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If you can run apt-get commands, you can make your own subset of Ubuntu. Grab and burn the Minimal installation CD that suits you:
https://help.ubuntu.com/community/Installation/MinimalCD

LTS gives you the most bang for the buck. (o;

Boot; install the minimal command-line environment (CLI).

Restart. Run apt-get update.

Then run apt-get {pkg-list}

where pkg-list is a space-separated list of the pieces that you want to install. Here's my list.

xorg gnome-core gdm synaptic gnome-app-install gdebi ubuntu-gdm-themes gconf-editor gnome-volume-manager gparted conky alacarte xterm smbclient update-manager update-notifier pcmanfm file-roller nautilus-open-terminal evince cups-pdf system-config-printer-gnome arj genisoimage lha ncompress p7zip p7zip-full sharutils unace unrar build-essential
firefox gnome-utils

Jaunty Jackalope FWIW.

https://lists.ubuntu.com/archives/ubuntu-devel-announce/2008-September/000481.html

"There are some specific goals that we need to meet in Jaunty. One of
them is boot time. We want Ubuntu to boot as fast as possible - both in
the standard case, and especially when it is being tailored to a
specific device. The Jackalope is known for being so fast that it's
extremely hard to catch, and breeds only when lightning flashes. Let's
see if we can make booting or resuming Ubuntu blindingly quick."

Not sure what you mean. I installed server and only got the bits I needed. Installed Samba after as it wasn't part of the default package because they don't know if you'll want it, so they leave it up to you. Same with other components.

Not sure what you mean. I installed server and only got the bits I needed. Installed Samba after as it wasn't part of the default package because they don't know if you'll want it, so they leave it up to you. Same with other components.

Beginning with Ubuntu 7.04, the PowerPC edition of Ubuntu will be
    reclassified as unofficial. The PowerPC software itself and supporting
    infrastructure will continue to be available, and supported by a community
    team.

Full decision:

    The Ubuntu Technical Board has decided to reclassify PowerPC as an
    unofficial architecture, rather than a fully supported architecture, for
    Ubuntu 7.04 and subsequent releases. This means that packages and ISO
    images will continue to be produced, but releases will not be delayed due
    to problems which are specific to PowerPC, and the quality of the PowerPC
    release itself will depend very much on the extent to which members of the
    Ubuntu community drive PowerPC testing and bug fixes.

In other words, Canonical is hosting the Ubuntu on PPC community, but the community is doing the development. And if a PPC port is broken at Ubuntu release time, it ships broken. Canonical might possibly do some PPC patching task, but there's no guarantee. That's why the community needs developers, and why I'm promoting it.

The PowerPC / Cell ports releases linked above ( http://cdimage.ubuntu.com/ports/daily-live/current/ ) get all security and package updates the same as x86 and x86_64 from official Ubuntu repos.

All isos, packages, security updates, etc are made by the Canonical team. Not the community. Feel free to ask on irc if you need clarification.

The only difference is that you cannot pay Ubuntu for commercial support for PowerPC.

I'm not so sure about the Ubuntu.com PS3 forums' median experience level. But beware the PSUbuntu.com forums: they're really "Ubuntu is a free PS3 game to collect" bunch.

If you can help get a 2.6.27 kernel to boot Ubuntu on PS3, you could drop a line in the Ubuntu.com PS3 forums, or that ubuntu-cell maillist, and return the favor of "collaborating" on PS3 Linux.

972 votes now. Thank you Slashdot. http://brainstorm.ubuntu.com/idea/1265/

According to https://help.ubuntu.com/community/LiveCD/Persistence/, persistence has stopped working since 6.10 (tried 7.10 and did not work for me...). Does it work on 8.10?

Personally, I use Ubuntu as LiveCD when I need Linux on a computer which I don't want / don't have right to install Linux. Otherwise, I install the 'standard' debian. As a result, persistence is an important feature for me. And that's why I am still running 6.06.

How so? What I said is exactly that. On an unformatted disk you get three options, 1- use the whole disk, 2- custom partiton, and.. wait. there's only two.

I can't figure out what I mean by me over simplifying it because that's what it is, simple.

You word it so that the Windows partitioning step looks like it involves more steps than the Ubuntu stage, when both systems have a partition stage. You even have the user create a new partition for some reason when their disk is most likely already partitioned, and all they have to do is press Enter.

