A (Ubuntu) Dapper day
I decided to connect the Ubuntu 6.06 LTS (Dapper) drive today, and I've spent quite a bit of time using it for work. Now this isn't the highest-spec machine (only 256 MB of ram, 1 GHz processor), but it's doing pretty well.
Even IE under Wine performed swimmingly (as good as or better as on my Xubuntu 7.04 setup). Same for the GIMP. I had a GIMP crash in Windows today, but the GIMP is generally rock-solid on both platforms -- and certainly was in 6.06 today.
On a more disturbing note, I've had a couple of Firefox crashes. I get three tabs open, and at some point the whole program just shuts down. Oh, and I still don't have Flash working.
I tried to "sudo" it to life again, but the clock was off all day (whatever distro I was using last worked off of UTC instead of local time), and once I synchronized the box with the network time servers (which I think is totally cool, by the way), I was unable to sudo because of this:
sudo: timestamp too far in the future: Jun 12 23:06:24 2007
Hmmmm. Maybe if I reboot, all will be forgiven and I can sudo till the cows come home. But I don't want to do that just yet. I've got stuff to do.
I'm enjoying my Dapper day, and once again, FOR EMPHASIS, I don't find standard GNOME-driven Ubuntu to be any slower in any way than XFCE-based Xubuntu (questioning, in my mind, any claims Xubuntu makes for being quicker or working on desktops with lower RAM, since I consider 256 MB, at this point, to be pretty low for a "modern" desktop environment). If you like XFCE, that's one thing, but at least when it comes to Ubuntu, there's no advantage, in my book anyway, for choosing Xubuntu over Ubuntu. Now Fluxbox or JWM, that's a different story ...
Final question you might be asking: Why Dapper? Why not Feisty? Well, I think the LTS edition of Ubuntu is important -- not everybody wants to upgrade all the time -- and I already have the drive set up with 6.06. I have worked a bit with Xubuntu Feisty (that's the version to which I'm comparing Ubuntu Dapper), and I've just wanted to keep this LTS setup around.
Just so you know, I run these tests on a Maxspeed Maxterm thin client with the aformentioned Via 1 GHz processor and 256 MB of RAM, with the drives sitting outside the box. I have three identical IBM 14.4 GB hard drives to choose from, each at this point with two OSes on them. So hardware is pretty consistent, and I can run about a half-dozen distros without having to do a full install.
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"sudo: timestamp too far in the future: Jun 12 23:06:24 2007"
That error is incredibly annoying, since you need sudo to set the data, and the error is stopping you using sudo...
I had it happen once, if I remember right I ended up booting into recovery mode, and setting the time/date again (using the `date` command)..
I have had my doubts about Xubuntu for a while and I see that your results sort of confirm my suspicions. The problem with Xubuntu, as I see it, is in the fact that most basic programs distributed with it require Gnome. So, in order to run Gaim, Abiword or Gnumeric you would end up running HAL, D-BUS, Gconf etc. And every one of those programs will load same GTK libraries as Gnome. So the desktop is not going to be much lighter on memory and CPU use. There are some things that Xubuntu does that do make it lighter in some cases, such as not having Openoffice and Evolution. But otherwise, I don't think the difference between running Xubuntu desktop and Ubuntu desktop is significant enough to warrant the inconvenience.
Dmitriy, I totally agree with you about the GTK libraries, and about application weight being much more important than the desktop environment wrapped around them.
Using the right apps is more important than the desktop environment, and even for a high-spec system, I recommend a low-spec window manager because it makes everything run faster.
As far as application weight goes, DSL -- Damn Small Linux -- does NOT use GTK libraries, but the bigger DSL-n does use them and is a bit slower.
For low-spec Ubuntu setups (or even Xubuntu), I suggest installing AbiWord and Ted for word processing, Dillo for Web browsing (and even Lynx and Elinks for text-based browsing), Sylpheed Claws for e-mail, mtPaint for photo editing (not in the Ubuntu repositories but available as a .deb package). I even found a USENET news reader in the Ubuntu repositories that was much quicker than Thunderbird (though its name escapes me).
And I just tried a new distro, AntiX, a spin on Mepis, which isn't quite ready for general use yet (it's still in "release candidate" territory) but which uses Fluxbox and a bunch of light apps, and which draws on the Mepis repositories via Synaptic, so it's comparable to Ubuntu in that respect. It's kind of what Fluxbuntu is trying to be -- but with more menus and helper apps, and with active development (Fluxbuntu seems to have stalled of late).
I use the ubuntu stable for my workaday machine because I do not want to intterupt my workflow by upgrading or dealing with issues on less stable incarnations
talking about firefox crashes, maybe you can find some answer at the following link
https://launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/firefox/+bug/14911
Right you are. When you have 256MB or more, then gnome is stable and fast. However, xfce and xubuntu is designed to run on systems with half the RAM or less. That's something else entirely. Gnome wouldn't run at all on such a system.
I really don't think that Xfce is all that and a bag of chips. I don't see much of a difference in a 256 MB system. As I've also found out, the apps you use make a big difference, more than the window manager. Right now I'm doing a lot of work in Fluxbox, and that really does respond very, very quickly in old systems.
If it was up to me, and clearly it is not, Xubuntu would be based on Fluxbox but have all the functionality it currently possesses. Fluxbuntu, with its obsession with the command line (and general unfinished state) will never fly, but I think that for 128 MB of RAM and older CPUs, Xfce is still too much for the graphics to handle. It's nice if you like Xfce, and I do, but it's not really a low-spec window manager, in my experience -- just a different window manager.
Using LTS is a smart choice in many cases, but I have a question:
What happens when a new LTS is released and you want to upgrade?
6.06 LTS should be upgradeable to the next Ubuntu LTS release, 8-point-whatever.
I expect it's by design, but you can't upgrade 6.06 LTS to 7.04, and I don't think it will upgrade to 6.10 either -- you have to go from LTS to LTS.
It's akin to Red Hat and Fedora. Red Hat Enterprise Linux is rock-solid stable and only given a major update every couple or few years, but they're trying to come out with a new version of Fedora every six months -- just like Ubuntu. I expect it's the same for Novell's SLED and openSUSE.
For me, it all boils down for what works best with my hardware. If all my stuff is recognized in 6.06 LTS, I'm going to be happy. If not, I'll try 7.04, or another distro entirely, depending on which box I'm talking about.
Right now, I've got my main test box running on Debian 4.0 Etch, and I'm building up Fluxbox as my window manager, tweaking the menus and adding/subtracting apps so it's just the way I like it.
Well, you obviously can upgrade from 6.06 LTS to 6.10, that's what most people did. I really hope you're right about upgrading from LTS to LTS. I googled about it and found nothing, Ubuntu is not communicating clearly what LTS is about...
I don't think you can upgrade from 6.06 LTS to 6.10. You can go from 6.10 to 7.04 -- I know because I've done it -- but I don't think there's an upgrade path from LTS to 6.10. I think it will only upgrade when the next LTS is released sometime next year.
I could be wrong, but in my LTS setup, the upgrade procedure doesn't allow for any upgrade, unlike my 6.10, which prompted me to do the 7.04 upgrade.
You can upgrade from 6.06 to 6.10. (you must call update-manager with -c argument.)
And, I was using Dapper before I switch to Etch two weeks ago.
I think 6 month is too short to upgrade the operating system. 9-12 month could be good.