Dapper Drake

Recently I wiped my box and installed Dapper Drake. Which is Ubuntu's next major release. It is currently in heavy development so I can't recommend it to anyone who cant debug problems. The three most major problems I had to overcome are as follows (listed in order of easiest to hardest to fix):

1. The installer did not pick up my ethernet card. All I had to do was ctrl-alt-F* and modprobe the module for my card. Luckily I knew what it was.

2. Gksudo would freeze X. This was annoying because all the adminstration tool use gksudo. I found the answer to this one on the ubuntu forums. I had to downgrade libgksu to 1.2-0_1.3.1-1ubuntu6.

3. When using nvidia as my display driver, my entire machine would crash when I logged out. It did not respond to any key sequences. I think I must have done 30 hard reboots trying to fix this one. I had to completely remove any traces of the nvidia packages that ubuntu ships, then download the kernel source and headers and gcc and make and compile the kernel (no need to install it, just compile it) then get the driver package from nvidia and install it. The nvidia install will run only if X is not running and since you cant actually stop X (because that would crash your machine) if you just reboot after removing all traces of nvidia X will fail to start leaving you with a command console. Whew.

So that was my experience with installing Dapper Drake. Its also nice that ubuntu as a Xgl package in their repos. I have Xgl running at the moment. Over all its a pretty nice distro, tho I must say I miss gentoo.

Lets not forget the obligatory destop screenshot: