The 5th preview release of Ubuntu Dapper Drake is out on the mirrors. As usual, there are both install and live CD’s for PowerPC, x86, and x86-64. “We are now in the final stages of Dapper Drake development. Everything is stabilizing, and Ubuntu 6.04 will certainly be a top-notch professional OS. Now that all of the lower level improvements have been made, it is time to close the hood and rub on a coat of wax. With Flight 5 comes a new and improved Human look-and-feel, a few new GUI power tools, and much more.” Update: Screenshot tour.
my primary desktop to this new version, and it works so well. No problems so far except one thing: VFS seems to not work correctly, and I can’t get DVDs to play with Totem (they work with GXine though). But besides that it’s a great distro already, and I also really like the new Human look (well it’s not finished yet, but it looks nice already). One really cool thing I found out today that if you unmount a USB stick for example, a small window informs you that there’s still data written to te device and that you should wait before you remove it – very nice!
Tom
Not sure about flight 5 but in flight 4 to get vfs working you have to install the libgnomevfs (or similar named) packages
totem is such a steaming pile……..
Something I still think is missing in Gnome is a text editor that focuses on very simple graphical layout like TextEdit under OSX does that will save to RTF, import OO.o writer files and a few other wellknown formats (Word?) and print to PDF. OO.o Writer is way too bloated and big for small quick letters on my tiny 500 Mhz laptop.
I use TextEdit all the time, if I just need something simple with a few different font settings and perhaps a couple of images, but you can get surprisingly far with it.
This particular area along with allround PDF writing/editing support is still a big gaping hole. Good work though.
One would probably need to write the plugins for gedit to do it. But I’m not sure how well their plugin system works as far as changing open and close routines.
EDIT: Looks like there’s an html export plugin already.
Edited 2006-03-11 22:21
Just remembered AbiWord, but I still think it’s too big. It wants still to be a full word processor.
ma_d, does the plugin system allow you to write text with font formatting and inserting images?
I have no clue man, I don’t even use gedit
. I was just reading their page.
I sort of doubt it does though. Maybe font formatting, but I really doubt image insertion. I haven’t yet tried the new gedit (it apparently had a huge overhall).
I have no clue man, I don’t even use gedit
.
It’s OK. 🙂
Anyway, I think a generic text editing widget with formatting would be needed at the GTK+ level rather than inside Gnome and then build a very simple editor around that. Do we have that?
I tried the new GEdit and it seems to get geared more and more towards coders than letter typists.
You might want to have a look at Scribes.
http://scribes.sourceforge.net/index.html
http://scribes.sf.net/snippets.htm
http://www.minds.may.ie/~dez/images/blog/scribes.html
It’s geared towards users. 🙂
From what I can see, Scribes does nothing of what is needed. It’s still a coder’s editor. TextEdit is geared towards word processing with bold, italic fonts, adjustments, etc., not syntax highlighting.
A few screenshots of TextEdit:
http://www.guidebookgallery.org/pics/gui/applications/office/texted…
http://www.alanwood.net/unicode/textedit.png (old one)
http://www.makki.is/frettamyndir3/textedit.gif
http://osx.freshmeat.net/screenshots/45644/ (GNUstep incarnation)
http://images.apple.com/macosx/tips/images/textedit20050615.gif
Abiword is the closest to a light weight word processor you’d get on Linux. You can also look into tomboy or Zim, but those are more note taking applications with basic word processing functions than they are word processors. Text editors do not do WYSISWYG word processing.
Tomboy looks exactly like what is needed. Why not build a small RTF text editor around that?
Text editors usually do not have facilities to process RTF tags like bold, underline, table, etc. Only word processors are designed to do that. So for example it is almost impossible to tag a string in bold in a text editor, except of course the editor provides a custom tag format much like HTML. But that for the most part is pointless since on Unix you could just as well write a tex (see LaTeX) file instead.
In fact, most unix geeks use a text editor to compose their documents, save the document as a tex file and then use a tool to convert the file from tex to RTF, PDF, HTML etc. Of course, there is a learning curve involved. You need to learn the LaTeX tags (just like you need to learn HTML tags to write webpages).
If all you want to do is just write letters, then you don’t even need a word processor. A text editor should suffice. Word processors and desktop publishers are best used for colorful presentations and publishing. This is just my not-so-widely shared opinion. 🙂
In brief, the benefits of having an RTF exporter is related to the ability for the application to markup and process RTF tags. This is outside the scope of a text editor, whose basic operations are usually text processing and manipulation as opposed to realtime markup/markdown processing and transformations.
Text editors usually do not have facilities to process RTF tags like bold, underline, table, etc. Only word processors are designed to do that.
…
In brief, the benefits of having an RTF exporter is related to the ability for the application to markup and process RTF tags. This is outside the scope of a text editor, whose basic operations are usually text processing and manipulation as opposed to realtime markup/markdown processing and transformations.
OK, then the term “text editor” doesn’t suffice, even if the OSX application is called TextEdit. 🙂
If all you want to do is just write letters, then you don’t even need a word processor. A text editor should suffice. Word processors and desktop publishers are best used for colorful presentations and publishing. This is just my not-so-widely shared opinion. 🙂
But you are missing out on those who want a lightweight application to write a school essay and have no idea there is an app called AbiWord, not installed as standard, or for those beginners who are just learning to write things on their new PC.
There is a big gaping hole between the barebones ASCII only text editor and the full features word processor like AbiWord.
I think the Tomboy screenshot here:
http://mono-project.com/Image:Tomboy-mainwindow.png
very much describes what is needed, with a very simple interface, and only need to add load/save files as RTF and printing and PDF export.
Its been a while since I used tomboy, but I believe it does have an RTF exporter as a plug-in somewhere. You may want to google that up.
Gtk’s textview widget supports markups, image within text, utf-8 text, etc etc. It’s already there, it’s just not what you’d call: Easy to use. But to be honest this can’t really be helped much, as formatting display is a complicated thing.
