I had a great time at the Sri Lankan Dapper launch party last Saturday at The Excel World. I sincerely believe that 'Ubuntu' will be the Linux distribution that made Linux mainstream among the desktop users. With the Dapper release, they have improved so many things, which makes their moto "Linux for human beings" very realistic.
For example, one of the first things I noticed last Saturday was how 'transparent' networking has become in Dapper. I have an Ethernet at home and was working on that right before I packed my laptop and came to the launch party. On arrival and while booting my laptop, Ubuntu has managed to detect the wifi at Excel World, connected to it and changed my default gateway to 'eth2', which is my wireless card. The result ?? The moment I finished booting, I have connected to Yahoo Messenger (with Gaim) and GMail (with firefox) with no interaction on my part at all. That's not all. When I went home that evening, it did the same thing backwards, so that I was connected to my home Ethernet. Sweet !!!!
We managed to burn and give away quite a few Dapper CD's (Ubuntu, Kubuntu, Xubuntu and Edubuntu).
Half way into the party, an effort was underway to build a RAID using USB Flash Drives and a Hub, which never saw completion due to our short attention span to anything other than Ubuntu Dapper.
Mahangu, who was the chief organizer of the event, has posted pictures in his flickr gallery.
