By all means, Ubuntu Linux and Canonical Ltd. have made a spectacular arrival on the Linux scene lately. The combination is like a dream come true for many, many Linux aficionados: tightly selected bleeding edge packages to focus the distribution on a single CD, corporate backing, 18 month support, that all sounds like a formidable package.
Furthermore, Ubuntu is based on the ever-popular Debian Linux, so our fellow Ubuntista has access to virtually all software that exists for Linux. Now they even released a Live CD and the whole thing can also be installed on Apple Hardware. It’s no miracle that Ubuntu stormed the Distrowatch-popularity charts in no time. And as of now, it doesn’t look like Ubuntu is going to be a One-Hit-Wonder. Well, of course I could not hold myself back and installed Ubuntu two days after the Preview Release came out in September. Six weeks later, Ubuntu is still installed on my Notebook and it does not look like it’s going away soon. Let’s have a look on Ubuntu Linux 4.10, the “Warty Warthog”.
I was really impressed with the Preview Release. I originally only installed it to see the then brand-new Gnome 2.8 desktop and, as I expected lots of problems within a totally new distribution that I never had heard of before, I planned to reinstall FC2 on the same day. But though there were a few rough edges in the Preview Release, it surely had good beta quality. There were no show-stoppers for me and so I just kept it, “apt-getting” myself through September and October. Besides, what a marketing move to release the Preview Release on the day when Gnome 2.8 was released – that surely made a lot of Gnome aficionados install Ubuntu who would have otherwise not tried it. Kudos to the Canonical marketing team! To my pleasure, as you can read here, this will be the standard procedure for all Ubuntu releases to come. So expect the “Hoary Hedgehog” Preview Release on the day when Gnome 2.10 comes out. Excellent…
I will not touch the Gnome-KDE issue. No, that’s wrong. I will touch it but only briefly: I have stated my opinion in my last article, I do think it’s a very good development that the distributors start concentrating on a defined subset of software. One idea: why not make a Ubuntu-like distribution focussing on KDE?! I bet there would be a market for a company who produces a totally free, Debian-based, commercially supported Linux distribution that includes the newest KDE desktop on the the day when it comes out (at least as a Preview Release, just as Ubuntu). Maybe some .com-hype millionaire with too much time and money listens…
But back to Ubuntu. Let’s look at the software choice of “Warty”: Kernel 2.6.8.1, Xfree 4.3, Gnome 2.8, Firefox 0.93, OpenOffice.org 1.1.2, Gaim 1.0 and XPDF 3.0. A pretty decent package, some people will be surprised that Xfree 4.3 is in it. The answer here is simple: As Ubuntu is based on Debian and Sarge will also feature Xfree 4.3, the Ubuntu team choose to use it too. They will, however, include a modern X.org release starting with the next version, that will probably be 5.04, the “Hoary Hedgehog”. A short word on the install: this laptop is more than 2 years old now and all distributions since Redhat 8.0 have detected all the hardware correctly (except for a broken power management and the obligatory winmodem). As expected, everything worked. After the installation, I activated the “universe” repository (which is a snapshot of the debian tree) and added Bluefish, XMMS, Thunderbird and EasyTAG. Oh yeah, and Star Control 2: The Ur-Quan Masters (the older ones of you will surely remember this game…).
The package management via apt-get/synaptic really is an advantage over other distributions. Although I have used apt-get/yum on Fedora regularly, I have to say: it’s even slightly better on a Debian-based distribution. The technical procedure might be the same, but having the one universal package repository where you can find each and everything is just a killer feature. Of course, there is not that much difference between Ubuntu and a Fedora Core installation with a decent yum.conf set up, it merely “feels different”. Hard to explain, I guess you’ll have to experience it for yourself.
A good concept forms the basis of Ubuntu but that would not be enough. The magic is: they actually did a really fine job. Warty Warthog is a pretty well-designed and bug-free piece of software, especially considering that this is just the first release of the Canonical team. But before I praise them too loud, I will start talking about some of the problems I had during the last weeks.
The worst bug for me right now: some applications that I install just don’t show up in the “Applications”-Menu. Contrary to Gnome 2.6, you can now edit the menus, so you can add applications with a few steps, described here. But this is just not enough for me. I don’t like to lose usability, and this problem did not show up in Fedora Core 1 and 2. Newly installed applications should just show up in the menu, at most after a restart of the X server.
Next really bad bug, and this is more of a feature-request: at the moment, it is downright impossible to burn an Audio CD with Ubuntu. Gnome has a bad history of not having a decent CD Creation program. This issue is almost solved now: creating Data CDs with Nautilus is really simple and works wonderful, burning iso-files is a matter of right-clicking them and selecting “Burn Image”. Very cool. But if I want to burn an Audio CD from my mp3-collection, I still have to either use the command-line, install an unsupported CD-burning application from “universe” or boot into Windows. Using the command-line is just not acceptable for a distribution like Ubuntu that features the latest user environment and focuses on ease of use. I have tried some of the CD-burning applications in “universe”, but none of them cuts it: eroaster crashes, gcombust looks ugly. I’m left with K3B, which is really fine but beats the purpose of being Gnome-only and also looks ugly in Ubuntu. The solution could be very easy: just let the Nautilus-CD-Burner ask if I want to burn a Data Disc or an Audio CD when I put mp3, ogg or wav-files in it. Or put the Audio-CD-Creation into Rhythmbox (and you all know where I got this idea from…). However, this situation definitely needs to be adressed in Gnome 2.10.
A small annoyance: despite having set the root-filesystem up on an ext3-partition, Ubuntu forces a file-system check at boot time every now and then. The first time I saw that I thought that maybe I just selected ext2 accidentally. That thought freaked my for a second, because I am normally very careful when I do the partitioning. However, I didn’t really care because I knew that I would do a clean install as soon as the final Warty was available. Just yesterday, after working with Ubuntu 4.10 final for a week, the partition got checked again. A quick dmesg showed that hda6 definitely is ext3. I don’t really mind the checks, but it feels so 2001-ish. Have not had this since Suse 7.2. I didn’t find anything on the mailing list. I wonder if this is intentional…
Then there’s Multimedia and proprietary plugins. As a good Fedora citizen, I know what to expect (ogg-playback) and what to not expect (mp3, avi and dvd playback, lame-mp3-encoder, flash and java plugin). So I fired up Synaptic and installed gstreamer0.8-mad for Rhythmbox. Solved. “apt-get install flashplugin-nonfree” – here we go! You’ll have to add the Debian marillat packages to your /etc/apt/sources.list to get libdvdcss, w32codecs and lame. You can find them, for example, here. But even then, some of my videos didn’t work. The solution was to install totem-xine. You’ll have to uninstall totem-gstreamer and ubuntu-desktop to do this but since ubuntu-desktop is just a meta-package, removing it does not cause any harm. I have not installed the Java Runtime Environment for now. Well, I guess, I just don’t want to go through the hassle of installing it whenever I install a new distribution – I just don’t need it anyway.
Oh, yes, and I had to install the German i18n files for OpenOffice.org. I guess that’s the downside of having a distribution that comes on a single CD. That would be bad, if I installed Ubuntu for a friend that doesn’t have Internet access. On the other hand, I can’t recall anyone within my circle of friends who is not online… Plus, I’d need Internet access to set Ubuntu up anyway, so it’s just one more package to download…
All in all, Ubuntu will be a strong competitor for Fedora Core on my desktop. I will definitely install Fedory Core 3 in November, just to see what it has to offer. And then I will make a strategical decision. The differences will be subtle: an ocean of Debian packages vs. freshrpms.net, Redhat System Utilities vs. the brand-new Gnome System Utilities (which are very good in my opinion), Human vs. Bluecurve. Ubuntu has good cards to become my Linux distribution of choice. By all means, it’s good to have a worthwhile competitor for Fedora in the Gnome arena. Kudos to Mark Shuttleworth and his gang of hackers!