The only thing more they could do is build a widget which puts in a formatting bar and handles all that for you.
Gedit has always been geared towards coders more than typists: It just really sucked before. Honestly I don’t know why they do it, there are a lot better editors out there already.
I think the reason there’s not much in the way of what you want, well, it’s twofold:
1.) WYSIWYG editors aren’t small and simple, they’re pretty complicated. And once you start doing complex stuff you find yourself doing more and more. Soon enough you have OOo Writer (Which I’ve heard is a lot faster if you build it with gcj).
2.) The Unix tradition is against WYSIWYG editors. There’s a preference for seperating writing from presentation.
You might look into abiword. It aspires to be a word processor, but it’s a lot better than OOo Write in terms of speed (startup, and use). You could probably cut the UI down in a few minutes to what you need and it only takes like 5-10 seconds or so to start on a slow machine.
It used to have stability issues, but that was a couple years ago. Hopefully it’s much more stable these days.
I think the reason there’s not much in the way of what you want, well, it’s twofold:
1.) WYSIWYG editors aren’t small and simple, they’re pretty complicated. And once you start doing complex stuff you find yourself doing more and more. Soon enough you have OOo Writer (Which I’ve heard is a lot faster if you build it with gcj).
I think small/simple depends on what you want in there. GNUstep has an incarnation of an older version of NeXTStep’s TextEdit which supports basic formatting, but nothing more. It’s a very small application, but does the job just barely.
2.) The Unix tradition is against WYSIWYG editors. There’s a preference for seperating writing from presentation.
That’s of course true, but it’s not a good argument in the Gnome environment that’s supposed to inspire to ease of use and is supposed to be for everyone. Grandma doesn’t use LaTeX. 🙂
If they are ever to hope to get usability anywhere near even the old MacOS9, there should be some rudimentary apps in the suite that addresses basic problems. They are almost there. We have (fill in the missing parts, if I forgot any):
– Epiphany for webbrowsing
– Evolution for mail, calendar, addressbook and groupware
– Nautilus for file management
– GAIM for instant messaging
– Evince for document viewing and image viewing
– Totem for movies and DVD
– Rhythmbox for music
– Ekiga for audio/video chat
– Calculator
There’s no simple RTF text editor. There’s also no primitive paint program, but I don’t know how useful that is. MSPaint for Windows is hardly useful, but it’s there and the kids love it, I suppose. 🙂 OSX doesn’t include a paint program.
I consider these bare minimum apps that can be useful for anyone. If you need more, you have:
– Abiword for word processing
– Gnumeric for spreadsheets
– The GIMP for image editing
– GNUCash for finance
– Terminal for command line access
– F-spot for photo management
– GEdit for text editing and coding.
– Kino for DV video editing
– OpenOffice.org office suite, which I think overlaps Abiword/Gnumeric
And finally there are heavy apps for developers, which I won’t mention here.
You might look into abiword. It aspires to be a word processor, but it’s a lot better than OOo Write in terms of speed (startup, and use). You could probably cut the UI down in a few minutes to what you need and it only takes like 5-10 seconds or so to start on a slow machine.
It used to have stability issues, but that was a couple years ago. Hopefully it’s much more stable these days.
A shame, but it could be the only way out. I still thing AbiWord is too big to be a basic app.
Try Gedit. Abiword should do most of what you want and is less big than OO.o.
Dapper is really looking nice. The only thing I can say I hope they’ve improved that I don’t see talked about: I hope they’ve improved their builds. While Ubuntu has always been stable, it’s also always been dog slow. I hope they’ve gotten a little less conservative about builds, but I sort of doubt it (too much like Debian).
Anyway, their new theme looks really nice. Their little add/remove program looks really nice, a lot nicer than synaptic.
Nice going guys. It looks like this first big release of Ubuntu will be a very good distribution for people for quite a while!
Well I can say for my part that Dapper is _really_ faster than Breezy was, especialy booting time has greatly improved (I have the same services loading at bootup as before, plus 2 more) and the general desktop feeling is also much nicer. OOo 2.0.2 also loads considerably faster, as do Firefox 1.5 & Thunderbird 1.5. When you enable XGL then all the redrawing problems of Metacity are gone, and the desktop is A LOT faster (like when you’re moving windows around quickly)
Tom
I wonder if they’ve switched to gcj for OOo. A friend told me it’s a _lot_ faster when built with gcj.
Now I just need eclipse built with gcj!
Well it seems so, when I go to the Java preferences in OOo it says “Free Software Foundation Inc.” as vendor – so it must be 🙂 OOo does a cold-boot in less than 2 seconds on my machine now, very nice.
Tom
I have a PCI WiFi card based on the Ralink 2500 chipset, it’s supposed to be fully supported in Linux. Ralink even makes GPL drivers for it, and it works well on Windows XP, but most distros don’t even include the driver by default. Ubuntu does but it lacks WPA support, and it seems that the WPA Supplicant app doesn’t support WPA with this chipset.
So far the only free OS that supports this chipset AND WPA is FreeBSD 6.0.
Isn’t it shameful that with Windows, 5 minutes after taking the router from the box, I was able to set up a wireless connection with WPA2 personal. That 5 minutes after taking my 15″ Powerbook from its box, I was able to join the wireless network. But with Linux, the best I can get is WEP? And that only if the distro actually includes the driver (Fedora and Gentoo for example, don’t).
Linux support WPA and _this_ chipset very well.
https://wiki.ubuntu.com/WifiDocs/RalinkRT2500
In the future, ubuntu will have NetworkManager with WPA support (you can try apt-get install NetworkManager).. for now we must do some tricks to have it.
Thanks. I’m downloading Dapper Flight 5 now so I’m going to try this.
