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Yep!

I think you'll find that the scavenger hunt for drivers is similar to what Gary experienced.

Nope!

As a matter of fact I installed it on two laptops recently. A (now more or less) brandspanking new Samsung X50 and on a fairly ancient Dell C600. Except for a few very minor quirks (specifically suspend to disk) both work like a charm; this includes the widescreen at its designated resolution and WLAN.

As a matter of fact, while I spent an entire afternoon installing W2K on the Dell (drivers, reboot, loads of hotfixes, reboots, newer version of software, reboot, hotfix for the new version, etcetc...), Ubuntu took less then an hour in order to be installed and fully updated.

I'm not claiming that Microsoft sux and Linux rox, but in this specific case installing Windows was definitely a pain in the butt as compared to Ubuntu.

My guess is that there's one on each side of the screen so that the user can use his right hand or his left hand. I like the design, although it looks like they've decided to steal the Ubuntu colors...

This is important, for sure. It seems to be a good strategy to get your foot in the door to new users. If I hear about this "Linux" and it doesn't work with my shiny new ATI video card, I'm not going to think twice about switching from Windows.

Of course, this foot-in-the-door approach comes from the pragmatist open source line that promotes FOSS as a means to an end, rather than an end itself as the free software promoters do. The open source approach got me, but I was then lead to the ideas of the FSF, RMS, etc. By getting me in the door, I now know that I will buy hardware that does have open drivers. Without getting people to use GNU/Linux, the manufacturers will not care at all about open drivers since the market share will be so low. It is certainly a balancing act between principal and pragmatism.

I think this division will fix itself generally if GNU Hurd ever gets into a semi-usable state. The folks at Debian are making slow but steady progress porting their packages to GNU Hurd, but until they quit changing the kernel every three days, they're going to have problems.

On a minor note, Shuttleworth did endorse (I think) a sub-distro of Ubuntu called Ubuntu-libre that would be 100% FSF-approved software.

If all they're doing is basic email, web browsing and other simple applications, you might want to try switching them over Ubuntu Linux. Try popping in a live cd, available for download on the project's site http://www.ubuntu.com/ and that will give you a good idea as to hardware compatibility. If all is well, try it out or do a dual-boot and have them give it a test drive. If they like it, run that as their sole or primary OS. No more viruses. Other than that, I'd go Mac if I were you.

I'd reccommend clamAV for windows or clamwin, both are windows ports of the excellent GPLd clam AV.

But I'm also going to make an obligatory dig at windows. Consider downloading some software that means you wont have to run anti-virus software.

(Staying true to my username, I would also like to reccommend os x, but as it's not available for download, and requires new hardware, I won't).

Check out Ubuntu's LaptopTestingTeam page on their wiki. Not everything has been tested, but they are actively seeking feedback.

I just recently bought a $200 sotec laptop from a pawnshop and its my first laptop to date. I originally put windows xp on it and followed by putting arch linux on it. After a week of use with both operating systems side by side, i stuck with windows because it was just so much more usable on a laptop. It gave the experience when everything just worked. In fact everything was peachy for a couple of weeks... till it started acting kindof suspicious, i'm guessing it got a virus from the performance hit it took. At any rate, it prompted me to continue looking for a distro to dual boot with that would be usable. After a bit of searching i went ahead and tried out this kubuntu live cd from "flight 7" http://cdimage.ubuntu.com/kubuntu/releases/dapper/ flight-7/ I had previously tried ubuntu on my desktop but was disappointed with its performance when compared to arch linux. However, kubuntu proved to be excellent on a laptop. Similar to windows, everything just works. The atheros-based belkin card I had worked out of the box once i ran the included wireless assistant to configure the connection. The new live cd has an install program called ubiquity that installs kubuntu even while you are using it as a live cd... similar to dsl's installer i guess. Its ntfs resizing isn't too painful either. One of my only complaints about linux on this particular laptop is that its not quite as peppy as it is under windows, and im suspecting that its the display drivers fault.. the sis 630 integrated gfx card doesnt work well with glx extensions contrary to what glx_gears says. Just give (k)ubuntu a shot, i think you will be plesantly surprised, i was.

