is being used. Nothing notifies me that I need to install a different kernel.
• No gvim in default install.
• The binary nvidia kernel driver is in the kernel, but the binary nvidia Xorg driver is not installed. Nothing notifies me that I need to install this. The kernel is tainted for no reason.