This is always the case with Linux — if there is poor hardware support by the manufacturers there is little developers can do to support those cards. Most of the a/g cards that do work manage this despite what seems like hostility on the part of the manufacturers. You’re right — it’s sad, and it will continue to be sad so long as you buy hardware with a poor level of support. It sucks that you have to do some investigation to make sure what you’re buying is well supported on Linux before you buy it, but that’s the reality of the situation until the attitude of the hardware manufacturers change (if they ever do).
Regarding WPA specifically,as you mentioned wpa supplicant is available but the NetworkManager version that supports WPA did not make it into Ubuntu last I heard.
It seems that the chipset IS very well supported by the manufacturer, and it’s just a case of poor WiFi management tools on Linux.
Right, mod me down because I only stated the truth.
Silly kids. 🙂
Can some one explain to me?
Better than what? It may actually not be better for you, who knows?
For me it’s better than Windows and OSX because it’s Linux. For me it’s better than small linux distros and stray OSes because of the comparatively good degree of hardware support and software availablility. For me it’s better than much of the other big Linux distros because their apt/synaptic/g-a-i is so smooth. For meit’s better because I prefer the debian universe over the rpm universe. For me it’s better than Debian because it’s newer than Stable but more stable than “unstable”. For me it’s better than the windows-user-oriented distributions like Xandros and Linspire because I don’t need that type of support for my uses. For me it’s better than Kubuntu because I prefer Gnome to KDE.
For you: who knows?
I prefer the debian universe over the rpm universe
Why?
I prefer the debian universe over the rpm universe
Why?
Don’t know
I have it the same way. I left RPM-world a few years ago in frustration and never looked back. Debian-world have never let me down.
I left RPM-world a few years ago in frustration
What frustrated you? Did the system break?
I left RPM-world a few years ago in frustration
What frustrated you? Did the system break?
When I think back…
* Buggy software. Some releases worse than others (RH6.0 was especially bad).
* Official mirrors quickly dropping support for older releases (I think I had to change mirrors 3 times with Mandrake 8.2)
* Complex configurations not suited for commandline maintenance. (an I was not impressed by Linuxconf)
* A lot of dependency problems, which I’ve been able to solve better on Debian.
* The final straw was that Mandrake patched Emacs in a crude way to hardwire Alt and Meta to be the same key.
All this might have gotten better on Fedora/Mandriva (I know the UI has), but I see no reason to go back. Debian/Ubuntu just works and I like the way they do things.
I can answer to why someone would like Debian packages over RPMs. I have had RPM databases become corrupted several times. Debian packages are far more friendly to third part repositories, with third party RPMs a lot of times it will totally hose your system, and since Debian in general has a ton more packages, you only need a few from third party repositories in general.
Leech
RPM has a lot more overrides, and it doesn’t tell you later you’re stupid for having used them.
Dpkg will constantly tell you its broken and you need to remove that package you overrode it on before it’ll install new packages. This is why I hate deb’s. I’ll take rpm over deb any day of the week, it’s a far more flexible system.
And yes, you can hose your system with a bad rpm. That’s why I like it!
But Ubuntu is aimed at inexperienced users as much as experienced once. So deb is likely a much better choice. There also aren’t nearly so many bad debs out there as the debian repo’s have long been the most complete.
That’s why I like RPM over deb. And for the record, I like a good slackware tarball even better
. But my favourite package format has been arch’s. Pacman isn’t terribly robust, but oh well, it also doesn’t think it’s smarter than me!
But Ubuntu is aimed at inexperienced users as much as experienced once
You gotta be kidding. I tried to install Ubuntu earlier this year with the online manual, and it was way too complicated to me. I gave up.
I guess it is a distro aimed at developpers, but definately not for the average joe user.
You gotta be kidding. I tried to install Ubuntu earlier this year with the online manual, and it was way too complicated to me. I gave up.
I guess it is a distro aimed at developpers, but definately not for the average joe user.
So maybe you should contact Ubuntu team and say about your expiriences with installation. I think they want an avarage joe users to be able to install and use Ubuntu. Ubuntu isn’t rather targeted at developers IMHO.
Anyway it seems that a graphics installer is on the way, so installation should be easier in upcoming releases…
Edited 2006-03-11 23:41
Yes, actually it seems that every installation is text-based or from the console (correct me if I’m mistaken…)
<You gotta be kidding. I tried to install Ubuntu earlier this year with the online manual, and it was way too complicated to me. I gave up.
I guess it is a distro aimed at developpers, but definately not for the average joe user.>
I’ve got to disagree with you on this one. Ubuntu is a great distro for newbies. I’ve had friends with no linux experience install it with just the smallest amount of help from myself – explaining where to find network info, for example. I find the installer to be simple to use but perhaps in need of a facelift to make it more appealing to non-linux users. You should try it again. The forums are a great place to look for help for your installation problems.
Edited 2006-03-12 03:01
I’ve had friends with no linux experience install it with just the smallest amount of help from myself
I’m doing Linux classes at the moment, and frankly you’d be surprised how many people have never seen a command line (I certainly was). Competent, experienced computer (Windows) users who just clam up when there’s no mouse. Translating GUI concepts into a TUI (text user interface) is harder than it appears, it seems.
You’re right that the Ubuntu text mode installer is easy to use, but the lack of a mouse cursor makes it an alien environment for users wanting to point and click.
My advice to the Ubuntu (& Debian) developers: simply enabling the console mouse driver and allowing users to click the buttons instead of having to navigate with the keyboard would take much of the newbie frustration away.
Ha ha ha ha ha!
What? Installing Ubuntu is as easy as making a free partition, putting the CD in, answer a few simple questions & your done. If you don’t know how to partition your harddrive, then don’t blame Linux for this. I agree that partitioning the harddrive is often the most difficult part of installing Linux, but this has nothing to do with Linux, it’s because most people want to install it in parallel to Windows first. It wouldn’t be different the other way round. Sorry I don’t want to be rude but if you can’t install Ubuntu than you also can’t install Windows – both are the same easy or hard to install. Where exactly did you give up? Perhaps we’re able to help you and you can try again.
