I spent some time getting Ubuntu’s new Dapper Drake release installed on my HP AMD64 box. It seems to work fine now, but it wasn’t flawless to install.

• The desktop install ISO crashed just after booting while mounting the root fs from the CD. Hard to tell what was going on, but the kernel seemed to be crapping out in some of the CD kernel routines.
• I then tried the “alternate install disk”. I tried a text mode install, and it went through flawlessly. Very nice.
• I tried to get the system to a state that would play DVDS using the 3.0 release of EasyUbuntu, a script that is supposed to install lots of useful packages. No dice.
• Automatix worked fine, and I installed the accelerated ati drivers and totem-xine, which worked fine.

Overall, I really like Ubuntu (but I liked Fedora Core 5 too).