About the Author:
Christian Paratschek is a very happy person at the moment since he finally managed to finish his studies after a decade (wow, I never realized that it was THAT long). His next plan is to annoy and bore as many osnews.com readers as often as he gets the chance to… Other articles can be viewed here.
If you would like to see your thoughts or experiences with technology published, please consider writing an article for OSNews.
A couple of notes, though:
The menu editing isn’t new to GNOME 2.8. It is simply, even in FC3, disabled by the fedora developers. Fedora Core 1 had a config option that allowed user to enable menu editing. Fedora Core 2 didn’t contain such an option, which I found to be one of the biggest flaws in their implementation of GNOME.
Nautilus-cd-burner did at one point have audio cd support. It was removed due to the belief that audio cds don’t quite fit into the filesystem paradigm of nautilus. However, the functionality of nautilus-cd-burner has now been separated out into a relatively easy to use library, meaning that gThumb (in 2.6.0), muine (patch available from fer), and rhythmbox (in 0.9) have cd burning in the works. And coaster – a burner project formerly aiming to use the slowly developing libburn – is now using libnautilus-burn to accelerate the development process. Hopefully we’ll see the fruits of all of this soon.
I think Ubuntu has a great future. There are a few quirks (e.g. fonts don’t look as well formed or solid as in Fedora Core 2), but that shouldn’t be enough to stop people from using it.
The LiveCD seems to be more successful at detecting non-Linux (e.g. vfat) hard disks than the installable version, but I think that’s been brought to the attention of the developers. Also, I heard word that a KDE variant of Ubuntu might be in the works, so that should appeal to non-GNOME persons.
The complaint about burning audio CDs should probably be pointed towards GNOME rather than Ubuntu. But it is a valid point.
Also, the lack of multimedia apps and encoders/decoders for videos and music is disappointing and badly needs addressing for the future in some way.
I’d like to see an option to install the basic development tools, but that’s not a real major issue.
Otherwise I think Ubuntu has blown other distros out of the water on its first release. At least that’s how I see it.
Man oh man, why doesn’t someone write some shell scripts that do an “apt-get” or a “wget” to install mp3, dvd, flash, java, etc and just make it a single package,
like “apt-get install plugins”
Why must we go through this?
Ubuntu is great only thing missing is encrypted IM.
http://gaim-encryption.sourceforge.net/
Anyone feel like adding it to the ubuntu repository???
“Otherwise I think Ubuntu has blown other distros out of the water on its first release. At least that’s how I see it.”
You give no evidence that it is better than, say, Libranet, or any other Debian-based distro.
Ease of use, successful detection and installation, pleasant theme, good support, single CD producing usable installation. Just to name a few.
Mostly it was the one of the better experiences I had with Linux distros. It took less work than usual to get things working. Just my opinion, so take with a large pinch of salt.
I’m looking forward to the KDE equivalent, as I prefer some of the KDE apps over the GNOME equivalents.
“tightly selected bleeding edge packages to focus the distribution on a single CD, corporate backing, 18 month support”
Bleeding edge and corporate backing in the same sentence? I’ll believe it when I see it. Lots of distro’s ended up trying to be everything to everyone. Not many of those around anymore. This is why Red Hat forked to RHEL and Fedora. Geeks wanted one thing, “corporate backers” wanted another.
ya might wanna edit /etc/default/rcS and change ‘no’ to ‘yes’
that should solve the fsck on bootup issue
make sure to schedule a fsck manually thou!
“A small annoyance: despite having set the root-filesystem up on an ext3-partition, Ubuntu forces a file-system check at boot time every now and then.”
If I’m not mistaken, this is a common thing for ext3. There is some way to disable it(which maybe some distros do).
This foreced file-system check is one major reason why I switched to reiserfs. During the Ubuntu install you have the option to use reiserfs instead.
I installed Unbutu on my 5 year old Apple PowerBook G3 the other day, and boy is it great. I did it because I was unhappy with OS X’s performance, and Yellow Dog 3 is now aged and not worthy of use.
Unbutu runs amazing on this system, is extremely easy to use, and I LOVE Gnome 2.8. Everything works flawlessly on my system, except sleep mode (duh) and volume control. It has blown me away, and is currently my favorite distro.
Aside from the fact that Ubuntu keeps checking for ext3 fs at boot (which I don’t have since I chose reiserfs), Ubuntu is a great distro. The only piece of hardware i couldn’t get to work was my wifi card, though this was easily fixed after installing ndiswrapper (though it took me some time to find the mrv8k51.inf file online). The Ubuntu community (on IRC) seems to be pretty helpful as well, which pleased me since I have dealt before with cocky Debian users unwilling to help (no offense to Debian users that actually are helpful). With time, I think the community could grow to be similar to Gentoo (which I love) if Canonical allows it (and I don’t see why they wouldn’t).
Ubuntu is great. I’d been jumping from distro to distro for the last 5 years and never really found one that fit me well. Ubuntu focuses on all the apps i’d install anyway, and doesnt fill up my HD with other crap i’ll probably never use by default. Slick and slim. The way Linux should be.
Some things that don’t make sense to me, the author says that items he installed didn’t show up in the Applications menu, yet everything I’ve installed from the Ubuntu repositories has in fact showed up in the Applications menu…
Secondly, he claims it’s a bug that Nautilus can’t burn Audio CDs, no it’s not a bug, it’s not part of it’s feature set. A bug would be that the programs you tried (except k3b) crashed when trying to do so.
Have you tried gtoaster? It’s not K3b but I find gtoaster still quite usable.
Great article… Nice simple and straight forward overview of the distribution.
I would like if the author could explore a little bit more about the “corporate” side of the distribution, but that’s ok.
I have installed Ubuntu two weeks ago, but I didn’t have the chance to use it extensively, but it really seems to be a very nice distribution.
Very clean, it has just the basic to have a working system. It’s a lot better than having 4 cds that you’ll never use with everything.
What does Ubuntu offer that Slackware or Debian doesn’t? I am just curious and don’t want to spend hours reading over tons of reviews.
There just seem to be TOO MANY distros and I think that might be the reason many people are turned away from Linux. Why can’t developers band together instead of branching apart?
If anybody knows and can explain how to install the codecs to watch movies (DVD, XviD, etc) I would be very grateful. The Ubuntu forums do not have this information (except for incorrect/out-of-date).
Thanks!
Okay, what’s the trick to burning an Ubuntu live CD? I downloaded Ubuntu and burned an iso, but it won’t boot. Other distros that I’ve burned copies of (Knoppix and Mepis, for example), boot just fine. Does it have to be burned differently or what?
What does Ubuntu offer that Slackware or Debian doesn’t? I am just curious and don’t want to spend hours reading over tons of reviews.
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then you really arent going to know the complete story
however quick points can be offered
* predictable release every 6 months
* every release has 18 months of support at the minimum
* corporate backing
* polished and integrated gnome UI and based on debian
* many key developers are sponsored to work on it
* all patches send upstream
* 100% free as in freedom and money
i know that i should adress the gnome developers about the audio-cd-creation-thing. i put it into the article because
a. a lot of ubuntu hackers ARE gnome hackers and
b. the ubuntu team is still responsible for their release. they shipped a ditribution that lacked a pretty important feature and they knew it.