Tom
Re: ease of Installation.
I found it the easiest Distro to install, but I have been trying since about Mandrake 6 or something, heck it even found my Graphics and sound cards (cough), but I would imagine, Installing with damaging an excisting Windows setup would still be scary to a person new to all this.
I don’t personally find Linux floats my boat, but what I really don’t like about it is some of the fan-boys how over exagrate how easy it is to install, and are rather sniffy about those who have trouble. I thought one of the strengths of Ubuntu was the friendyness given to ‘nubies’.?
Sorry I don’t want to be rude but if you can’t install Ubuntu than you also can’t install Windows
No, I install Windows every now and then. Windows is easy for me because it has a graphical installer. I am just unable to use the command line…
Ehm sorry but where do you need a command line when installing Ubuntu?
Tom
Ehm sorry but where do you need a command line when installing Ubuntu?
Ubuntu installation is text-based. Also, most of the tweaks are also text-based: http://help.ubuntu.com/starterguide/C/ch03s06.html
It is not bad if you are used to it, but if you come from the Apple/MS world, this is misguiding to the least. I will have to wait for a full GUI version of Ubuntu.
The first half of Windows XP installation is text-based as well…how did you manage to get through it?
Okay well the _installation_ of Ubuntu is GUI-driven, although this GUI is textbased (text-pseudo-graphics). You don’t have to enter a single command during the installation.
Well when you talk about this starter guide. I don’t know if you’ve even read this starter guide or how you define “most” – but out of these 11 programs only 2 need to be installed via the command line. All others can be installed trough Synaptic – the _graphical_ package manager.
Tom
The installer for Ubuntu is no more or less graphical then the one in Windows, save the serial number and regional settings input that the windows installer has.
I don’t think you have even tried to install Ubuntu. The installer may be “text-based”, but it doesn’t use the command line. It uses a ncurses-like interface showing text screens in which you can select options using arrows.
I’m with the original poster, if you can’t install Ubuntu, you probably can’t install Windows either. In fact, you probably can’t install anything. The Ubuntu installer is very simple to use.
Ma_d,
Re: “RPM has a lot more overrides, and it doesn’t tell you later you’re stupid for having used them. Dpkg will constantly tell you its broken and you need to remove that package you overrode it on before it’ll install new packages. This is why I hate deb’s. I’ll take rpm over deb any day of the week, it’s a far more flexible system.”
Are you referring to dependency checker which is available in package managers such as YAST that also checks for digital signatures? Unless you’re comment regarding “more overrides” refers to using the force command to install packages. If so then I would not recommend this method to someone installing software, especially someone new to Linux.
Re: “And yes, you can hose your system with a bad rpm. That’s why I like it!”
I use SUSE Linux a RPM based distribution and I found your comment not logical. An end user would not typically want to corrupt their data by intentionally force installing a binary package that they know may cause havoc on their system. Anyway it is possible to repair a RPM based distribution which I’m sure is also possible on Debian based distributions such as Ubuntu Linux.
Re: “That’s why I like RPM over deb. And for the record, I like a good slackware tarball even better
. But my favourite package format has been arch’s. Pacman isn’t terribly robust, but oh well, it also doesn’t think it’s smarter than me!”
No matter if a consumer chooses to use a RPM based distribution such as SUSE Linux or a Debian based one such as Ubuntu Linux I’m sure most of us would agree using a binary package (ie: packagename.rpm) is similar to using “packagename.exe” for Windows. Though ease of use is unlikely when choosing to use tarballs or compiling from source. The reason being command scripts are rarely if ever needed on modern Linux distributions that provide a simple GUI package manager to ease installation and removel of binary packages.
Edited 2006-03-12 08:03
I’m sure most of us would agree using a binary package (ie: packagename.rpm) is similar to using “packagename.exe” for Windows.
OK, I see some similarity. But the RPM gives much greater freedom. You can list the files in an rpm and even view the scripts that show what the RPM will do to your system. There is even rpm2cpio that lets you extract individual files and examine them.
rpm -qlp package.rpm
rpm -qp –scripts package.rpm
rpm2cpio package.rpm | cpio …
But with a Windows setup.exe, what can you do but just trust it?
> OK, I see some similarity. But the RPM gives much
> greater freedom. You can list the files in an rpm and
> even view the scripts that show what the RPM will do to
> your system.
> […]
> But with a Windows setup.exe, what can you do but just
> trust it?
What can you do and just trust a setup script if you don’t have the expertise to understand it?
This problem needs a radically different approach. The OS should be able to auto-check whether installation screws it and act accordingly. Of course, this implies that a package may not contain installation scripts written in a turing-equivalent language, and so on.
KenJackson,
Re: “OK, I see some similarity. But the RPM gives much greater freedom. You can list the files in an rpm and even view the scripts that show what the RPM will do to your system. There is even rpm2cpio that lets you extract individual files and examine them.”
Maybe I should of worded it differently as I wasn’t getting into that much detail. Though package managers such as YAST are doing what they should do and that is checking for dependencies, conflicts and digital signatures. Yes it’s nice to be able to extract the binary and look at the source code but not everyone wants to do this. My reasons for migrating over to Linux wasn’t so I could read lines of code.
Anyway, what I was referring to was ease of installation when using binary “packagename.rpm or packagename.deb” on Linux similar to ease of installation of “packagename.exe” on Windows. Compiling from source or using a Terminal (BASH, CLI) to execute a command to install software is not what most consumers want.
As long as Ubuntu Linux provides ease of installation and use then it should be a good distribution for those migrating from Windows to Linux. Though if it falls into the “geeks only” catagory as some Linux distributions do then it will be less attractive to consumers. After all not every user using Linux is the person installing the distribution or even knows anything about using a Terminal. This is why I like companies such as Novell and Mandriva that continually strive to make migration easier. As long as other Linux developers keep this in mind then Linux adoption will continue to grow.