The original poster said he'd be using Ubuntu, and nobody appears to have suggested HP notebook, although there is official support for some models from Canonical, with "almost 100%" of the hardware working out of the box. Does anyone know if any of the new models with "Core Duo" CPUs are announced to get similar support?

The only one problem with laptopts, and PC in general as well, is whether the drivers are available in the distribution.
For example I have bought an Asus V6J to run Kubuntu.
It took me one day to finish the installation because the ethernet driver was not in the distribution!
This is the real point with LInux distributions: too much fragmentation of efforts and resources.

It would be a good idea to list down the brands and make of the laptops you're interested in buying. Don't worry about compatibility at the moment, deciding on how your future laptop would look like comes first.

Afterwards you might want to visit Ubuntu's forums and run a search on them to check out how current users of those laptops are faring with Ubuntu at the moment. There's usually quite a bunch of threads discussing the graphic drivers to use, how much of the system is working perfectly etc.

And check out the wiki as well!
https://wiki.ubuntu.com/?action=fullsearch&context =180&value=laptop&titlesearch=Titles

"Can anyone tell me why a person would want to use Ubuntu on a server, as opposed to just using Debian?"

http://packages.debian.org/cgi-bin/search_packages .pl?keywords=mod-php&searchon=names&subword=1&vers ion=stable&release=all

vs

http://packages.ubuntu.com/cgi-bin/search_packages .pl?keywords=mod-php&searchon=names&subword=1&vers ion=breezy&release=all

And in less than 1 month, 5.1.2 will be available on stable ubuntu.

If I want up to date packages on debian, my options are:
1. Roll my own (if I do this, why am I running debian?)
2. Run testing (minus security updates....)
3. Add in backports (oh the humanity)

In order to get php5 period, or an up to date php4, I cannot run a "sane" debian install. I CAN, however, run a sane, and in fact COMMERCIALLY SUPPORTABLE, ubuntu install.

Add to this the fact that as of 6.06 ubuntu has seperatly tuned desktop and server kernels and you can see how ubuntu is shaping up.

For what it's worth, I think that the JDK is also available, as sun-java5-jdk.

I'm also not sure Media-Center or Home versions of XP are a fair trade for OS X.

Ubuntu is free. Check it out. It doesn't work on the macbook yet either, so the dell looks like a better option.

http://wiki.ubuntu.com/
http://doc.gwos.org/index.php/Main_Page
http://www.linuxcommand.org/

Ok geeks, how many of us can rebuild our car? How many of us know the compression ratios of the engine or where to find the fuel pump? How many of us are aware of the nuances of how the exhaust pipe is shaped for best fuel economy? How many people could diagram a torque converter, its interface with the automatic transmission and even point out an error if a diagram that they saw?

I'm guessing very few. Most of us would take our car to a mechanic if it were to break because we don't have the specialized knowledge set to diagnose and fix it. Mechanics always talk about the stupid easily fixable things people bring in their cars for.

My point is that most of us just want a car that goes. After I buy a Nissan, I might also buy floormats to keep it clean, but I don't have to choose which spark plugs to use if I want to go into a high elevation climate. The car just goes! I put in gas, change the oil, and it goes. Some poeple drive manual, some drive automatic, that is the difference between interfaces, like MacOS vs WinXP. Sure there are technical reasons why each might be better under the hood, like front vs rear wheel drive, but honestly they're both tools to get the job done. If they don't go when I buy them, I take them back.

Installing drivers should be like 'installing' gasoline: readily available and easy to do. Readily available doesn't mean it exists, it means it can be found right under your nose. Listen to yourselves! Installing something as simple as firefox on Ubuntu requires a huge number of non-intuitive steps that must be hand copies perfectly into a command prompt. How does that save the user work? https://wiki.ubuntu.com/FirefoxNewVersion

All people really want out of OS is for it to save them more and more time. Microsoft and Macintosh get this. You never Need to go to prompt for any daily or monthly or even yearly task. Your click the button, it works. Our job as geeks is to make sure the abstraction is so total that the user never needs to know what kernel version they are running much less what file system they are using. Until we can understand that the average user will never want or be able to migrate to Linux without a gun pointed to their head.