@brad: thx especially for explaining how gnome plans to handle cd burning in the future. sounds very reasonable!
on another note: i admit i didn’t know mepis at all. i don’t care about kde-based distributions at the moment. i will have a look at it in november/december. i want to try out kde soon 🙂
regards,
christian
http://www.ubuntulinux.org/wiki/AddingRepositoriesHowto/view?search…
@christian, fedora is not all rpm-based distributions. If you run Mandrake you need three repositories to get practically every MDK package available: main, contrib, plf. For SuSE I believe the situation is similar with YaST, but I haven’t run it since 7.x so I don’t know the details.
add connectiva distro – makers of apt-rpm and synaptic for a rpm based distro with huge repositories
Ubuntu is great. The last 7 years I used different distributions, but always prefered Debian. The only problem I had with Debian was, that I had to do too much manually to get a decent desktop. Not anymore, Ubuntu just works and still is Debian under the hood.
The only problem I have with Ubuntu is that I miss Galeon. Are there any Galeon packages available? I couldn’t find it in the software repository.
Slick and slim. The way Linux should be.
… provided you use GNOME. I’m not flaming you, I just wanted to qualify a somewhat accurate statement. I was a Debian user for 3 years (and looking for a little newer), and I tried Ubuntu. I thought that it was a really nice setup for people that use GNOME, but I ended up switching to Arch.
Ubuntu is wonderful for those that enjoy using GNOME, but want fresher Debian packages. It’s a great setup for that. But for those not really interested in GNOME, its a bit specialized.
Anyone out there in love with Ubuntu that doesn’t use GNOME?
The command: tune2fs -c 0 -i 0 <partition>
should eliminate the automatic fsck. Debian sets it to check every 30 times an ext3 partition is mounted. A reiserfs partition never gets checked.
“The only problem I have with Ubuntu is that I miss Galeon. Are there any Galeon packages available? I couldn’t find it in the software repository.”
sure. you need to add the universe repo to the list which is just a snapshot of debian unstable.
from there you can also install kde or fluxbox. gnome is the only DE available by default but that doesnt mean others should be switching distros but installing what they want
you will have to agree that having everything in one cd is not possible for support and technical issues
I added universe to the repository, but galeon is not available. There are some conflicts with mozilla-dev, so you can’t even build it from source.
” Redhat System Utilities vs. the brand-new Gnome System Utilities (which are very good in my opinion),”
Aren’t the Gnome System utilities just using Red Hat’s code? If not its odd that they look like exact copies of what Red Hat developed. Mind you I don’t think that’s a bad thing, I’m just surprised you think there is much of a difference.
For me it comes down it better installer, and for now a better community. I do think Fedora and Ubuntu are two sides of the same coin though and they are more alike than different. Though I suppose Ubuntu will appeal to the “Anything but Red Hat” crowd.
“For me it comes down it better installer, and for now a better community. I do think Fedora and Ubuntu are two sides of the same coin though and they are more alike than different. Though I suppose Ubuntu will appeal to the “Anything but Red Hat” crowd.”
No, you are wrong here. Fedora and Ubuntu are in completely different leagues. Ubuntu is in the same league as RedHat Workstation. Fedora is completely unusable in the enterprise. There isn’t much stability testing and RedHat drops support for it almost immediately after a new release forcing you to upgrade every 6 months. That is ridiculous. On the otherhand, Ubuntu guarantees support for 18 months and is proving to be extremely stable. Ubuntu is competing with RedHat but it isn’t going after Fedora.
Man oh man, why doesn’t someone write some shell scripts that do an “apt-get” or a “wget” to install mp3, dvd, flash, java, etc and just make it a single package,
like “apt-get install plugins”
So, you’re looking for a meta-package. That’s very easy to do: it’s a simple ar archive listing dependency to “real” applications.
It’s very common in Debian’s repository, like the kdegames package that allows you to install all kde games at once.
Hi,
Dude, I’m sure it can’t be all *that* hard. I’ve only used Ubuntu for a little bit (running under VMWare) – use Slack/WinXP normally – but I’m pretty impressed (particularly with the LiveCD).
However, still a bit confused with this Gnoppix/Ubuntu thing – Gnoppix 0.8.1 had all these icons for media players and what-not on the desktop – what happened to those? Also, I’ve always found (no offence to the Gnoppix team) Gnoppix a bit…unpolished. I mean, c’mon, the 0.8.0 release wouldn’t even work with NVidia cards no matter what you did. What sort of bugtesting is that? (Nonetheless, kudos for the effort).
Bye,
Victor
4 weeks with Ubuntu
6 weeks with Ubuntu
8 weeks with Ubuntu
10 weeks with Ubuntu
12 weeks with Ubuntu
Let’s think positive: for at least two weeks we won’t see Another Ubuntu Review(tm).
Look what someone put as to why ubunto:
* predictable release every 6 months
* every release has 18 months of support at the minimum
* corporate backing
* polished and integrated gnome UI and based on debian
* many key developers are sponsored to work on it
* all patches send upstream
* 100% free as in freedom and money
This is what Fedora is with one difference, 6 months more “support” the Fedora legacy took over in mid september approx one year after FC1 was released. To completly write this distro off as “anything but redhat” is pushing it. I think thats exactly what it is. I mean why start a whole new distro for an extra 6 months of support? Why not just use fedora legacy which has longer support than ubunto anyway? why? because “rpm sux0rz”.
So saying ubunto is closer to RHWS’s 5 year release cycle than being 6 months off of Fedora’s release cycle is quite a reach.
Actually, your characterization of Fedora is faulty. Fedora Core 1 has been rock solid for me. It has a huge repository of *current* software and through the Fedora legacy project, it maintains support even after Fedora’s 6 month cycle is over.
Ubuntu is good, but it still hasn’t built up a good base of current software. From what I understand, Universe is basically SID and SID is not anything that I’d ever use on my desktop.
Once the stable Ubuntu repositories start appearing in numbers (I’m confident that they will), the key difference between Ubuntu and Fedora is that:
* Fedora wants to provide you with a reference system that contains most everything that you want out of the box and is eager to implement new features like Security Enhanced Linux as default.
* Ubuntu uses the KISS principle. It provides a lean base system and focuses on the simplicity of SUDO to lessen the need for SELinux.
It’s the distribution version of the old CISC versus RISC debate or the Microkernel versus Macrokernel debate or the “Worse is better” school of thought versus the “Always do it perfectly” approach.
Each camp has it’s devotees and neither side show any signs of disappearing, so let’s be civil. Okay?
I need to support for a drive to read stuff off from it. Does Ubuntu have support for NTFS ??? How about SMB and Windows XP share support ?? Or WMV, Quicktime movie files, etc… multi-media files and streaming media ???
Ubuntu looks like it’s a fine, easy, lightweight, Gnome and Debian based distro. I’ve ordered the free CD, and look forward to giving it a spin.
However, the seemingly unending Ubuntu hype is getting tiresome. Ubuntu is simply Debian with Gnome, and very few packages (only “best of breed”), a good installer and good hardware detection.
While I’m looking forward to trying Ubuntu (mostly to see what Gnome 2.8 is like), it won’t get a permanent install on any of my machines, due to the following show-stoppers:
1. According to reviews and message board posts, Ubuntu is a “rude” install, in that it does not recognized other OS’s on other Partitonions. It just takes over the MBR and ignores the rest. This is unacceptable as I like to dual boot with Windows or other Linux distros. And the other distros dual boot as a no-brainer.
2. I like Gnome and use it once in a while. But I prefer KDE (and I won’t get into the reasons or start a stupid flame war). While you can apt-get KDE with Ubuntu, it’s a hassle to do so, and with mixed results.
3. While Ubuntu apparently has very good hardware detection, other distros have it as well, like Mandrake and Mepis. And the hardware detection is more mature and complete with those distros.
4. Single CD distro with very few packages. Sure you can apt-get anything on the internet (from the repositories), but that takes a lot of time, especially if you’re on dial-up. I strongly prefer the convenience of tons of apps on distro CDs.