I did that because Ubuntu comes with Office software already on the disk.

You do realise that people use office software don't you?

Again (since you're being purposely obtuse), you cite Ubuntu's inclusion of OpenOffice as an advantage while pretending that versions of Office don't already come preinstalled on PCs or even on the OEM Windows recovery install disc included with the PC. Dell even has a CD with an app that lists all the bundled applications available, and you can just click their names. OpenOffice is also a free download for Windows.

This is nonsense, how can you do a fair comparrison of installing the operating system on a custom pc and come up with "the vendor disk".

Why wouldn't I? What is unfair about pointing out that Windows almost always comes with Office as well? And if it doesn't, OpenOffice is a free download for Windows too. I really don't see the point is of even bringing it up as an advantage.

It's totally irrelevant anyway because it's still not a click install even with the vendor disk. Which was my whole point in the first place.

There's no such thing as a "click install," especially with Linux.

Yes because it would be irresponsible not to download updates for Windows. It's so important that your box can get owned in less then 4 minutes.

Ubuntu never has security problems. Ever.

How so? What I said is exactly that. On an unformatted disk you get three options, 1- use the whole disk, 2- custom partiton, and.. wait. there's only two.

I can't figure out what I mean by me over simplifying it because that's what it is, simple.

You word it so that the Windows partitioning step looks like it involves more steps than the Ubuntu stage, when both systems have a partition stage. You even have the user create a new partition for some reason when their disk is most likely already partitioned, and all they have to do is press Enter.

I did that because Ubuntu comes with Office software already on the disk.

You do realise that people use office software don't you?

Again (since you're being purposely obtuse), you cite Ubuntu's inclusion of OpenOffice as an advantage while pretending that versions of Office don't already come preinstalled on PCs or even on the OEM Windows recovery install disc included with the PC. Dell even has a CD with an app that lists all the bundled applications available, and you can just click their names. OpenOffice is also a free download for Windows.

This is nonsense, how can you do a fair comparrison of installing the operating system on a custom pc and come up with "the vendor disk".

Why wouldn't I? What is unfair about pointing out that Windows almost always comes with Office as well? And if it doesn't, OpenOffice is a free download for Windows too. I really don't see the point is of even bringing it up as an advantage.

It's totally irrelevant anyway because it's still not a click install even with the vendor disk. Which was my whole point in the first place.

There's no such thing as a "click install," especially with Linux.

Yes because it would be irresponsible not to download updates for Windows. It's so important that your box can get owned in less then 4 minutes.

Ubuntu never has security problems. Ever.

I've been running Eclipse 3.4 no problems. When it comes to Eclipse, screw the repository. You will need to change your JVM from gcj to sun-java6-jdk, details here, then download the package from Eclipse, untar.gz and run the executable.

4. Network manager: Anyway who has a 3G connection probably has a laptop. And laptop's need network profile. I need one for work and one for my apartment. Ubuntu doesn't support these and this article doesn't mention anything new. Everything listed is minor improvements. Personally, I have to use wicd, which is decent, but isn't quite as well integrated as networkmanager.

A brainstorm suggestion regarding that it seams to be getting positive votes but not enough to get anything done yet.

shameless plug: other ideas of mine: GUI to show failed log in attempts renice the active program GUI tool to restart subsystems (make /etc/init.d/* easy for new users)

4. Network manager: Anyway who has a 3G connection probably has a laptop. And laptop's need network profile. I need one for work and one for my apartment. Ubuntu doesn't support these and this article doesn't mention anything new. Everything listed is minor improvements. Personally, I have to use wicd, which is decent, but isn't quite as well integrated as networkmanager.

A brainstorm suggestion regarding that it seams to be getting positive votes but not enough to get anything done yet.

shameless plug: other ideas of mine: GUI to show failed log in attempts renice the active program GUI tool to restart subsystems (make /etc/init.d/* easy for new users)

4. Network manager: Anyway who has a 3G connection probably has a laptop. And laptop's need network profile. I need one for work and one for my apartment. Ubuntu doesn't support these and this article doesn't mention anything new. Everything listed is minor improvements. Personally, I have to use wicd, which is decent, but isn't quite as well integrated as networkmanager.

