Ubuntu 6.06 (aka Dapper Drake) is out. I think this release will impact the Linux market in a major way and give Redhat a big headache. I'll be playing with both the desktop and the server version on both Windows and MacBook, inside VMware and Parallels respectively. Free toys boys and girls. ;-p

Update 1:

Eeeks. Booting desktop ISO inside VMware Server resulted in kernel panic. As instructed in error message, I added noapic to boot option (F6 from the Ubuntu boot menu) which solved the problem. If they knew this would fix the problem, why doesn't Ubuntu try to recover automatically? Googling, looks like this is a common problem among Linux distributions. Still, this sucks for a distro that's supposed to be easy to use.

Update 2:

Getting past noapic problem got me to Live Ubuntu desktop. To install Ubuntu, I had to press the Install icon on the desktop. Silly bulls**t. Mouse was very sluggish too. Thinking it was a Live Ubuntu problem, I installed and restarted only to run into noapic problem again while booting from hard disk this time. No boot menu this time so had to press Esc to get list of configurations. Pressed 'e' to edit the configuration then, after moving down to kernel command line, pressed 'e' again to edit it, adding 'noapic' to it. Press 'b' to boot with edited configuration. Hurrah, got to the desktop. Hmm, sluggish mouse again. Not sure what is causing this. It's unusable in this state. Hmm.

Update 3:

Uninstalled VMware Server to reattempt using VMware Workstation 4 (been lazy and haven't upgraded to version 5 yet). Same noapic problem appeared but same workaround worked and sluggishness went away. Looks like that was VMware crap. Installing sendmail still behaved weirdly, hideously long delays during install and then reboot, leaving me wonding the whole thing hung. Unreasonable patience seemed to fixed the problem so far. My fingers are still crossed though.

My overall impression of Dapper Drake release is not great. I think the previous stable release (Breezy) is far more trouble free than this crap. The same goes to VMware Server.