I’m against the latest trend of having “stripped down” or “lightweight” or “only best of breed packages” oriented distros. Everyone talks about the “extra cruft” or “I don’t want that extra crap on my hard drive”.
But, for me, all that extra “cruft” or “crap on my hard drive” is part of what makes Linux so great, so useful, and so much fun. I love being able to jump between KDE and Gnome, Koffice and OpenOffice, Konqueror and Mozilla and Epiphany and Firefox, Glade and QT Designer (and KDevelop), Kate and gEdit, and have immediate access to tons of games. And I like all that stuff to be on CD, because it’s easier and faster to install from CD.
But people argue that all that extra stuff makes Linux harder and more confusing for newbies. Perhaps. But the distros that do include that stuff jump through hoops to make it easy.
Mandrake, for instance, has simple installation defaults. Unless you explicitly select the extra packages or package groups, Mandrake will install KDE, Mozilla, and OpenOffice, with a smatering of games and multimedia. In it’s installer, you have to explicity select the extra stuff. Plus, Mandrake labels the packages in the menus to make it brain-dead easy for the uninitiated (like “Browser”, “CD player”, “Wordprocessors”, etc.).
So you get the best of both worlds – easy, intuitive, non-overwhelming defaults, with super easy access to all the extra stuff if you want it. Ubuntu, by contrast, dictates what you install by default (deciding for you what’s “best of breed”), then makes you take the time of downloading to get the other stuff you might want.
What about the fact that Fedora claims it should not be used on mission critical systems?
I dont see Ubuntu making that claim.
It seems they are making one stable,current,clean distro for home or office.
So far for me its running great and I would consider installing it on any machine.
Couldn’t you just apt-get install kde?
I can’t stand Gnome.
heh. The review suggests that Ubuntu is ‘storming’ the distrowatch charts. I went and checked, and it’s…#18. woot. Mandrake doesn’t have anything to worry about yet…
Just moved over to Ubuntu yesterday, from Debian Sid, and so far I am very impressed. This is exactly the kind of easy to update, GNOME-desktop focused distro I have been looking for.
@adamw:change to “last month” and you’ll see what i mean. of course, this doesn’t really mean anything, as ladislav repeats to say often enough. still, it is somehow significant…
@kreek: i wouldn’t use ubuntu and kde. that just doesn’t make any sense. if i wanted to use kde, i’d try mepis…
regards,
christian
I’m sure that Ubuntu might be a nice distro and all, but this really is getting old. Most people here probably remember the SuSE review every two *articles* some weeks ago, and before that the Xandros reviews and who could forget those: Yoper reviews all over the place with a little and nice Yoper banner in the top of the page!
I don’t think most real Linux ‘aficionados’ care much for corporate backing, support or limited one-cd distro’s (they install their own weird blend of software anyway).
Now, at the risk of being branded troll once again, I still don’t understand where these sudden hypes come from. Be it Gentoo, Yoper, Ubuntu or whatever; these are probably all very capable linux distributions, like there are many other very capable linux distributions, but what sets of this overwhelming stream of press attention for some distro’s, and not for others?
Blogging sites, distro news sites, themes and backgrounds, every so many months there is a new favourite that takes over. Funny.
TT Fonts look like crap on ubuntu, I had to compile freetype and fontconfig myself. why do people still insist on compiling freetype2 with the bytecode interpreter, it makes fonts look like CRAP >:(
Anyone knows why the hell doesn’t ubuntu accept CFLAGS=”-march=athlon-xp”????
I hope that Ubuntu – as a commercial distribution and unlike noncommercial Debian and most variants – could include Java in the default install so that Firefoxx (= the default Ubuntu browser) would support Java out of the box too.
It may not be an impossible task to install and configure Java manually, but too difficult for newbie users.
Same with other such important proprietary stuff (like some multimedia codecs).
What, you think they aren’t because they don’t want to? They legally cannot distribute “proprietary stuff” because it’s, uh, proprietary. It’s kind of the point. All Ubuntu and other distributions can do is make it easy for end users to add support for these nonfree formats, and they have done so quite well.
No, you are wrong here. Fedora and Ubuntu are in completely different leagues. Ubuntu is in the same league as RedHat Workstation. Fedora is completely unusable in the enterprise. There isn’t much stability testing and RedHat drops support for it almost immediately after a new release forcing you to upgrade every 6 months. That is ridiculous
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dont spread lies. fedora core 1 support was dropped by redhat after fedora core 3 test 2 was released and critical security updates and given by fedoralegacy.org
now brace yourself for this
sourceforge.net now runs on fedora core 2. tell me now that fedora is unstable or whatever. they serve 2 TB of data every week guys
I tried both Ubuntu and the FC3 Test 3 and while I do like the keep it simple approach of Ubuntu, I still prefer Fedora for the following reason:
1) Bluecurve is a great default theme and now integrated into Openoffice as well. I dont really care for Ubuntus default theme. I know its personal preference and one can change it but I prefer a nice professional default theme and Bluecurve is just that.
2) Font rendering seems much better on FC3 compared to Ubuntu.
3) No proper UTF-8 support in Ubuntu yet.
4) No bootsplash in Ubuntu yet.
5) X.Org.
6) RedHat system tools and update notification.
I read Ubuntu is working on some of these for their next version so I will definitely try the next release.
For now I am looking forward to Fedora Core 3 Final.
I am a fedora user myself and I gave the reasons for ubuntu.
fedora does not have a rigid time based schedule. its not a single cd distro either. fedora doesnt have a big repository unlike ubuntu universe. debian is well known for community participation and ubuntu feeds on it. fedora has NO outside packagers at all. fedora users get all the upstream software as updates. not just security and bug fixes. this is not suitable for everyone. While this has been pretty much what I want I still consider ubuntu for its advantages.
”
Aren’t the Gnome System utilities just using Red Hat’s code? If not its odd that they look like exact copies of what Red Hat developed. Mind you I don’t think that’s a bad thing, I’m just surprised you think there is much of a difference.
”
it was originally developed by ximian and has similarities to redhat tools but supports more distros. this is useful for support reasons
I think that Ubuntu is a fine distribution because it is Debian-based, and it is built for ease-of-use. I was able to install Warty on our family computer, and It ran like a charm. My mother was amazed on how easy it was to use compared to Windows 2000. And it comes with a kernel that is patched with supermount, which is needed, because it is almost impossible to explain mounting partitions to a windows user. And I am glad that Ubuntu is Debian based, because RPMs are trash. And portage is great, but again, you cannot easily explain how source code compiles to a windows user. So debs are the way to go. Along with sudo and synaptic, you have yourself a good desktop system.
Hopefully, there won’t be too many separate Ubuntu repositories. Ubuntu provides a supported selection of packages (over 2000) and the rest of Debian’s packages (over 10000) in universe and multiverse. There’s no problem with a lack of software. 🙂
While Ubuntu is a branch of Debian sid, it is frozen, stabilised and released regularly… and commercially supported. We wouldn’t be able to support it if we didn’t feel that it was up to scratch. Also, note that Ubuntu is a fully supported server as well as desktop – we just happen to have a very KISS desktop by default. 🙂
ive been using ubuntu for about over 3 weeks now and its great. i love the simplicity and the apt-get
gnome 2.8 works great but with a few minor buys.
cant wait for hoary hedgehog to come out!
for the six hundredth time this week, that’s idiotic.