A brainstorm suggestion regarding that it seams to be getting positive votes but not enough to get anything done yet.

shameless plug: other ideas of mine: GUI to show failed log in attempts renice the active program GUI tool to restart subsystems (make /etc/init.d/* easy for new users)

4. Network manager: Anyway who has a 3G connection probably has a laptop. And laptop's need network profile. I need one for work and one for my apartment. Ubuntu doesn't support these and this article doesn't mention anything new. Everything listed is minor improvements. Personally, I have to use wicd, which is decent, but isn't quite as well integrated as networkmanager.

A brainstorm suggestion regarding that it seams to be getting positive votes but not enough to get anything done yet.

shameless plug: other ideas of mine: GUI to show failed log in attempts renice the active program GUI tool to restart subsystems (make /etc/init.d/* easy for new users)

4. Network manager: Anyway who has a 3G connection probably has a laptop. And laptop's need network profile. I need one for work and one for my apartment. Ubuntu doesn't support these and this article doesn't mention anything new. Everything listed is minor improvements. Personally, I have to use wicd, which is decent, but isn't quite as well integrated as networkmanager.

A brainstorm suggestion regarding that it seams to be getting positive votes but not enough to get anything done yet.

shameless plug: other ideas of mine: GUI to show failed log in attempts renice the active program GUI tool to restart subsystems (make /etc/init.d/* easy for new users)

Unfortunately there are a few negatives, too. Thanks to the new kernel there is no realtime audio support for my Ubuntu Studio install and my laptop nvidia drivers would get switched to the non 3d open source nv drivers.

8.10 Release notes

So neither of my personal computers are getting upgraded which is unfortunate. I was looking forward to the Gnome updates and the newer officially supported apps.

Here

As I said, the Cell arch port is a community supported port of Ubuntu, not an officially supported one from Canonical:

We need developers! It's very early days for this community supported port and we need all the hands we can get to physically make the port stable and current.

The community is a real one that develops the port available from the ubuntu.com website. But it's community supported, not by the Canonical team, and they need developers. Just like I said.

So, Anonymous FUD Coward, take back your attempt to monkeywrench this community effort and scare off needed developers. You're exactly the opposite of what FOSS projects need.

I wish Ubuntu would get their act together on Eclipse.

From http://brainstorm.ubuntu.com/idea/1265/

msarro wrote on the 25 Mar 08 at 01:50

This has almost 550 vote ups, more than just about anything else on this place, and yet according to launchpad this isn't even supposed to make the hardy release? C'mon guys, 3.3 is a year old, and 3.4 will be in testing shortly after hardy. Some of us like to have a scripted install so we can get ubuntu installed, run our shell script, come back an hour or two later and have everything installed. Yes, it can be downloaded and run from a folder, but we can do that with everything. So if that's the retort people are going to keep kicking back at us why are we even bothering to include apt?

My attempt to run Ganymede from a folder was unsuccessful. Maybe it was the AMD64 thing, I never figured it out, and I don't want to.

Ibex appears to be stuck at 3.2.2. That's Callisto from July 2006. If Jaunty remains stuck at 3.2 in April 2009, I'll begin to seriously wonder about things. Does July 2002 to June 2005 ring any bells with Ubuntu management?

I've read other threads which suggest that Fedora enjoys a small monopoly on the developers who are proficient at packaging Java applications.

[[Had some problems posting from a public terminal. Sorry if my repost ends up becoming a dup.]]

PowerPC releases from Ubuntu are continuing as normal. Get the latest here:

http://cdimage.ubuntu.com/ports/daily-live/current/

We can also expect the PowerPC distro to fall further behind, unless the outside community helps the ubuntu-cell project, which has taken over from the main Ubuntu project (run by Canonical,Inc) in maintaining that architecture's distro. Which means not just PS3 Ubuntu, but also PPC ubuntu on other platforms, including rack servers and workstations, and embedded PPCs that might use a stripped-down downstream distro (but benefit from Ubuntu's APT repos), or any other Cell machines, from workstations to supercomputers.

If you've got a PPC machine, please try installing the current ubuntu-cell snapshot, as the project explains. At the very least you can file bug reports. If you can, you can patch some bugs. That's why the source is open, after all. And what the community is really for: not just getting free SW, but giving something back so everyone can get some free SW, including you.