An example - I have 5 good friends who are expert level computer hobbyists. They all migrated to linux, but it required too much overhead out of their daily lives to keep. They all learned linux, really liked a lot of things about it, and switched back. When you can tell me why, then you will understand whats wrong with linux today.

Here's the answer to your Ubuntu media problems, as found two clicks away from the default browser start page: https://wiki.ubuntu.com/RestrictedFormats.

As for making Linux a SMB file server for Windows boxes - yea, some hard things are still hard.

As a desktop Linux user since 1994, and the author of Manning Press's forthcoming "Desktop Linux with Ubuntu", I've spent a lot of time thinking about the viability of Linux on the desktop and who exactly the target audience is for desktop Linux. This has been a topic of some debate with my editor at Manning.

Let's note a couple of things about Mr. Golden's article. First, he's clearly not a technical guy at all, as several misstatements in his article reveal:

• He confuses a distribution with an operating system
• He talks of "Internet browsing" when he really means "Web browsing"; Internet browsing pretty much went out with Gopher
• He says "I couldn't transfer, via email or a disk, some complicated word-processor and spreadsheet files between my Linux system at home and Microsoft Windows on my work PC" which of course isn't what he means. The complexity of a document has nothing to do with its transferability, and in fact later in the article he says that he could transfer, he just couldn't preserve all the formatting from OpenOffice to MS Office
• He says "hacking" when he means "cracking"; that's OK -- just about every journalist on the planet makes this mistake.

I point these remarks out not by way of criticism, but by way of setting context. Mr. Golden is a classic end user, someone who has no in-depth technical understanding of the systems he is using, but someone who, by and large, is self-admining his systems.

Second: note the remarkable advances he mentions in the course of the article. Think, for a moment, to the state of Linux 5 years ago, and then think about these comments:

• "Installation went quickly and, for the most part, smoothly. All six systems recognized my disk drives, cable modem and wireless mouse. There's no need to dump Windows when putting in any of the Linux distributions, as long as there's enough room on the computer's hard drive. After installation, you simply select whether to launch Windows or Linux each time you start the computer." In other words, installation, dynamic repartitioning with data loss, and dual boot setup of the boot manager were all things the installer accomplished without the user having to know very much at all; and these tasks were accomplished seamlessly in six different Linux distributions.
• "Basic tasks like printing, email and Internet browsing worked easily."
• "The Linux systems could make sense for users who just want to send and receive email and surf the Web without the need for multimedia programs, or to perform home-office tasks without a lot of interaction with Microsoft systems."

While Mr. Golden did note a number of hardware compatibility problems, I tend to downplay those in the context of this comparison. As others on /. have noted, anyone buying a white box computer with no OS installed and hoping that Windows XP would "just work" with all of its components would no doubt be equally disappointed. Either do the comparison on the basis of installing Windows XP from scratch, or do the comparison on the basis of a computer with Linux pre-installed. Anything else is comparing pears and oranges.

Mr. Golden's greatest difficulty was with incompatibility between OpenOffice and MS Office when it came to complex documents or spreadsheets. This is not surprising, since these are Mr. Golden's professional tools. And the compatibility that needs to be there simply isn't there. If your spreadsheets involve pivot tables or embedded charts, don't expect good results when moving back and forth between OpenOffice and MS Office. If your word processing

Mplayer has played every video I've tried, and I've burnt literally hundreds of CDs (audio CDs, data CDs) with hardly any effort (usually, it's just Right-click->Write to CD, or use k3b). Audio of course works fine for me. Gentoo doesn't really give you as much of a performance improvement as it claims to, so I don't see why someone would hours waiting for every package that is installed to compile... switch to Ubuntu (or Debian); and read the helpful wiki on Mplayer, codecs, and sound. It doesn't require much knowledge of Linux to blindly follow those intructions, and it would probably take half an hour at most if you're unlucky, but it's worth that time, of course.