Edited 2006-03-12 18:54
I can answer to why someone would like Debian packages over RPMs. I have had RPM databases become corrupted several times. Debian packages are far more friendly to third part repositories, with third party RPMs a lot of times it will totally hose your system, and since Debian in general has a ton more packages, you only need a few from third party repositories in general.
If you install an rpm not meant for you distro then of course your system can get hosed. Remember that most Debian based distros use the same base, but many rpm based distros are completely independent entities.
Also Debian users are not immune from having their systems hosed by third party repositories. It just depends on the quality of packages and the amount of testing that they have gone through.
To directly your question, I’ve had experience with several RPM distributions (mandrake, redhat and derivs, suse) and found that the software availability in official repositories was quite limited, and were forced to install .RPMs from packages provided by the official application distributers. The quality of these packages was uneven, tracking down the package dependencies was annoying and frustrating, and sometimes the .RPM was not available in the flavour I wanted.
With debian-derived distros, you have a huge repository of applications that work and are available either via the command like or a nice simple GUI. It’s true that you don’t always have the most recent packages available that way, but for my tastes the benefits outweigh the negatives. For people with other preferences I can certainly understand why they’d disagree with my choice.
I’ve had experience with several RPM distributions (mandrake, redhat and derivs, suse) and found that the software availability in official repositories was quite limited, and were forced to install .RPMs from packages provided by the official application distributers
Mandirva has 12000+ packages in its official repositories and there are a few third party repos that provide stuff that can’t be shipped with most Linux distros. Suse is the same, it has lots of packages in its official repos (including commercial apps). To say that the number of packages are limited is wrong in my opinion.
Many Debian users profess about how easy apt makes life, but they forget that apt and synaptic also work on rpm based distros so apt is no longer exclusive to Debian and derivatives. Package managers like yum and urpmi are also just as good as apt and they have nice gui interfaces.
I don’t know the answer to this, maybe you can tell me. Does Mandriva have Gnome 2.13/14? Tomboy? NetworkManager? Gnome-sudoku? Liferea? Rhythmbox 0.93? XGL? And that’s just what I have currently running right now. I know Fedora probably has all those already.
I dunno, maybe the rpm distros are catching up as you say — if so that’s great. The popularity of Ubuntu has probably been a big factor in how Fedora dramatically improved their distribution from their poor quality starts to the quite good FC5. Also probably a factor that helped push Debian into a better timeframe commitment for releases.
I do understand your point, that there is no reason why you couldn’t achieve the same level of application support with rpm as I talk about deb having — as you say the cli and gui tools are there. The advantage debian-derived distributions have is that (to a varying extent) they all share the same package upstream so the work is co-operative not simple duplication of effort. I like that.
I don’t know the answer to this, maybe you can tell me. Does Mandriva have Gnome 2.13/14? Tomboy? NetworkManager? Gnome-sudoku? Liferea? Rhythmbox 0.93? XGL? And that’s just what I have currently running right now. I know Fedora probably has all those already.
I don’t know myself because I prefer KDE over GNOME, so don’t bother intalling GNOME on my Mandriva installation altough I use it elsewhere. As for XGL, its not officially supported but can work on Mandriva.
The advantage debian-derived distributions have is that (to a varying extent) they all share the same package upstream so the work is co-operative not simple duplication of effort. I like that.
I wouldn’t call it duplication of effort because most rpm distros are not based on one distro like the Debian derivatives.
“Package managers like yum and urpmi are also just as good as apt and they have nice gui interfaces.”
I would have to agree completely. Urpmi does an excellent job and I have had zero failures since using it.
Urpmi is one of the most overlooked package managers ever. I’ve moved on but Mandrake/Mandriva is wonderul, and I bet if some Apt fanatics tried out a Mandriva install, they’d love it.
Is it better than Slackware + KDE for someone who is past the newbie stage and has a fascination with performance and editing text config files?
Probably not — if you like a lot of control and doing things by hand I’d recommend checking out Gentoo or sticking with Slackware. Gnome and Ubuntu are better for people who are sick of munging text files and want things to just work without messing around a lot. That said, there is nothing _preventing_ you from editing text files, and the performance is rather good — but really it honestly sounds to me like Ubuntu is the opposite of what you want.
<blockquote>For me it’s better than Windows and OSX because it’s Linux.</blockquote>
Why is Linux better than Windows and OSX? Are you talking about how the Linux kernel handles things which are in your mind better than OSX’s and Windows’s (which Windows kernel are you talking about here?) kernels?
Or do you prefer Linux because it’s versatile and allows you to install and uninstall different apps without much fuss?
For me:
Linux (vs Windows)
+Security
+Privacy
+Free (as in beer)
+Know what’s going on
+Tweakability
+Developer friendly
-Fussy
-Lack of availabity or low quality for certain apps (e.g. multimedia)
+Handles heavy loads better
-but is a bit slower for light loads
It’s a nice hobby as well.
I might be pleased with OS X as well if I could afford it.
Edited 2006-03-12 11:46
“Or do you prefer Linux because it’s versatile and allows you to install and uninstall different apps without much fuss?”
Speaking for myself, I prefer Linux for lots of reasons:
Gnome is a nice clean integrated environment compared to Windows & Mac OSX. Windows is the chaotic mismatch that everyone used to claim Linux was. Even “foreign” apps like Thunderbird integrate nicely. Mac OSX seems to be getting less consistent over time.
Multiple desktops for grouping applications. I’ve tried some of the alternatives in Windows and as an add on it just doesn’t work that well. Busy applications will freeze things and follow you when you switch desktops.
Windows are managed by the window manager, they don’t manage themselves, so they behave better if they do freeze.