Free antivirus, Hopefully I get my suggestion in before everyone else :P

Not only that, but it looks like you got Frist Psot as well. Good job.

Free antivirus, Hopefully I get my suggestion in before everyone else :P

Can anyone think of a place that would fall into these two categories?

Things that are given little attention are those really difficult parts that tend to be done by very few people. Off the top of my head, crypto implementations are understood by few and someone who knew what they were doing could possibly hide something in there. These crypto libraries are used by the kernel in many places, so the heavy use requirement is also met. Of course, I imagine that only very trusted people are allowed to touch such code. However, I still recall this nasty Ubuntu vulnerability. I was extremely glad that my critical servers are on BSD.

Oh if only they had chosen the 30th of October for anti-piracy day.

http://www.ubuntu.com/getubuntu/countdown

Make an ndiswrapper for those damned Lexmark all in one printers!...

[snip]

MSFT may hate it and just wish it would die,but there is a damned good reason why VB6 is still the number three business language. It is because VB is the engine that runs many a SMB.

https://blueprints.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+spec/printerdriverautodownload

http://brainstorm.ubuntu.com/idea/14529/

Are all of the drivers open source?

Most probably not. The baseband chipsets that provide the network interface tend to be very, very proprietary, for example.

Is the desktop open? Which widget toolkit does it use - can you run gtk/qt/x apps on there?
Can you compile real apps or just Java?

I think you can probably compile anything you like, provided you have the appropriate cross-compiler and emulation environment and you can shoehorn the libraries onto the device.

Is there any chance of a proper distribution like Ubuntu being ported to this thing?

Ubuntu is working on their own mobile devices.

If anyone knows anything different from what I just said, feel free to correct me.

> Imagine going to prevention.com and it had a Firefox exploit which installed a rootkit/backdoor or whatver in Linux.

That is a Windows problem. You are suffering from Windows think.

> Good luck finding someone knowledgeable enough to clean up a linux box.

Not hard at all.

https://help.ubuntu.com/community/LiveCD

Pop in your Live CD, boot, while running the machine from the LiveCD save all the userland documents to a USB pendrive or a USB external hard disk, list all current user account names and save the list to a text file, re-format the compromised machine's hard drive, use the OS installer from the LiveCD, shutdown, remove the LiveCD, reboot, install updates using the package manager from your local server (not required if your LiveCD master copy is fully up-to-date), restore all user accounts (easiest to use Ubuntu's "newusers" command in conjunction with the saved text file list of user names), and finally copy back all the userland documents (can be done with one command).

Should take no more than about 30 minutes per machine all up. To speed it up you can do several machines concurrently if you make multiple copies of your master LiveCD.

"7" will be just a maintainance release for Vista.

The really new Windows version will be called "Ubuntu". It has new "chocolate" artwork and they have switched to a Unix-based core and a modular architecture. It is going to be much more stable, user-friendly and fast.

You can download preview releases at ubuntu.com.

I feel that is a bad idea because an Internship implies that the inexperienced individual will be a slave of authority and incapable of setting his own direction of specialisation.

My advice instead is to keep your QA job, but be inflexible with it. By inflexible I mean you walk in the office and 8am, and then shoot out at 5pm - regardless of the circumstance. Ofcourse you must exercise your own judgement if you need to break this rule assuming a deadline is looming. But if you break this rule more than 20% of the time (more than once in every 5 working days) - you have lost your objective.

The reason for the very inflexible hours is so that you can shoot home and spend 2 hours each working day actually working on your programming skills. There are bucket-loads of Open Source projects that require actual people - regardless of your talent or experience. The only condition all projects require is that you are able to learn new things relatively quickly and are good at the new things you are learning - something which should be a breeze given your CS background.

For example - take the Ubuntu project - they actually have a Wiki page for peeps like yourself wanting to get into the game: https://wiki.ubuntu.com/ContributeToUbuntu

Just wait till Debian names the next release after Wheezy, the asthmatic penguin.

They have already used the W letter for naming Warty Warthog. If you are referring to using X, try Xanthic Xerus (a yellowish African ground squirrel).