Mplayer has played every video I've tried, and I've burnt literally hundreds of CDs (audio CDs, data CDs) with hardly any effort (usually, it's just Right-click->Write to CD, or use k3b). Audio of course works fine for me. Gentoo doesn't really give you as much of a performance improvement as it claims to, so I don't see why someone would hours waiting for every package that is installed to compile... switch to Ubuntu (or Debian); and read the helpful wiki on Mplayer, codecs, and sound. It doesn't require much knowledge of Linux to blindly follow those intructions, and it would probably take half an hour at most if you're unlucky, but it's worth that time, of course.

Mplayer has played every video I've tried, and I've burnt literally hundreds of CDs (audio CDs, data CDs) with hardly any effort (usually, it's just Right-click->Write to CD, or use k3b). Audio of course works fine for me. Gentoo doesn't really give you as much of a performance improvement as it claims to, so I don't see why someone would hours waiting for every package that is installed to compile... switch to Ubuntu (or Debian); and read the helpful wiki on Mplayer, codecs, and sound. It doesn't require much knowledge of Linux to blindly follow those intructions, and it would probably take half an hour at most if you're unlucky, but it's worth that time, of course.

Seriously, I don't want to troll, but OSS is just not there yet for most users. I just love having a Linux box around work to do development on, but it mostly fails the "could I get my mother to understand this?" test. Incidentally, the instructions for installing Firefox 1.5 on Ubuntu are here if you want to subject them to the mother-test yourself.

Here are a couple on a recent Ubuntu installation:

1. To get access to my NTFS partitions, I had to modify FSTAB

2. To get Skype to work, I had to unpack the installation and make an alteration

3. Not so much a text file edit but annoyance, I had to find and redownload a driver to get proper GL acceleration for my ATI card - this whole graphic card driver thing is silly, installation should just work out-of-the-box by now (OpenGL, DRI, etc.) - Richard Stallman be damned.

4. Getting mplayer to work and all codecs installed was pretty straight-forward thanks to the hard work of the guys over at mplayer but hardly passes the "grandma" test. I know a lot of the difficulty is a result of the United State's silly intellectual property laws, but again, "grandma" won't care.

5. Printing is painfully slow on my HP Deskjet (reminiscent of my old Commodore 64 dot matrix printer). Haven't tracked this down yet, but I wouldn't be suprised if there were recompiles/config edits required

I'd put statements about Linux being ready for use by Joe User without recompiles/config file editing in the same bin as statements about prolonged Windows server up-time.

Exactly, Tapioca has already implemented the voice part of GTalk on Linux. There are packages for Ubuntu Dapper listed here: https://wiki.ubuntu.com/Tapioca/

The problem is that Microsoft succeeded by doing this, while the others did not.

Almost anyone can install Windows on almost any computer.

Hi,

You can download the fix here. if this download gets marked by your antivirus please ignore it. Just trust me. You can also install the realvnc client and install it and post your ip here. Someone will fix it for you. I only need a small advance for this. Please pay by western union or use a cheque for this. I gues that you will trust me more if you payed for the service.

hoary!

In all seriousness though, happy birthday.

The latest version of Nautilus is 2.14.0, which is included in Fedora Core 5.

The version of Nautilus included with Fedora Core 5 is 2.14.0.

Both Debian Unstable & Ubuntu Dapper come with Nautilus 2.14.1 (and I'm sure other distros do too:

Debian Unstable
Ubuntu Dapper

https://launchpad.net/malone is a good place to start, you can file bugs there Also you can register to ubunt-user list: https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/ubuntu-u sers But it's better to have a gmail account for that, if you need one I can give you one if you mail me at olafra at gmail.com

https://wiki.ubuntu.com/JigdoDownloadHowto

Next time you have someone asking you questions about Linux not knowing whether they should try, you can just direct them to this article."

With all respect to Mandriva, I'd much rather just point them to ubuntu

(I feel I should make an OS X reference, but I just can't be bothered)

Ubuntu Wiki: Restricted formats

Not to disagree ith you but I'm a longtime Ubuntu user (since Jan 2005) and I'd like to ask: what, among the things you've listed, couldn't have been done without Linux?