A .deb is a compressed file archive with some metadata. A .rpm is a compressed file archive with some metadata. They are functionally equivalent.
dpkg is a basic package management tool for .deb packages which will install and remove said packages and reference a database of which packages are installed. rpm is a basic package management tool for .rpm packages which will install and remove said packages and reference a database of which packages are installed. They are functionally equivalent.
apt-get is an advanced package management tool for .deb packages which will install and remove packages, and resolve dependencies for said operations if necessary. It can also retrieve packages from a correctly configured package source either locally or remotely through a wide variety of protocols. urpmi, yum and apt4rpm are advanced package management tools for .rpm packages which will install and remove packages, and resolve dependencies for said operations if necessary. They can also retrieve packages from a correctly configured package source either locally or remotely through a wide variety of protocols. They are functionally equivalent.
synaptic (for apt-get) is a GUI frontend to the apt-get package manager which allows graphical access to the most common functions performed at the command line through apt-get. rpmdrake and synaptic (for apt4rpm) are GUI frontends to urpmi and apt4rpm respectively which allow graphical access to the most common functions performed at the command line. They are functionally equivalent.
Get the picture yet?! Sheesh. If anyone from OSNews wants to post this, or a suitably prettied-up version, as an article, feel free. It might reduce the amount of sheer cluelessness in the universe by a thousandth of a percentage point or something.
(btw, does yum have a GUI?)
Yes. you are obsolutely true. I have been planning to post this as a article sometime soon and the important difference between yum in fedora and apt-get in debian is the size of the repositories
http://fedoranews.org/tchung/yum-applet/
http://cobind.com/yumgui.html
remember though yum has great amount of improvements which is in the development tree and will be in fc3. so the gui currently doesnt provide all the functionality but if you are just in need of a quick gui like synaptic go ahead and install it and it would helpful to send thomas chung a quick email to appreciate his docs.
FYI it doesn’t use supermount… it’s project:utopia (udev, hal, and dbus)… no kernel patching required for these (need a 2.6 kernel for udev)
They legally cannot distribute “proprietary stuff”
They could if they paid money (some commercial distros do that)… But yeah, on a second thought, it would be next to imposible to keep Ubuntu (a commercial but also a free distro) free if the project would have to pay for stuff like that… I admit that I didn’t think that suggestion through carefully enough…
Anyway, to make Java installation, configuration and updating as easy as possible was my main point. If things like that are too difficult for newbies there’s no point to dream of Ubuntu (& other such distros) becoming very popular among newbie/home/non-geek Linux users too. And never mind DVD codecs, and even Flash etc. – people can find and configure those if they need them, but Java is important.
with respect, that’s not a difference between deb and rpm or between apt and yum. It’s a difference between Debian and Fedora.
as for Java, this is the part of the license on v5.0 of the JRE which applies to redistribution:
“B. License to Distribute Software. Subject to the terms and conditions of this Agreement and restrictions and
exceptions set forth in the Software README file,
including, but not limited to the Java Technology
Restrictions of these Supplemental Terms, Sun grants you a
non-exclusive, non-transferable, limited license without
fees to reproduce and distribute the Software, provided
that (i) you distribute the Software complete and
unmodified and only bundled as part of, and for the sole
purpose of running, your Programs, (ii) the Programs add
significant and primary functionality to the Software,
(iii) you do not distribute additional software intended to
replace any component(s) of the Software, (iv) you do not
remove or alter any proprietary legends or notices
contained in the Software, (v) you only distribute the
Software subject to a license agreement that protects Sun’s
interests consistent with the terms contained in this
Agreement, and (vi) you agree to defend and indemnify Sun
and its licensors from and against any damages, costs,
liabilities, settlement amounts and/or expenses (including
attorneys’ fees) incurred in connection with any claim,
lawsuit or action by any third party that arises or results
from the use or distribution of any and all Programs and/or
Software.”
I’m not actually sure if that would allow a distributor to include it or not. Any lawyers (or paralegals :>) care to comment?
Yea, that annoyed me too. I really don’t like Firefox or Epiphany: I wanted “the only web,” Galeon ;-). I don’t know what problem you are saying you had compiling it from source. I was able to check out Galeon from CVS on my Ubuntu system, and compile it relatively easily (granted I installed all the gnome-devel libraries).
I’m a longtime Debian sid user who recently bought a laptop for chump change (An Averatec 3250, a really nice and slim notebook for those of you who want a portable but don’t have the cash to shell out for a shiny Apple or even an comparively overpriced Dell). Well, I figured rather than playing with laptop stuff on my own, I’d give Ubuntu a try. On my desktop I run “Libranet,” but I put that in quotes because Libranet is a 100%-Debian compatible distro, and so now I really just run plain-old Debian after upgrading to sid (I don’t use Libranet’s [out of date] repositories).
Ubuntu is different than Libranet in that it uses Debian as the _base_, but doesn’t maintain compatibility with “pure Debian” packages. So, I’d encounter lots of problems if I tried to, say, install the package of galeon from sid or experimental repositories at debian.org. This annoys me because I’ve built up a good list of debian repositories over the years for new versions of packages that regularly get built, and those packages aren’t usable on an Ubuntu system.
I’ll give the devs credit: they really cover a shitload of packages in their base repository and in “universe,” but a lot of it seems like duplicated effort (which I hate). They only make new packages for Gnome 2.8 and a few other things. (btw, Gnome 2.8 is in Debian experimental, so even that isn’t a HUGE plus).
I really would have preferred if Ubuntu took the Libranet approach, but did it completely right. That is, set up a repository with new versions of lots of packages that build against most libraries present in Debian sid. Then, give users of Ubuntu a mixed sid/Ubuntu system with apt-pinning so that newer Ubuntu packages always get dselected over older sid ones. Not so tough to do, and you wouldn’t need to “duplicate the universe”, and you’d be compatible with debian packages.
Argh, I guess you just can never win 😉
Yea, that annoyed me too. I really don’t like Firefox or Epiphany: I wanted “the only web,” Galeon ;-). I don’t know what problem you are saying you had compiling it from source. I was able to check out Galeon from CVS on my Ubuntu system, and compile it relatively easily (granted I installed all the gnome-devel libraries).
I’m a longtime Debian sid user who recently bought a laptop for chump change (An Averatec 3250, a really nice and slim notebook for those of you who want a portable but don’t have the cash to shell out for a shiny Apple or even an comparively overpriced Dell). Well, I figured rather than playing with laptop stuff on my own, I’d give Ubuntu a try. On my desktop I run “Libranet,” but I put that in quotes because Libranet is a 100%-Debian compatible distro, and so now I really just run plain-old Debian after upgrading to sid (I don’t use Libranet’s [out of date] repositories).
Ubuntu is different than Libranet in that it uses Debian as the _base_, but doesn’t maintain compatibility with “pure Debian” packages. So, I’d encounter lots of problems if I tried to, say, install the package of galeon from sid or experimental repositories at debian.org. This annoys me because I’ve built up a good list of debian repositories over the years for new versions of packages that regularly get built, and those packages aren’t usable on an Ubuntu system.
I’ll give the devs credit: they really cover a shitload of packages in their base repository and in “universe,” but a lot of it seems like duplicated effort (which I hate). They only make new packages for Gnome 2.8 and a few other things. (btw, Gnome 2.8 is in Debian experimental, so even that isn’t a HUGE plus).
I really would have preferred if Ubuntu took the Libranet approach, but did it completely right. That is, set up a repository with new versions of lots of packages that build against most libraries present in Debian sid. Then, give users of Ubuntu a mixed sid/Ubuntu system with apt-pinning so that newer Ubuntu packages always get dselected over older sid ones. Not so tough to do, and you wouldn’t need to “duplicate the universe”, and you’d be compatible with debian packages.
Argh, I guess you just can never win 😉
I apologize for the duplicate post… I’m on a friend’s PC which is running Windows, and IE complained about “Runtime errors” or some such nonsense when I hit submit, so I hit it again and it posts twice… typical Windows shit ;-)…
” It was removed due to the belief that audio cds don’t quite fit into the filesystem paradigm of nautilus.”