I found a different solution to the same problem. Worked like a charm against those annoying UAC messages.

uess how difficult it is to mirror the "pool" directory without also getting the packages from every other version of Ubuntu.
Not too hard you just have to use the right tool, https://help.ubuntu.com/community/Debmirror

Why can't I just have a single directory I can rsync?
IIRC the main reason debian introduce the pool structure is to allow packages to be shared between versions (particularlly testing and unstable) and therefore reduce the archive size.

I did not know that ubuntu was a player in the server market.

http://www.ubuntu.com/products/whatisubuntu/serveredition

Debian never paid much attention to desktop features, may I suggest Ubuntu 8.10?

No you may not. We are aware of that distro and have rejected it. We like Debian and use Debian. It is the best desktop system as far as I am concerned.

may I suggest Ubuntu 8.10?

You have my permission.

It's a shame this won't be in the upcoming Lenny release of Debian. The in-kernel support for heaps of webcams via gspca is a very nice user-visible element of this release.

Debian never paid much attention to desktop features, may I suggest Ubuntu 8.10?

I have! MyISAM tables get corrupted by normal MythTV use on x86_64, which causes mysqld to crash. Pretty annoying to live with, until you realize you can change the engine to InnoDB and it seems to work.

This is documented on the ubuntu wiki, but affects gentoo as well.

Oh well, one person is better than none!

http://packages.ubuntu.com/intrepid/flashplugin-nonfree

The intrepid version of Flash installs fine on Hardy so might be worth giving a go for stability.

Want to know why I spend 2/3rds of my time in Windows (the rest in SuSE 10.3 on KDE 3.x)

I would like to point out that age obviously has nothing to do with computer literacy. From your previous statements I'm much younger than you and I use Linux 100% - to the point where I refuse to use Windows.

1) The games I play, play in Windows. I have no inclination to fumble-fuck around with emulators or what have you trying to get MS Flight Simulator 2004 or STALKER or Team Fortress 2 running on Linux, not sure it's even possible.

I don't think you've tried the latest wine. I was able to install Portal with steam extremely easily - I sincerely mean that. I just double clicked on the stupid .exe and it worked just like in windows (I assume, I haven't used windows in quite some time).

2) The fonts in Windows have been optimized at the per-pixel level to match up with LCD monitors. In KDE 3.x the fonts are about where they were in the Windows 3.1 world, circa 1995. Big pudgy letters that my eyes have to fight to glom. Especially in FireFox on Linux.

You know, that's strange, I've got better fonts on Linux than I've seen on windows. All the fonts in windows looks terribly thin and aliased while in Linux they are full and plump, like a young woman's... lips. ;)

3) For fucks sake - where's the calculator? It's bad enough that I can't hover over the different parts of the start menu (or what ever it's called) and just see what's under there, drill down without it hiding all the other stuff because it 'page flipped' - but the calculator isn't called 'calculator'.

For me, this is as easy as + then typing "calc". I use a program called Gnome-do. But then again, I also use gnome.

It's called kcalc. And the movie player isn't called 'movie player'. It's called ICEwigga or something. And the music player isn't called 'music player' - it's called kude or some shit like that.

You sound frustrated to me. I get the feeling you've been using a Linux that is too much of a pain. I used to have those issues too.
Then, I switched to a debian based distro. You know the one I'm talking about. Join the Brown side, and together we can rule as -*.. Sorry got lost in the moment there :P

This thread really makes this logo look indecent. And to think, for all these years, I thought it was people holding hands.

I've administrated network authenticated openSUSE machines and they definitely benefited from booting faster (compared to older versions of openSUSE) - after all the sooner the kernel finishes the sooner you can start waiting for that DHCP lease...The key is that the moment someone says they want to run NIS/LDAP/NFS you just say "start everything that doesn't depend on the network while you wait for the network to come up". In your case NIS/NFS/autofs/xdm DO need the network so they have to wait until that DHCP lease is acquired. No functionality need be lost but the dependencies/order of certain events need to be maintained (this is what tools like Upstart are about).

Strangely enough in one of the article's comments you'll find that Arjan isn't advocating a parallel boot:

Parallel boot is the wrong thing; it ends up meaning that you're not really doing the critical path in sequential order; but let the system get distracted from that.

Asynchronous boot (where you let the critical path go sequential, and non-critical pieces asynchronous) is the right answer; the article has a graph about this. And Asynchronous boot you can do just fine with SysVinit.... no magic about that.