Installing applications from source code and uninstalling them is easy. If you don’t think it’s easy try doing the equivalent on Windows.
Application install/uninstall/management is much easier when everything is managed centrally. One gives you one place for managed updates rather than randomly searching the web for them, or expecting apps to manage their own updates.
Installs from source code drop into a different place, keeping them seperate from apps managed by the package manager. Gives you a perfect opportunity to experiment with new in-development software without destabalising the core.
All apps open at the user’s home directory, or the last used directory in the home directory. The home directory is also nice and easy to find.
No drive letters. What an annoying legacy. I remember my Atari 800 having drive letters. Fortunately we’ve moved on from there.
Though of course this is a personal thing, if people prefer Mac OSX or Windows that’s their perogative. I just find them less usable environments.
I do like some of the new OSX inspired features that are coming though, like expose, but for the current desktop top rather than all open applications.
I also really like Nautilus, I’ve not tried it in a corporate environment with lots of networked resources, but on a home user desktop it’s great.
Muine has the cleanest interface of any music player I’ve used, and Rhythmbox isn’t too bad either despite being less aesthetically pleasing. Oh, and Mono apps look much nicer than .Net applications.
I could go on and on and on, but I’m sure you’re bored already. As I said, it’s a personal preference thing.
I pretty much agree with all your points except…
“Application install/uninstall/management is much easier when everything is managed centrally. One gives you one place for managed updates rather than randomly searching the web for them, or expecting apps to manage their own updates. ”
I think that ‘normal’ desktop apps like web browsers and media players should not be managed centrally. Simply because this means that installing an app that does not exist in the central repository can be unnecessarily problematic. Apps checking for their own updates is much simpler. I prefer the Mac way of not even having to install an app to run it.
“Installs from source code drop into a different place, keeping them seperate from apps managed by the package manager. Gives you a perfect opportunity to experiment with new in-development software without destabalising the core. ”
How is this different from the Mac or even Windows way? I’m pretty sure that any OS lets you built applications and use them in a different folder.
“All apps open at the user’s home directory, or the last used directory in the home directory. The home directory is also nice and easy to find. ”
How are the home directories in Windows and Mac hard to find?
“I think that ‘normal’ desktop apps like web browsers and media players should not be managed centrally. Simply because this means that installing an app that does not exist in the central repository can be unnecessarily problematic.”
I can’t say I’ve found a problem with that. I find a centrally managed solution has more upsides than downsides. I rarely feel the need to track the absolute cutting edge of any application I run, as long as the security fixes are up to date. If I do feel the need I’ll just build from source. Having that choice is a benefit when a lot of closed source providers only give you the choice of waiting for their periodic updates. If I want to take advantage of a new feature Microsoft has come up with, I may have to wait three years and do a whole OS upgrade.
“How is this different from the Mac or even Windows way? I’m pretty sure that any OS lets you built applications and use them in a different folder.”
The fact that I don’t even have to think about the folder? I can just do “./configure && make && sudo make install” and run it without concerning myself about install folders unless I specifically want it somewhere non-standard.
I think the fact that most open source software for Windows comes packaged as binaries says a lot about the ease of building/installing source on that platform. The tools also don’t come out of the box. As far as I can see, Windows doesn’t seem to have any standards as to where things should be installed. Where will I find the offical install of X and where will I find my home built version. I can answer that on Linux, but if I installed both on Windows I’m pretty sure they’d be fighting for the same install location.
I’ve not built software on Mac OSX so can’t comment on that.
“How are the home directories in Windows and Mac hard to find?”
Windows apps are hardly consistant about where they open when you go to save a file. And tucking things under “c:Applications & Settings” isn’t the most user friendly place. It still doesn’t feel very user centric, as you are playing second fiddle to the operating system. I don’t have problems with the Mac in this regard, not every point in my list was targetted at both platforms. It was just what I like better about Linux environments.
Truthfully not much.
ubuntu are not what you would exactly call innovative or revolutionary. Their contriubtions in terms of volume and complexity are relatively small, compared to say Novell ( which has backed ,funded and support server OSS projects).
What makes Ubuntu better ? So what makes Ubuntu great?
It’s because they focus on the “simple” things. And they try to keep things simple.
Take their new additions to Dapper. I mean really the gdebi (it’s reaaaaalllly simplified )makes me sick to look at ….but i know that i will be using it when i do get dapper. Not because it’s complicated wizadry with amazing bells and whistles but because it is simple.
….i hope with the one simple example i’ve given you’ve gotten a feel for what makes Ubuntu great.
oh by the way. anything Ubuntu can do any other linux desktop distro can…..
To me, what makes it better is that they focus on one desktop environment at the time. This way the desktop becomes more consistent than distros that tries to combine Gnome, KDE,… into one distro.
They also tries to make a sensible selection of what’s installed by default, you don’t end up with 5 different text editors, 3 termial programs etc.
Ubuntu satisfies almost every kind of user.. from the noob to the experienced hacker.
Why?
It just works!
It’s easy to keep updated, it has a very good hardware support, it’s well documentated, it has the benefits of debian (apt-get), it is actual!
Ubuntu is a cutting-edge linux distro.
from the ubuntu website:
“Ubuntu is a free, open source operating system that starts with the breadth of Debian and adds regular releases (every six months), a clear focus on the user and usability (it should “Just Work”, TM) and a commitment to security updates with 18 months of support for every release.”
I was looking forward to this but X still doesn’t work here
This is both on my Windows laptop with an ATI X700 card and on my desktop running Breezy.
Oh well, maybe I should risk a dist-upgrade…
What about Leafpad? http://www.gnomefiles.org/shots/leafpad.png
If only Leafpad had text formatting features… it still geared towards coding, albeit simple coding. No go.
Dapper looks like it will be pretty good. I don’t think Ubuntu every really brings out anything revolutionary in any of it’s releases , they focus on the simple but useful things. Which is what makes Ubuntu great , in my opinion.
