First look at Ubuntu Intrepid Alpha 4

Ubuntu Intrepid Ibex is to be Ubuntu’s next release, due in late October this year. It’s gingerly marked as “experimental” and, as with all Ubuntu releases, follows just six months after the previous version—Hardy Heron. The message is usually that those who want stability and support should stick with the long-term support release, while those who want to help test Ubuntu, and get a taste of cutting-edge software, should try the newer versions. But is this true, or even advisable, in the case of Intrepid? 

The Alpha 4 release of Intrepid has just been released. According to the Intrepid release schedule, there are two more alpha releases due before the final release. There are no betas or release candidates this time around, and this reflects the truly experimental nature of Intrepid—it really is a case of “straight from the hands of the developers”.  EDIT: Doh, I was wrong. There’s a beta and RC due too. Apologies. 

In my humble opinion, Hardy set a very high bar for desktop releases of Ubuntu. I’m surprised more people didn’t comment on this at the time. Sure, there were problems, but anybody experienced in Linux will know that Hardy is simply light-years ahead of releases of Linux made even one or two years ago. Ubuntu really is pushing the envelope and Hardy got everything “just right”. 

Intrepid has to somehow best this, or at least introduce useful new technology to prove its worth. In terms of features at least, at this stage of the development process we should be seeing things start to firm-up—according to the release schedule, 28 August is the Feature Freeze date, after which nothing else gets in. We’re only a few weeks away.

In this review I take a look at Intrepid as a complete operating system, just like I would a new release of Windows or Mac OS. I don’t look at it through the eyes of a Linux enthusiast, and I don’t look at it as a composite of separate projects.

I want to know how well Intrepid is likely to work in real-life, and how much of an improvement it is over Hardy. I’m looking to see how well everything integrates and, above all, how well everything works (taking into account that this is pre-release software and therefore incomplete/buggy, of course).

Installation and setup

I installed Intrepid on my MacBook for a genuine everyday user experience. Apart from the fact my touchpad didn’t work (a known issue), and after an external mouse was attached, installation progressed OK. New to the installer is an automatic login option during the user setup screen. This will no-doubt raise the hackles of security freaks but I don’t think it’s that big an issue.

Although the Ubuntu installer (Ubiquity) is down for a visual refresh, I didn’t see much improvement. The window decorations were the garish Atlanta theme, and made everything look like a Sun workstation circa 1985. More of that in a minute, however (it’s another known bug).

Installation completed OK, no different to Hardy, in fact, but after a reboot and after Ubuntu had booted, the screen was black. I heard the startup drums and the screen’s backlight was on, but I saw nothing. Switching to a virtual console didn’t help. After some fiddling around, I discovered that Intrepid would boot to a black screen if the power was connected. If the battery was in use, it worked OK, although the backlight was prone to flickering. This is clearly an issue with power-saving and backlighting. Once booted, I could connect the power without a problem.

On booting, I saw the same-old Ubuntu desktop. The dark-brown theme of earlier alpha releases has gone, although maybe by accident—when I took a look at the visual theme settings, I saw an error message that “the window manager theme ‘Human-Murrine’ is not installed”. This is a known bug and is fixed by selecting the Human Murrine theme option. The dark-brown theme is still present, now labelled NewHuman, so you can switch to it if you want. I must admit that, despite being critical of Ubuntu’s GUI choices, I rather like this, but it isn’t clear whether it will make it into the final release as the default theme. I think they should use the dark theme for experimental releases, and a brighter, cleaner theme for LTS releases. Just a suggestion. 

NetworkManager’s main menu has been expanded to include a VPN Connections option. I’m very pleased it’s present because VPN is becoming a popular choice for the corporate worker, especially bearing in mind crazy border control practices of searching laptop hard disks (many workers now wipe data before traveling, and then VPN into their corporate network once landed to retrieve the files; the files are uploaded and the disk wiped once again before traveling back).

However, the placement of the VPN option on the NetworkManager menu is confusing—right below the wifi network options, as if making a VPN connection will somehow get the user online. In reality, of course, the user will have to join a wifi or wired network first, and then configure VPN. I can expect non-technical users being confused here, and many tech support phone calls along the lines of not being able to connect via VPN when the computer isn’t even online.

Note that I wasn’t able to test the VPN functionality because I don’t have access to a VPN.

Included in a new network configuration box that appears when you choose to configure VPN are tabs for Wired, Wireless, Mobile Broadband, and DSL. The mobile broadband option lets you configure GSM or CDMA connections, and is a much-vaunted new feature, requested by Ubuntu overlord Mark Shuttleworth right back at the beginning of the development process. Again, I couldn’t test this because I have no mobile broadband hardware, but the configuration screen looked mighty complicated to me. There’s no step-by-step wizards here—just a dialog box asking for details such as APN, PIN, PUK… Scary. The setup screens for all the other choices are similar. If you attempt to configure a wifi network, you’re prompted for the MTU, and the BSSID…

Yeah, I know Linux is about configurability and not hiding technical details from the user, but this is overkill. Ubuntu is supposed to be Linux for human beings. Linux developers always seem to start by making software complicated, and then attempt to make it easier to use afterward. Why not start by making it easy to use in the first place? Don’t lose the complicated options. Just move them to “Advanced” tabs, or similar.

My wifi network wasn’t automatically detected. I don’t know why because those of my neighbors were. They all use WPA, however, and I use WEP (ironically, I use WEP because it’s the most compatible with various Linux-powered devices in my household). The dislike of WEP is almost certainly an alpha bug. Ironically, while running Intrepid on my MacBook, the wifi device seemed to become supersensitive—I spotted several wifi networks belonging to my neighbors that I’d never seen before. The wifi device is an Atheros AR242x, according to lspci.

