The Visual History of Ubuntu

Ubuntu's Dapper Drake was originally scheduled for release in April of 2006 (6.04), but Mark Shuttleworth had pushed the release back to June 1st. With the additional development time, Dapper Drake was the first release to present LTS (Long Term Support). Ubuntu's Dapper Drake is supported on the desktop for three years and on servers for five years. Non-LTS Ubuntu distributions are supported by Canonical for 18 months. Ubuntu 6.06 shipped with GNOME 2.14, Linux 2.6.15, and X.Org 7.0.

One of the most significant changes with Dapper Drake was a new graphical installer that is accessible through the LiveCD. This allows the desktop CD to double as a LiveCD as well as an installer, which was certainly a terrific addition. Some of the other desktop changes for this release included a faster startup process, graphical shutdown process, improved support for video playback, NetworkManager support, and OpenOffice.org 2.0.2. This release could also be installed to USB devices and presented an upgrading tool to update from a previous Ubuntu release. Dapper Drake was the first release to support the SPARC architecture for server installations.