I can’t wait to get dapper , just to use gdebi. Nothing revolutionary here but useful.( like gnome-sudo tool ) This tool alone will take fustration out of some fairly mundane yet routine debian admin tasks. I know there are other gui debian installers out there but this will save so much time. ..
They should take repository management out of synaptic and update manager and put into a seperate application.
It would make life a lot easier.
System menu is getting a bit crowded. Why do we need
to add a help folder ? Wouldnt it be better to improve the help app ( yelp ), than to give us 3 types of help ?
CLI are useful but there not meant for everything.Go Ubuntu go !!!!
It might (still) not have the eye-candy of fedora or suse, but i would hardly call the ubuntu install “dificult”.
I’d guess it’d be pretty easy to get hoplessly confused and lost if one takes a wrong turn with the partition manager.
In a top-notch professional OS, icons on the desktop don’t change their positions by themselves after each login, session manager doesn’t restore session and open unrelated apps when turned off, and the default video player doesn’t crash on the second attempt to play DVD in a session. Etc.
Dapper Drake shows a lot of promise, but to make that promise a reality, such little or not so little bugs, which there are plenty of, should be fixed. And judging by the amount of problems reported in the Dapper forum and the speed of response to the bugreports in Malone, even six additional weeks proposed by Mark may not be enough to make Dapper really stable.
Yes, I know that nobody owes me anything. But then to me personally, Dapper Drake is fine as it is. Just don’t call it a top-notch professional OS yet. It’s not going to become one in such a short time frame.
So what would you call a top notch OS?, because both Windows and Mac OS-X have bugs like that.
Dunno about OS X, but XP has much less bugs like that in my experience. It lacks some badly needed features, but the one it has are implemented rather decently.
But do you want to say that these bugs are unimportant and shouldn’t be fixed?
I don’t know WHEN you’re tried out Dapper, but I have it on my primary desktop for a few days now, heavily using it every day, and I haven’t seen any problems so far, except that VFS bug. Totem and all other multimedia apps work fine also. The progress off how fast bugs are solved is sometimes amazing. When you have Dapper installed, packages are updated daily, and you can see a lot of improvement every day. The new Ubuntu theme for example has gotten updates every day now, and it’s getting better & better. Can’t wait for the final elease, but for now, even this alpha software fits almost perfectly.
Tom
I have the current Dapper with all updates and report all bugs I encounter to Malone.
Yeah, I know it’s offtopic but i’ve been in Debianland for many years and I want to try something different (FC, Suse, or Slack). I got sick of relying on a central repository for software.
Does anything like Fedora extras exist for Suse?
Does anything like Fedora extras exist for Suse?
If you use apt on SuSE you will find a large number of package sources. Many of these are SuSE’s own engineers posting their latest stuff in their own folders rather than in the official tree, but others are third parties such as packman, guru or usr-local-bin. For example, a list of apt sources for SuSE 10 from http://linux01.gwdg.de/apt4rpm/ is
rpm ftp://ftp4.gwdg.de/pub/linux/suse/apt SuSE/10.0-i386 suser-oc2pus suser-guru rpmkeys base java update-drpm update-prpm update extra kde gnome xorg mozilla openoffice samba3 ximian suser-agirardet suser-hthen suser-liviudm suser-rbos suser-crauch suser-jengelh jacklab suser-gbv usr-local-bin suser-tcousin suser-scorot suser-sbarnin suser-scrute suser-jogley suser-ollakka suser-raoul funktronics kolab packman packman-i686 kernel-of-the-day kraxel wine suse-people suse-projects kde3-stable kde-unstable security-prpm security
In practice you would not want to use more than a small subset of the full listing or borkery and duplication conflicts would soon follow. One of the nice things about Debian is that strict rules mean that packages are better integrated one with another than they are in SuSEland. In addition, I’m not sure whether the SuSE community plans to continue with apt and I am fairly sure it is not officially supported anyway. Still I have used it for a few years with no problems.
There is already an extras folder in the SuSE ftp tree which mostly contains packages designed to put back in the multimedia and non-free stuff left off the official distro.
Edited 2006-03-12 12:57
http://linux01.gwdg.de/apt4rpm/
Thanks, i’ll bookmark this. One more question: I know retail Suse comes with more packages than the Opensuse version. Is there a way to get these packages by downloading (and I mean OSS packages like SBCL, I don’t know if this is included in Opensuse or not).
One more question: I know retail Suse comes with more packages than the Opensuse version. Is there a way to get these packages by downloading (and I mean OSS packages like SBCL, I don’t know if this is included in Opensuse or not).
Check these links for left-off stuff. I am sure others have done the same, but these are the ones I know.
http://disruptive.org.uk/2005/10/11/suse_10_package_comparisons.htm…
http://disruptive.org.uk/2005/10/13/suse_10_package_comparisons_2.h…
I would guess that nosing around in the SuSE ftp tree would soon reveal whether any “missing” packages are available. I’d be surprised if all that much was missing by now, as SuSE 10 has been out for a while. If you have apt installed, then perhaps apt-cache search … would help too.
Alternatively, look around the sources of help and info cited at http://en.opensuse.org/Communicate
Good luck!
How about a small simple aux. comp that is designed only to load the main operating system onto the main computer?
Don’t laugh
Basically this would be like using Knoppix as a loader.(but more so)
One poster has already pointed out that the forums of most OSs have EXACTLY the same problems appearing on them.
Very basic cpu’s these days are cheap enough. (Back a few years ago when I was buying box sets of Linux and trying to install them I spent a lot more money than the price of XP Pro)(and failed; until I came across Knoppix)
The amount of resources available to the Ubuntu community.The amount of (working!) quality apps in the several repositories.The relaxed way of the community towards those new to linux (Ubuntu.The srict package maintaining and adequately fast handling of new bugs.Innovation,vision.User friendlyness.
