I wrote of Ubuntu preview weeks ago, I am back on my steps to install this release, to see what has changed.
One would expect not much changed. And you end up being totally surprised and amazed. But let's go in order. Let's start from the beginning, from the installation.

The test machine is the same old G4 Quicksilver, 867 Mhz CPU, nVidia GPU, 640 MB of RAM, Gbit Ethernet, additional PCI USB card, Firewire and some other things i am not going to put here. It is a standard Apple QuickSilver machine, you know :)

Just a note: we're going to test usability, ease of use, device recognition, not performances. I could run some benchmarks, suggest me which ones and I will do it.

Installation

The booting procedure is easy, as always: put the cd media into your drive, restart your machine and keep pressed the "C" button. That should be enough. Otherwise lean on the Open Firmware interface and pass the right parameters to the boot command.
Last time I tried the simple installation procedure. This time i took time to have a look at the possibilities the yaboot prompt offers and I must admit there are many choices for different hardware: simple installation is the default. Simple for PowerPC in my case: you can choose POWER3 and POWER4 kernels too. But if you need something like total control over the installation you can choose among expert and custom-expert installations too. These ones too come in PowerPC, POWER4 and POWER4 flavours.

I had a look into the custom-expert-powerpc mode, as said, to see in what it differs from the simple one: you get control on what's installed, on modules loading and modules parameters, on base package installation and so on. It is a more verbose installer and give you full control on the installation, as expected. After this look i went back rebooting and choosing the simple install.

The simple install has changed a bit: this time will explicitally ask you for your keymap (in the preview it automatically used to choose the keymap according to the country location you chose). Localization is good, as it was in the preview. This time i am going to install in English, so screenshots can be understood by much more persons.

The hardware detection, at this stage, works just fine. If you're in expert mode you get control over it and can load/unload modules. In the simple proceure it just loads what you need and, in my case, you get it working: network setup is automatic for me, as I set a DHCP server.

I partition the hard drive with this ncurses-based partition manager which is, in my opinion, clean, usable and easy to understand. I choose XFS as my root filesystem. I must admit I do not miss a X11 GUI for the installer: this ncurses one works just fine and is sort of failsafe, ready to easily run on a good range of hardware.

The first installation stage completes with the base packages install, the copy of remaining packages to the hard drive and the reboot of the machine to get into stage 2. If everything worked fine at the reboot you are welcomed by yaboot prompt. Type "l" to complete the installation.

During this stage i was just prompted once to add a user: this one will be added to the sudoers list, so it can be both your normal and super user. We already talked about this when reviewing the preview and Mac OS X users are familiar with this.

After that I made my personal test going to take a shower and coming back to the monitor to see what was going on. A ncurses message was telling me everything was setup and ready to run. I believe it. I just press return and the Xserver begin to load. Last time, for the preview, hardware detection was fine, but the Xserver was starting with some strange settings, like 640x480. This time it was smart enought to understand that this monitor can do at least 1024x768. This has changed and is another point of improvement.

Sound, i am welcomed with sound at the GDM login. This has changed too. Soun working fine, volumes up, sound linked with desktop events.
The desktop background has changed, this on a side note.

The desktop

Gnome is the Ubuntu choice, KDE is not even included. This will make unhappy many people. I always choose Gnome, so I just feel comfortable in this environment. I will not go deep into Gnome stuffs, but Ubuntu.

A better display recognition is possible: would have liked to use the screen resolution chooser in the system preferences menu to change to 1280x1024 on the fly. The choice is not listed, i got it to work editing the Xfree configuration file. Anyway 1024x768 is a) just fine and b) failsafe for this monitor :) So it is just ok in this way for this first release.

To install and manage packages it was enough for me to configure apt-get using apt-setup from a terminal window (as a privileged user) and then installing what I need: using apt-get or Synaptic. Synaptic is really nice frontend to the apt suite and it can perform most of its functions, as far as i can see. It is a good add-on: expert users like old Debianists can keep using the terminal suite, new users will feel better with Synaptic, probably.

I tested some devices I use and need to see how the system reacts.

External HDD

This is a firewire and USB external hard drive, DVico Momobay cx-1. Putting it on the firewire port will make it recognize by the system. I had to mount it manually. The vfat partition on it was recognized. I then unmount it and deattach it and reattachi via USB. The result is nice: recognized and mounted, available on the Desktop immediately.
Copying a 700 MB file from this disk, attached to the old USB 1 controller, to the internal HDD takes about 10 minutes, as expected considering the 12 Mbit bandwidth provided by USB. Took few seconds attaching it as Firewire.

Digital Camera

While viewing the preview i tested the camera: it was not recognized at all. Big step here: camera connected, recognized (I have syslog in tail), one second of suspence and a gtk dialog window pop up telling me that the device contains photos. And it would be glad to organize those photos in an album for me :)
Nice, it works just fine, you can navigate through the pictures and edit them. You can take a fullscreen view of them and then revert to the normal view (see screenshots on the last page).
I take a look at holiday's pictures and then i unmount the volume (the digital camera flash card was mounted as sda1 on my desktop).

Scanner

Scanner was recognized by the system, syslog prompted me with:

Oct 24 13:42:22 localhost kernel: usb 2-1.3: new full speed USB device using address 9
Oct 24 15:42:24 localhost usb.agent[23768]: libusbscanner: loaded successfully

This did not work on the fly, it was impossible, I already knew: this scanner Agfa Snapscan E50 needs users to download a firmware .bin file from the Agfa website and edit the sane configuration file to adjust the firmware path to this path. Doing so will result in a perfectly working scanner.

Same thing for a keyspan USB serial adapter: some of these devices need a firmware upload before they can work. That happens in a totally transparent manner on operating systems such as Mac OS X and Windows. On Linux you just have to google the internet to look for the firmwares, then the most is done.


Conclusions

Ubuntu is at the first release and is working nice. It starts from a great base, Debian, and the efforts are clearly oriented to provide an easy-to-use desktop system. But, although I didn't mention it in this article, it does not miss anything to work perfectly on servers. I concentrated only on the Desktop environment cause that's what i was looking for.
There's room for improvement and the six-months scheduled releases are just a dream for a PowerPC distribution at the moment. Give it a try and see if it does for you.

Screenshots

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