That sucks, when programmers try to do this whole paradigm thing, it doesn’t work, just look at Konqoerurs horrific sidebars! And also Firefox’s preferences…
“dont spread lies. fedora core 1 support was dropped by redhat after fedora core 3 test 2 was released
First learn to do math. If Fedora Core 1 support was dropped while Fedora Core 3 has not been released, what are you going to do with your existing production servers? I would guess you would be responsible enough to upgrade them to Fedora Core 2. And if support is dropped for Fedora Core 2 before Fedora Core 4 is released, I’m pretty sure you would migrate to Fedora Core 3. Continue this pattern for a few more releases. Now, for a particular server, if you are going through all the Fedora releases: 1 -> 2 -> 3 … and RedHat releases them every 6 months, logic would say on average, you would be upgrading every 6 months. I’m not lying.
” and critical security updates and given by fedoralegacy.org”
You mean the Fedora Legacy that has this on the front page “It is not a supported project of Red Hat, Inc. ”
“sourceforge.net now runs on fedora core 2. tell me now that fedora is unstable or whatever. they serve 2 TB of data every week guys””
Finally, if you haven’t worked in a real industry, learn to keep your mouth closed. I don’t care much what sourceforge does or whatever other random example you can pull. Sourceforge is a simple setup of a few servers that relies heavily on Apache only. Work some place with thousands of workstations and hundreds of servers doing all sorts of tasks, and come back and tell me that you won’t mind upgrading them every 6 months. Tell me that whatever little enhancement they make in an application, it’s worth installing it and risking breaking a million little things.
Regarding stability, I have had many instances where updating the distribution has broken things. I have been able to roll back the changes, or in cases where it it didn’t crash anything too important, wait it out a few days to do another apt-get, but the point is that it’s rather sickening that they just toss new kernel’s/applications in. I just need something that works for some time and gets security updates. To me that is much more valueable. I am also waiting for the Sarge release of Debian, and then I will migrate the Fedora Core 2 machines to Debian.
Fedora is not made for the enterprise. It has no place in it. But don’t just take my word for it. Take RedHat’s. This is what they say about Fedora: “It is also a proving ground for new technology that may eventually make its way into Red Hat products.” I don’t like my server room to be a proving ground for anything. Their little proving ground has already broken way too many things. And here is part 2: “Red Hat Enterprise Linux is the solution that provides a robust, stable operating system supported by Red Hat, Inc. and a wide variety of independent software vendors (ISVs). For production use, support, service level agreements (SLAs), and ISV support, we proudly ask that you look at Red Hat Enterprise Linux.”
I won’t use it because I know it won’t detect the soundcard on my Thinkpad 600e. Every major distro (Debian, Arch, slack, Fedora, etc), does not work “out of the box”. On a few, I’ve been able to manually load the required modules and parameters at each boot via the shell, but not running “out of the box”.
Which is too bad, considering a (almost) dead OS like BEOS detects it, along with certain OS’s with the years ’95 and ’98 in the name.
Please don’t point to any user forums, been there done that, bought the t-shirt. I’ve got 5 of these laptops, and none can run linux with sound (alsa or oss).
This is not a flame, just a real like experience regarding hardware compatability not being there yet for linux.
What you just described as “doing it right” was avoided specifically because it’s WRONG, WRONG, WRONG. You could not ship a stable, supportable, ‘just works’ distro doing what you’ve said above. 🙂 Instead, we do it the right way -> aggregate all of those extra repositories you add, and build the whole lot against the one distribution. Reliable, easy to understand, and actually supportable.
“fedora does not have a rigid time based schedule.”
4 to 6 months is what they shoot for, but yes you’re correct. Though can I ask why that matters? If its about 3rd party vendors Java, Flash, etc all work on my FC3 and its not even released yet. Why because its very popular and it serves them well to test on RHEL’s proving ground. Will ubunto get this kind of attention from binary only software? Maybe, we’ll see.
“its not a single cd distro either.”
Download one CD then put a checkmark next to “minimal install”. Or you can “custom install” then uncheck all software. That will install only barebones, and you can ‘yum install x’ anything else you need later.
“fedora doesnt have a big repository unlike ubuntu universe.”
Certainly not. maybe half that with all repo’s. But Here is the thing I have a folder in $HOME called src/. Every six months I upgrade fedora and you know how many tarballs are in src/ ? around 4 (not including themes). My point is the things that are in yum repo’s are mainline. the only stuff you’re not going to find in there are things like rare perlmodules and some sourceforge projects that are not popular yet. Though Java, Flash, mp3, codecs, p2p, common perl modules, NTFS modules, nvidia, etc I get from yum. Only thing I don’t is gyachE a yahoo chat client (WAY too unstable to put in repo) and a couple networking scripts that are outdated (mid 90’s)
“debian is well known for community participation and ubuntu feeds on it. fedora has NO outside packagers at all.”
What do you mean no outside packagers?
Livna
http://rpm.livna.org/fedora/$releasever/$basearch/yum/stable
Jpackage (java stuff)
http://heanet.dl.sourceforge.net/sourceforge/jpackage/direct_downlo…
freshrpms
http://ftp.us2.freshrpms.net/linux/freshrpms/ayo/fedora/linux/$rele…
DaG
http://dag.atrpms.net/fedora/$releasever/en/$basearch/dag/
Dries
http://dries.studentenweb.org/yum/fedora/linux/$releasever/$basearc…
subpop
http://rpms.subpop.net/fedora/linux/$releasever/$basearch/productio…
new rpm’s
http://newrpms.atrpms.net/apt/redhat/en/$basearch/fc$releasever
atrpm’s
http://apt.physik.fu-berlin.de/fedora/$releasever/en/$basearch/at-s…
Macromedia
http://macromedia.mplug.org/apt/fedora/$releasever
Those are just the ones in the yum.conf so to say nobody outside of RH packages anything I’m not sure what you mean. There is also Fedora.us but they are “official” That is how people get their packages included into Fedora’s stable tree, you get accepted into fedora.us as a proving ground. If you want everyone off the street to have CVS access I’m not sure about that, I think they’re re-writing software in house so that it can be used with outsiders not just RH ppl. atleast that was the last excuse I heard.
if ubunto is suppose to be so stable and Fedora is a flimsy peice of junk why is this “enterprise” distro running all the same version of software as Fedora? Cause its got the smell of Debian its stable? hey guys, kernel 2.8.1 is the same thing FC2 is using! Gnome 2.8 isn’t even in a stable Fedora release yet but its in Unbunto which is so much more rock solid? I just don’t get it.
Why one can claim its more stable when it hasn’t even been out a month yet has all brand new software makes me laugh. Debian is stable, RHEL is stable. Something that you’ve been running for two weeks without problems is not allowed to be given that honor.
I installed Ubuntu about 2 weeks ago, after seeing the last review here. Now, I’m running it on my main PC, an old iMac, and my P3 500 laptop. It totally rules. I absolutely love it. After getting all the codecs and such, I can use it as my only OS, except for when I want to play games. I’ve been using Linux for years now, and this is the desktop distribution I’ve been waiting for. I love the new Gnome (KDE convert), the debian base (debian is on my two servers), the fantastic community, the default theme, everything. I’ve never enjoyed using Linux this much.
I challenge anyone reading this to just run Ubuntu for a week.
In that time, utilize the menu’s as much as possible.
At the end of that week, install Fedora or Debian or anything else you like. Nothing compares to the simplicity and intuitiveness of the “Computer” menu. Its just a more logical Desktop system.
If you disagree though, thats fine, you are entitled to your opinion. I am not the person who has to use your boxes, so it doesn’t bother me.
