Ubuntu now works
Tried out the Ubuntu Dapper Flight 5 release today. The final release of Ubuntu 6.04 is only a month away but I had nothing else to do 
Anypoop, things are looking up! As soon as you pop the CD in you are greated with a new graphical menu, rather in the style of ubuntu’s boot screen. Handily, the menu has a boot from hard drive option, in case you accidently left the CD in when rebooting the PC. The rest of the install process seems largely the same as 5.10 in my eyes, but things seems to hurry along faster than I remember. Didn’t seem to take long at all to install.
WOOHOOO!! For the first time ever with an Ubuntu release I was taken straight to the Gnome login screen. Always before I’ve been met with a load of graphical corruption and have had to stop out of X altogether in order to compile and install the nvidia drivers.
There’s a new icon set, which is a lot more pleasing to the eye than the stock gnome ones, lots of shades of orange going on, I like orange.
I followed this guide to getting XGL and compiz running I’m not entirely sure what these things are technically, but I’m guessing they are new ways to get composite graphics tied into the environment better than you could previously. And boy is it impressive! The most obvious eye candy going on is the windows transformations. Especially when you drag them around the screen, they puck and bloat as you pull them around very very smoothly. I almost collapse when I tried it first because I wasn’t expecting it to be so good! These effects don’t seem to cause as many problems as they did previously, you might be able to keep them on all day as you work on linux. Awesome!
Don’t take the screenshots at face value. Basically, you cannot take screenshots of the desktop with this composite manager running, it fluffs up, I’m guess that what is happening is that the graphic card has updated the screen several times before the screenshot app has finished trying to take an image of it.
Oh eck, not only that but flickr has resized the images against my will, they were 1600×1200 images but flickr appears to have resized them to 1024×768, so even full size looks a little blurry. Soz.