For example;doc-central installs automatically a complete apache webserver where all the docs are browsable locally via whatever browser.You have defacto more apps working as in many commercial distros.While they get upgraded continuously instead of only bug fixes.
Browser: Links (2.1pre20; Linux 2.6.14-hardened-r5 x86_64; x)
I used the LiveCD to install on the harddisk. The LiveCD didn’t set up a good video resolution (it went for 640×480, I think). But I configured it manually (editing /etc/X11/xorg.conf and restarting X), and then I was able to install it to the HD using the Espresso installer.
In my first try wih the Espresso I tried to use the existing partitions (/, swap and /home), but I couldn’t advance to the last stage of copying the files to the HD, because it kept repeating the partition management stage.
Once I decided to let the installer repartition the HD, the installation went though accordingly.
On the pro side, I like the new Espresso installer very much, and I can see some improvements since its first appearence in Dapper. Also, I used this same Espresso in Guadalinex and Molinux, and I can say that I prefer the polishing of the Dapper version, though the Guadalinex and Molinux still work a little bit better in the “use the existing partition” stage. I can say that Espresso will make Ubuntu very popular as a LiveCD distro, a la Knoppix.
GDM rocks. I didn’t know how much GDM was good until I tried to use something else. GDM rocks a lot. The Gnome tools rock as well.
The new Human theme is much more tolerable I think.
The only downside to the latest Linux distros is the conflicts with in the latest developments of Xorg. Xorg needs to become stable again, a la the 6.8.2 version. It’s good when they add new features, it’s bad when it makes the Linux desktop experience unstable. Hopefully, they won’t need to mess up the Xorg codebase again for the next 5 years. So, Linux is about ready to conquer the world.
Go Ubuntu! Go Linux!
I’m beginning to think it’s time to give it a test drive,There’s a few reasons why I haven’t
1. I would have to buy a copy off ebay or something becauise I don’t have a high speed commection
2.I am not a real big fan of Gnome(or the earthy toned gui btw(don’t flip guys I never liked yellow tabs in BeOS either,it’s one of the first things I do after an install,put windowshade in and change those yellow tabs!))I have ran Mepis for a few years now and I always considered Ubantu a Gnome based Mepis more or less.both have the same Debian based underpinnings the main differance has been the choice of window manager.I have always liked KDE better ,bloat and all,it just seems to be more complete.On that not I recebtly read that the latrest Vector Linux distro is shipping with a full bloiwn version of the latest Enlightenment ,and the claim it will run ananimated desktop wallpaper,even on a PII 266 laptop with 128 RAM and not really bog it down much.E has always fascinated me but I hate building it from scratch because I always get something wrong and it does’t run right.which leads me to my next point.
3.Why the hell can’t anyone in the linux camp see that an end-user doen’t want to go thru library and dependancy hell just to install an app? A package should come with all it’s depandancies met,just like in Windoze, Mac or Be.I have never used OSX but in the old Mac’s I never remember having to download any other stuff to make an app run ,and in Windoze I never had to get.dll’s to install anything ,they were in the app,and in BeOS usually in the packaged(SoftwareValet) apps this stuff was included in the package and even in the Zip files when you opened the app up after unzipping ther was a folder with the libs and anther hotlinked folder that said “drag libwhatever.so here”Plus they have a pre compiledd LibPak with just about all the libs you need to run Linux ports>Where is the LibPak for Linux?Virtually everything I install requires extra pi$$ing around to satisfy dependancies,be it RPM or .deb based.
All that being said they do look like they are heading the right direction by making more stuff controlable from the gui,and they have passed up Mepis to the point where the founder of Mepis is saying thar he’s going to base his future Mepis distros on Ubuntu rather than the raw debian versions(I do still like Warren’s desktop manager and color choices better)maybe I will wait on his build,building my own KDE sounds like too much work.
1. Ubuntu will ship you a free CD if you request one. It can take a while to reach you though. You should get one when Dapper is released.
2. Get Kubuntu instead of Ubuntu, based on KDE.
3. Synaptic (and apt-get) handle all the dependencies for you and automatically download/install them. So the average user doesn’t need to know a thing about them. There are some instances in the last 1.5 years of running Ubuntu where I’ve run into dependancy conflict and had to build certain packages from source to get around it, but that’s rare and only in cases where I wanted the latest version of certain apps that weren’t in the repositories. The vast majority of users will never run into that.
Does anyone know if ACPI support has been fixed in Dapper to allow resume-from-RAM on most laptops? As an Ubuntu user on my primary workstation (a Compaq x1000 laptop), the ability to resume to RAM is probably the main feature that I’ve missed since switching from WinXP to Ubuntu (Warty/Hoary/Breezy) a year-and-a-half ago. Hibernate to disk has never worked either. Especially if they’re targetting corporate laptop users, the ability to hibernate/resume to save battery life (without powering down and up) seems pretty important.
I was able to get suspend-to-RAM working on my Breezy box with some tweaking. Now, I’ve installed Dapper on the same laptop, overwriting the acpi config files (after doing a backup, of course), and it worked right out of the box, so you may be luckier.
Hibernate worked, but not resuming from it, however I have not tweaked anything yet. I’ll post info here if I succeed.
It looks amazing! I’m using Suse 10, but that new Ubuntu eye candy is making me lust for Ubuntu now, esp. considering they’re supporting XGL too!
Does anyone know what happened to Kubuntu Flight 5? Ubuntu and Edubuntu are there, but Kubuntu is mysteriously missing. It’s just plain unavailable. When will Kubuntu Flight-5 be released? Flight 4 is nice, but not quite stable enough for me to use at home yet.
IIRC the Kubuntu team is working on adding KDE 3.5 instead of 3.4. That might explain the delay.
when i boot into kde on my ubuntu box it IS kde 3.5