“Now, at the risk of being branded troll once again, I still don’t understand where these sudden hypes come from. Be it Gentoo, Yoper, Ubuntu or whatever; these are probably all very capable linux distributions, like there are many other very capable linux distributions, but what sets of this overwhelming stream of press attention for some distro’s, and not for others?”
Specifically about Ubuntu, it’s like a dream coming to reality. At the moment, at least, they have an adequate proposition.
Not to try to cite its qualities, but:
1- It’s a free distro. They don’t want to sell it, but sell the support for it. It’s like RedHat and Fedora in one distro, but with the free tag and they mean it. How many distros want to sell the ISOs? We want *the* ISO, not a ISO or spread packages. We want support, but not paid support all the time.
2- It builds on Debian success and all the other current distro successes. It’s like Knoppix, Mepis, etc. But they have a different proposition. They don’t target the LiveCD market only as many do. And they are serious about upgrades.
3- It has a good international support by default. The english only or mainly of many distros creates the necessity of national distros. It’s better to have one distro for the world than each country with its own distro.
4- Some of us think that GNOME and GTK+ have better commercial support. We don’t want a Trolltech to rule us. We may want to target many different OSs, even Windows, without having to worry with Trolltech. We can live with some tradeoffs, but not others.
Ok, other people interests may vary, but we all want something unique. Some users want KDE because at the moment it may do something better. But it doesn’t mean that we won’t work on the GNOME and GTK+ to create a better experience than KDE in the future. Some of the things that make KDE or QT attractive to users don’t make them as attractive to some developers.
“Warty Warthog is a pretty well-designed and bug-free piece of software, especially considering that this is just the first release of the Canonical team.”
Hahahahaha… “bug-free”. That is ridiculous. Ubuntu is a decent distro, but it is certainly not “bug-free”. I have experienced many application crashes as well as other glitches in my week of using it.
This article reads like a PR piece as opposed to an actual review.
MEPIS seems to have had more attention since Ubuntu came out than ever before. Weird no?
* Java is redistributable but you have assume libility which is just too worrying for linux distributions to handle without a specific contract from Sun.
”
You mean the Fedora Legacy that has this on the front page “It is not a supported project of Red Hat, Inc.”
how nice of you to quote in part. redhat is still supportive of that effort and red hat doesnt support fedora either directly so what point are you trying to prove. fedora gets updates from redhat for around 8 months and about 1 1/2 years by fedora legacy project. so effectively getting updates just like ubuntu.
“Finally, if you haven’t worked in a real industry, learn to keep your mouth closed. I don’t care much what sourceforge does or whatever other random example you can pull. Sourceforge is a simple setup of a few servers that relies heavily on Apache only.”
would working on a data center count?. I mean dont turn technical discussions into personal insults. sf.net relies on apache only?. come on. you should know better. how about mailing lists, bug trackers, cvs, mirroring, finanical transcations, database functionality etc?
“4 to 6 months is what they shoot for, but yes you’re correct. Though can I ask why that matters?”
for outside coordination. suppose they did have a rigid schedule, I would know the time I have to propose a new package or similar things. basically time base release schedules have worked superb for gnome and there are too many nuances to deal otherwise
“What do you mean no outside packagers? ”
i meant no outside guys can contribute to fedora core packaging in any meaningful way right now. redhat does everything while calling it a “community project” unlike debian where volunteers do real stuff and can make a difference. the list of scattered repositories you list in a problem unto itself. everything should be in a ONE repository with the exclusion of restricted packages for legal reasons
“if ubunto is suppose to be so stable and Fedora is a flimsy peice of junk why is this “enterprise” distro running all the same version of software as Fedora?”
versions dont really determine stability. testing and integration does. besides there a lot of distro specific patches that eventually go upstream. read the gnome 2.8.1 changelog for details
“MEPIS seems to have had more attention since Ubuntu came out than ever before. Weird no?”
It’s no wonder as Mepis seems to be a good distro. But when I tried it, I preferred Kanotix to it. But now I prefer Ubuntu to both of them. I haven’t tried SimplyMempis though, but its infrastructure should not be very different from Mepis.
I’ve already switched my two computers from FC1 and FC2 to Ubuntu and I must say that this is the best distro I’ve seen in a long time. Give it a try!
After trying it on a couple of PCs at work, I went back to SimplyMepis. Ubuntu is OK, but it’s no where near as good or ready to use as SimplyMepis.
I do have a PC using Gnome but with VidaLinux (Gentoo) which I also found to be superior to Ubuntu. I let others use it, but they preferred SimplyMepis.
I don’t understand why the plugins couldn’t be installed or ready to install with a simple click like in SimplyMepis and Libranet.
At least it’s a decent beginning, not a great one, but decent.
Nice Distro really came out with a great start… I think ubuntu should port fedora’s redhat-config-services, samba, and nfs. This would allow easier configuration of simple services.
That suggests to me the card is probably ISA-based; most distros stopped doing ISA auto-detection because it can hang some machines solid and ISA is a long way outdated by now. Even if the card isn’t autodetected there’s no reason to always load the modules manually at boot – just work out what module you need and the options it requires and add it to /etc/modules.conf (for 2.4-kernel) or /etc/modprobe.conf (2.6-kernel). Then it’ll be loaded at every boot with no intervention.
“Even if the card isn’t autodetected there’s no reason to always load the modules manually at boot – just work out what module you need and the options it requires and add it to /etc/modules.conf (for 2.4-kernel) or /etc/modprobe.conf (2.6-kernel). Then it’ll be loaded at every boot with no intervention.”
And under Debian (or Ubuntu) put it in /etc/modules
The one major problem I’ve had with RPMs vs Deb packages is in fact the database structure that RPM uses… I have several times (Can’t recall which versions, I believe one was Mandrake 9, and the other was a very old redhat… probably 5.1 or so) That somehow had a corrupted database, and I couldn’t find a fix for it for the life of me…. once I had that happen with Debian, but it was easy to fix the problem.
One thing that surprises me is that almost no one here has mentioned the inclusion of Project Utopia etc. I’ve been using Ubunta for a few weeks now and have found this works great – pretty much everything is automatic.
I’ve noticed that four main things are missing from Ubunta at present – 1) CD burning app (should be one in next release, K3B for now), 2) Configuration tools – only the GNOME defaults are there at present, 3) automatic java/plugins installation (legal problems unfortunatly) and 4) Multimedia support. Most of these can be solved quite easily by reading the FAQ on the wiki – the exception being the configuration tools which are being worked on for the next release.
Overall by default I find its much more stable than Mandrake usually is, with far fewer obvious bugs. Its very good for a first release.
1) What is wrong with the (beautiful) default Debian Gnome? The Ubuntu one looks incredibly “naked” to me (and no, no reference to the controversial artwork, at least that puts some life into an otherwise “depressing” desktop).
2)Where is the Debian folder (or they could call it “Ubuntu” folder, I don’t care) in the menu? This means that newly installed apps don’t appear anywhere.
3)Take a snapshot of Debian Sid and freeze it? This the worst joke I’ve ever heard. Debian Sid is by definition a moving object. At least Mepis’ default branch is testing.
4)Their own repositories only? Then it isn’t Debian much more than Linspire or Xandros are.
5)No support for commercial applications (Acrobat Reader, RealPlayer, Java, Flash…)? That is very wrong. I know very well where to find them, but if this is meant to be a newbie friendly distro, again, this choice is very wrong.
Concluding, my take. Do you want to use Debian? If you are a newbie use Mepis or Kanotix. If you are more advanced or if you want to learn faster, use Libranet. If you are even more advanced or if you like absolute freedom and some DIY, use Debian Proper.
On the other hand, if you are Aunt Tillie, Linspire or Xandros are the right choice for you.
Nothing is wrong with the default Debian GNOME. However most people find the Ubuntu desktop to be more logical. You say depressing, but it is almost exactly as I have configured GNOME for the last 2 years, so I just have a starting point that is closer to what I usually use.