Login

If you select the automatic login option, you will—of course—be logged in automatically upon bootup (because of my wifi problems I was unable to find out if this fixed the annoying bug of being prompted for a keyring password each time you boot, in order to give NetworkManager the wifi password).

If you subsequently log out again, a timer will start in the login dialog, and automatically log back in within 10 or 30 seconds. Rather worrying, there seemed no way of stopping this. Hitting a key just caused it to start again from 30. Selecting not to login automatically during installation gives you the standard GDM login screen, sans countdown.

The Fast User Switcher applet now supports a Guest Session option, which creates a locked-down login for others to use (for example, those who borrow your laptop during a meeting to check their email).

I’m not sure if it’s entirely necessary—I regularly create locked-down Guest accounts on all my computers anyway, and it’s the kind of thing that virtually any competent Ubuntu user can do with just a few clicks (remembering not to allow administrator privileges, of course). The only benefit of a ready-made Guest Session option would be that it’s entirely locked-down and thoroughly security-tested, so there absolutely isn’t any way for the user to break-free. I’m not sure if this is the goal, however.

Applications

Let’s move on to look at the apps. Nautilus appears to be mostly the same, except for eject icons that appear alongside any removable storage devices.

Synaptic has had a bit of a visual refresh, and now sports a “Quick Search” box in the toolbar (this was grayed out, so is obviously a work in progress). There are now clear dividers between columns too.

The System —> Shutdown dialog has been overhauled, so that it’s now a series of buttons, rather than icons and, once selected, a countdown timer appears, telling you that the system will shutdown in 60 seconds. This is (cough) borrowed from OS X but I think it looks pretty neat—the previous graphical shutdown dialog was always overkill. Shutdown or restart should be quick and painless. No fuss. 

But other than this, I had trouble spotting any major differences between Hardy and Intrepid when it came to day-to-day apps. I’m sure there have been a few tweaks here and there, but they weren’t visible on my cursory inspection.

Here are the version numbers of key apps—those in parenthesis are the version numbers on a freshly updated 8.04.1 installation. Note how many are the same:

Kernel (2.6.24): 2.6.26
GNOME (2.22.3): 2.23.6
Evolution (2.22.3.1): 2.23.6
Firefox (3.0.1): 3.0.1
OpenOffice.org (2.4.1): 2.4.1
Pidgin (2.4.1): 2.4.3
GIMP (2.4.5): 2.4.6
F-Spot (0.4.3.1): 0.4.4
Totem Movie Player (2.22.1): 2.23.4
Rhythmbox (0.11.5): 0.11.6
Brasero (0.7.1): 0.8.0

When you try and run an application from the System —> Administration menu, there’s still a mishmash of old-style password requests and new “Unlock” buttons. I had hoped that PolicyKit would have made it into more apps, but I didn’t spot it. Maybe this is one for the future.

Encryption

New to Intrepid is the easy creation and subsequent mounting of encrypted folders. By issuing the following commands (the first of which installs the necessary software), you can create a filestore called Private in your /home directory that will be automatically mounted and unmounted when you log in and out, along with restrictive permissions when in use meaning nobody else can access it:

sudo apt-get install ecryptfs-utils auth-client-config
sudo auth-client-config -p ecryptfs_standard -t pam-auth,pam-session,pam-password
ecryptfs-setup-private

This seemed to work fine in my tests. Configuration is command-line, however, and there needs to be a GUI (again, “Linux for human beings”, anybody…?) Maybe part of the initial installation routine could take care of this. Indeed, I’m not sure why the entire /home directory can’t be encrypted, like OS X’s FileVault, although I appreciate this is immature technology and maybe it isn’t wise to entrust all your data to the system right now.

Personally I prefer to use TrueCrypt, at least until this component matures. This has the benefit of a GUI interface and is also cross-platform, working equally well on Windows and OS X. This is ideal for creating secure but portable data transfer archives. I like being able to easily unmount an encrypted file store when I don’t need it, and having several in use at once. 

Verdict

This is an alpha release and it shows. Intrepid is also definitely an incremental release of Ubuntu—more of a point release than an entirely new version. Aside from minor changes, the main addition is the new network configuration software that allows mobile and VPN connections. However, this is very young and the design needs to be refined. At the moment it’s simply a downright scary raft of configuration options.

The new encryption option is welcome but, again, needs to mature considerably. GUI configuration is a must—asking users to rely on the command-line to setup such a vital feature working is too much. With a distribution like Ubuntu, the command-line should be either a last resort, or an alternative for power-users. It should never be absolutely necessary.

Still, when everything is tightened up, as will inevitably happen over the next few months, I can see Intrepid making for an excellent release of Ubuntu. The new features are necessary and vital for our modern world and, more importantly, bring Ubuntu up to speed with Vista and OS X.

Unless you’re a “road warrior”, however, I can’t see any reason why you should upgrade from Hardy, which, as mentioned, gets things just about right for most users. If you really need the new network configuration utilities, I’d simply scan the Ubuntu forums to see if somebody has found a way of backporting the relevant components into Hardy. If you need encryption, download TrueCrypt instead.

(C) 2008 Keir Thomas. You may reproduce the above on your blog provided that an author credit is given and a link to www.ubuntukungfu.com is clearly shown. 

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This review was written by Keir Thomas, an award-winning author of Linux books. Recently he’s published several books about Ubuntu, including Ubuntu Kung Fu—a book of over 300 excellent tips for Ubuntu—and Beginning Ubuntu Linux, a “from zero to hero” guide to Ubuntu. Take a moment to check out both of them, and also take a look at the rest of the site.