I just got finished installing Ubuntu 6.04 (Dapper Drake). It’s becoming ever-more polished although it is a beta and there are quite a few things that just don’t work yet.

I really like the cleaned up menu layout. The search function in Nautilus is also nice.

I’ve been having problems with quite a few Mono apps, though. Banshee, which I love, keeps seg faulting after a random amount of time (Bug #29957), Monodevelop needs to have a environment variable set before it’ll start (Bug #29958), Blam just refuses to start and Beagle can’t be installed because of a missing dependancy. Also, after the install, X wouldn’t start and I had to “sudo apt-get update”, “sudo apt-get install xserver-xorg” and finally “sudo dpkg-reconfigure xserver-xorg” and choose the defalt selections when prompted. After that everything was fine. The /etc/X11/xorg.conf file was completely empty before the reconfig.

So, there is still quite a few broken things but that’s why I’m using a test release. With about 3 months to go I think the project is coming along great. I’m now administering about 10 Hoary desktops and am looking forward to getting Dapper on those in May.

I’ve kinda officially joined the Ubuntu Laptop Testing Team today. I’ll be testing my IBM Thinkpad T43, Model# 266875U. I haven’t got tons of time for it but another guy has a Canonical-supplied T43 that is about 90% the same hardware so I’ll just copy his stuff where appropriate.

If you’d like to help just get in touch.

For those who hate ubuntu spatial and never want to see it again, you can issue this command WITHOUT any users logged into Gnome (GConf can’t be running.).

sudo gconftool-2 --direct --config-source xml:readwrite:/etc/gconf/gconf.xml.defaults --type bool --set /apps/nautilus/preferences/no_ubuntu_spatial true

The same is true for other settings as well. Also, if you want to make a setting mandetory then just change “defaults” to “mandatory” and users will be restricted to that setting. For other settings you’d probably need to change the type after “–type” and the value at the end.

After a little searching, I found out how to import Evolution 1.4 settings and data in /home/$USER/evolution into 2.2.

All you have to do is go into the Gconf Configuration Tool and change the keys “version” and “last_version” under /app/evolution to 1.4.6. When you start Evolution it will find the folder ~/evolution and ask you if you’d like to import the old data and settings. I believe it over-writes the current settings.

Today I’m updating one of the computers at Sprachenatelier Berlin e.V. from Suse 9.2 using KDE to Ubuntu Hoary 5.04. Hopefully I won’t run into any problems I’ve tested everything i can think of. I’m sure I’ve forgotten something, though.