Ultimately I doubt people are advocating all of this work for your typical network workstation. For starters such systems don't tend to be using solid state disks with unattended login...

Do you have a reference for your statement that you need at least a 1xRAM swap file because Linux writes a complete copy of physical memory there?

Whoa, didn't think I'd run into Stephen Colbert here. *Waves!*

Linux runs fine without swap. It also runs fine with less swap than RAM. I'm just saying that in certain situations it'll be faster if Linux can immediately reuse RAM for something else (because it's already swapped out) than if it can't. That something else might be an application or it might be file system cache (priority for this is tuned with the swappiness sysctl). The easy way to make sure you always have enough swap to take advantage of this is to have at least as much swap as RAM.

It doesn't really make sense for the OS to write to disk parts of physical memory holding read-only pages like the kernel, libc, your GNOME libraries, the Firefox executable, etc.

Not everyone's RAM is mostly full of clean mmap()'d pages. It depends on what you're using the computer for. And of course most of libc would never get swapped out - even if marked dirty, it'd be on the bottom of any least-recently-used algorithm's list.

Anyway, you can search for "linux swap cache" for more references if you want, but here's two: 1. Linux automatically moves RAM reserved by programs but not really used in swap so that this ram can serve the better purpose of having more cached memory.
2. There are times when a page is both in a swap file and in physical memory. This happens when a page that was swapped out of memory was then brought back into memory when it was again accessed by a process. So long as the page in memory is not written to, the copy in the swap file remains valid.

I have an Eee 901 [...] I decided to be bold and installed Hardy with no swap partition.

There are better reasons than boldness for not using swap on an Eee. They use solid-state drives (except some 1000-series models and the 904), which are faster than mechanical devices but can be rewritten fewer times. To make sure your drives last longer, do the following:

1. Mount partitions with noatime, or relatime if you are using one of the very rare programs that use atime (mutt is the only one I know of);
2. No swap partition, which would predictably have many more writes than the rest of the disk;
3. Mount /tmp on tmpfs so that temporary files do not wear the disk.

Sure, without swap and with tmpfs you will have less memory available, but I have an Eee 900A and I bought it as a presentation machine, possibly for some occasional work while travelling, not as a workhorse.

weren't there a bunch of alternative PDF readers long before Adobe made PDF an open format?

Adobe from the very beginning of PDF claimed it was an open and fully documented format.

I believe the very first open source PDF reader was "xpdf" created by Derek Noonburg. I used it for years before Adobe finally released their own, and I still use it today because it is much faster and simpler.

For years there was quite a bit of tension between Derek and Adobe. His xpdf viewer, at one time, would display messages asking people to contact Adobe and make good on their claim that the PDF format was truly open, mostly with respect to the rather lame encrypted PDF features. As I recall, at one point it even printed the name and phone number of someone at Adobe. Supposedly people at Adobe blamed xpdf's programs on Derek (supposedly calling him incompetent publicly) and utterly denied they had not documented their format. Derek published on his web page exactly what features were not documented.

Today there are many other PDF viewers, though for a very long time xpdf was pretty much the only alternative to Adobe's. I haven't looked at their code, but I suspect most of them are based largely on Derek's original code. For one small anecdote along those lines, here is an advisory were Derek found integer overflows in his original xpdf code, which also effects all these other open source PDF viewers.

My point in all this is that, while today it may seem there have always been lots of PDF viewers, in reality they are mostly (if not all) due to the long, hard work of one determined man. While he didn't have to reverse engineer Adobe's software, it was nonetheless a long, difficult struggle to get the missing bits of info. We all benefit today, even though Derek probably doesn't get nearly the credit he well deserves.

1. Abiword to
2. Epiphany to
3. Totem.

Next, compare

1. Internet Explorer 7, released on October 18, 2006 to
2. Microsoft Word, released in December, 2007, to
3. Windows Media Player 11, by the same company for the same platform.

Now tell me with a straight face that Windows knows how to look like Windows.

yeah, and you can download a free copy of a malicious software removal live CD at http://www.ubuntu.com/

https://help.ubuntu.com/community/Postfix https://help.ubuntu.com/community/PostfixBasicSetupHowto https://help.ubuntu.com/community/PostfixDovecotSASL Don't be scared at the mass of information. Just read alittle bit everyday for a couple of weeks and soon you will be a master