The ‘Debian Menu’ was one thing I never liked. Its not well layed out, and I always look for a way to get rid of it. Granted there needs to be a mechanism to add things to the menu automagically, but the Debian Menu is not the answer.
Why a snapshot of sid frozen? Because its the most current set of packages in the Debian repo. They then have 6 months to stabalize that, this seems fine to me. Certainly a lot better then taking a snapshot of already fairly old software.
Most everything other then Java _is_ in the repo, they can’t be installed by default as a matter of policy, but they are there. Even MPlayer is in the repositories.
As for your conclusion, well, everything you listed other then Debian itself is KDE based. I don’t use KDE any more, so those are all bad choices. As for using Debian, I did for 3 or so years. I switched to Ubuntu for the reason I have already listed, its just closer to how I usually configure my system anyways.
Fair enough.
Just one quick consideration: Libranet is not KDE based.In fact the default desktop is a (nicely, IMO) customized IceWm.
Gnome is included and it is the default Debian Gnome.
Libranet has been called “a Debian on Steroids” and therefore it suits my tastes fine 🙂
You can only use /etc/modules (which exists on any 2.6-kernel based distro) if the module you’re loading doesn’t take any options. If it needs options, you need to use modprobe.conf. The 2.4 equivalent was modules.preload, btw.
Fixing a corrupted rpm database is pretty easy – rm -f /var/lib/rpm/__* then rpm –rebuilddb. The only times I’ve ever had corrupt rpm dbs have been when I killed or ctrl-c’ed package installations for one (bad) reason or another, anyway.
“Fair enough.
Just one quick consideration: Libranet is not KDE based.In fact the default desktop is a (nicely, IMO) customized IceWm.
Gnome is included and it is the default Debian Gnome.
Libranet has been called “a Debian on Steroids” and therefore it suits my tastes fine :-)”
Crazy enough. 🙂
I like IceWM a little bit as well. It’s funny how sometimes are advices don’t coincide with our choices. 🙂
“It’s funny how sometimes are advices don’t coincide with our choices. :-)”
Simply because our choices don’t suit everybody’s needs 🙂
When my brother in law began too ask questions about Linux I decided too give him a dual-boot too play. Because of the many positive things people say about Ubuntu I decided too install it instead of the usual Fedora Core. Boy, do I regret it.
First the positive:
Installation was easy and it recognized the many devices on his computer without a hitch.
The desktop is clean and nice.
But then:
If you don use English some main applications stay English, especially OpenOffice and Firefox. No problem for me , but for my computer illiterate brother in law it is a big minus. Fedora switches OpenOffice too your language (Dutch).
Trying too save it I downloaded with OpenOffice the Dutch spell dictionary, it installed but failed too work. In 5 minutes Ubuntu had given Linux a amateurisch impression too my computer illiterate brother in law. But it didn stop there. The Gnome-volume-manager demonstration failed in a big way, none of the three memory sticks got recognized (never had problem with the many Fedora set-ups at work or my own Gentoo set-up). DVD (multimedia) failed too work and installation of it is far harder then in Fedora. All the just work things didn’t work and Linux was going down fast in the opinion of my brother in law, thanks too Ubuntu. Trying too save things I wanted too demonstrate zapping. So I fired up Sypnatic, and boy is this package manager a bloated user unfriendly peace of sh*t. Trying to explain the thing to him, all I was getting back was a glazy stare, absolutely no GUI for normal users. I installed zapping from universe to show the TV-tuner off, this was a old GTK+1.2 version from way back and it grabled the complete screen! Aaah what a disaster, so I decided too stop here and now and not demonstrate Kino with his camera because it could only get worse.
Ubuntu people look at Fedora, they are still way, way aheah of you! Im using Gentoo myself by the way.
I want to give Ubuntu a try, so I went to buy a new Seagate SATA HD a few days ago.
However, I cannot install Ubuntu because it always hangs when loading the sd_mod module…
If I don’t load the module, the installation goes smoothly,
but then it cannot find my new SATA HD in the step of partitioning HD
My MB is ASUS P4S800D (SIS 655FX).
Doesn’t the kernel support SIS 655FX with SATA HD?
If that’s really the case, I may consider buying a new MB
I posted the problem on the forum but no response yet…
Any help is appreciated and many thanks in advance~~~
Im using Gentoo myself by the way.
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Why not install Gentoo to your brother? And try to explain ’emerge’ to him?
To me this is just another debian copy. I mean, gnome in debian testing looks basically the same. Download some clean theme for it and you get Ubuntu.
Have you guys even tried the new debian installer? It’s the same as Ubuntu uses more or less.
i wonder what’s being done here.
i had it working fine in KDE with Kaffeine or KPlayer installed. the embedded video in web pages worked flawlessly.
last time i checked out gnome, it’s was buggy as hell, in fact it always crapped itself. it was usually gstreamer’s fault. the sound just wouldn’t work. i wonder if ubuntu will make a difference
after 1 weeks trying to use this “popular” distro I am back to Mepis:
on an HP mediacenter:
*Sound = not working (impossible to know why it worked out of the box and not anymore after reboot –no dsp ?)
*Cd burn = impossible it comes out with empty Cd
*Get info = if you do not have a day off don’t try to get an info from ubuntu.org.
*Menus in gnome = not updated when you install (easy to install if one by one lol)
*tools = nothing more than in a standard gnome.
*Printer = I have to reconfigure it at each reboot (HP7760)
*Sudo Root = work fine if you use only gnome tools then it’s another story.
*Kde & tools = only old version 3.2 available if you need anything else come back next year or become Indiana-Jones.
*Compilation = nothing!! every single part of your needs -ie gcc, ++, autoconf etc has to be put by hand (you better have a 10 year degree in linux ).
*material recognition = impossible to get an external usb hard disk to be recognized or even seen.
*Font install = euh euh font install you have the choice: “use those!!!” lol.
*usability = after 3 or crashes of the out of the box firefox I tried to go back on mozilla pure.
*Forum help = later….
* Mutimedia and java = usable after reading 4 or 5 posts and a by hand install.
I do not see actually where Ubuntu is the future of debian. Maybe next time but, there is a but , I came to Linux to forget vaporwares and other false promesses from “elsewhere” it is sad to see a beta version (I would say a RC) taking so much of publicity.
Good point,
Yes in fact i’m writing this on debian installed with the new debian-installer.People would be pleasently suprised hoe easy it really is to install debian with the new installer.Of course dependent on you internet connection ro give an exemple:14 mins took the net-install from the fastest ftp server in my networkhood.
Onlu drawback but that’s inherent to debian,gentoo,slackware,it’s a bit more work to install and configure some hardware but defenitely not impossible and hard to do.
when installing software, particularly from “universe”, items do not appear in the menu.
the ubuntu forums tell me that they do not in fact use the “debian menu” system and so /etc/menu (iirc) is ignored. (?).
so i agree with the article author that is is its most serious bug wrt to its intended audience.
I personally can not wait to get free Ubuntu CDs I have ordered. I just want to ask what you were thinking installing a Linux distribution you have never installed on your machine (as far as I gather). Don’t go by the positive things people have said about Ubuntu because as often is the case in life: YMMV == Your mileage may vary.
Why didn’t you just opt to install Fedora Core as was your initial plan? One obvious thing is that this is the first official release, and like almost any first release of any Linux distribution, there are things that work less well and even some tools/features that are inadequate or missing.
Hint:
The saying : “Familiarty breeds contempts” doesn’t not apply to Linux distributions especially wrt to recommending a distro you have not tested yourself to a Linux newbie.
I certainly hope your brother in law comes back for more Linux goodness after that fiasco