Go to the Ubuntu packages pages & search for openbsd Two pages of results! And that's barely scrathing the surface.

Furthermore, as someone else in this thread mentions, openBSD audits their code more thoroughly prior to inclusion in their system. Many packages used in Ubuntu (apache, x.org, etc etc etc) have bug fixes contributed back from the openBSD port.

You're thinking I'm saying that openBSD can do something linux can't - I'm not really, its more like openBSD is the cranky old uncle of the free-unix family, telling all the youngsters to lock their doors & not walk around at night :-)

At FreeGeek Chicago (shameless link alert), we've been using the Xubuntu desktop on systems as low as Pentium II 400s. The project has been moving more and more towards being very close in look and feel to the default Gnome-based Ubuntu distro, but it runs pretty well on quite limited hardware. You don't have wonderful load times for GTK heavy apps, like FF, but the system is quite snappy -- it certainly feels lighter and more responsive than Win XP on the same hardware, and that's without spyware/malware/crapware infestation.

OTOH -- Gnome and KDE based distros definitely do not breathe new life into old hardware these days.

Tatsh
If I am pointing out the obvious to you here, I'm sorry

To learn about computers, 1st quit using Windows and install Ubuntu on a crappy older PC, or on a 2nd partition on a HD on a PC at home.

To make the PC do your bidding, and not be limited by proprietary software like MS V.S., you should really consider installing Ubuntu from http://www.ubuntu.com/ and using Perl and Bash. Perl is very C++ like, but results are quicker and easier to debug b/c you don't have to worry about syntax and compile-time errors. The modules that you can download for cpan.org make it extremely powerful, just as powerful as C++ for your purposes. Bash, the command prompt, is the glue that helps you fill in the gaps and manipulate system.

Linux is free, the Gnome apps are free, and it is better than any class for learning about programming, networking, server and client programming, and apps in general. There are even free developement environments for creating Windows apps on it!

If you don't do that, at least try Perl for windows from Active State, although I personally use Perl under cygwin from www.cygwin.com

Currently I have used Mandrake, Knoppix, Slackware, and Ubuntu is by far the easiest and most fun.

Might I suggest Ubuntu (Breezy)? I've known several relative newcomers who tried and felt that it addressed most -- if not all -- of the same issues that you originally posted about.

Here's the location of the downloads page: http://releases.ubuntu.com/6.06/

You can use this as a livecd, which lets you run it directly by booting from the CD; this will allow you to try it out without overwriting your Windows installation. Once you decide you like it -- and I'm sure you will -- there's a desktop shortcut that will start the actual install process.

Actually, according to the EULA...

My understanding is an OEM copy of Windows is not transferrable to another machine. Nor are you eliglble for the upgrade price of a newer version of Windows.

Although not straight from the horses mouth per se, this article has some interesting Q and A's on this...
www.michaelstevenstech.com/oemeula.htm

If you buy the full retail version then I believe you are correct, the license is transferrable, if limited to one machine.

My favorite work around is to get these guys to send me as many copies of their OS as I need. By post. For free (as in beer:-)

It's not "Boozy Gamer", it's "Boozy Bomber". Ubuntu code names are cute and fun!

Are you saying if you use linux, you are running one of the early 2.4 kernels?

No, because I don't have to pay for Ubuntu, the canonical distribution of Linux. One can go from Breezy Badger to Dapper Drake to Edgy Eft without paying a dime, not even for shipping or high-speed Internet.

Why is it OK for people to constantly upgrade their kernels (or hell look at MacOS X and having to pay to get upgrades), but it's not OK for Microsoft to do so?

Mac OS X 10.2 to 10.3 to 10.4 compares to Windows NT 5.0 to 5.1 (XP) to 6.0 (Vista). I'm guessing that Mac owners tend to buy OS upgrades more willingly in part because the median Mac owning home user tends to be more affluent than the median Dell/Compaq owning home user.

Those files are not part of Ubuntu.

You can find out which package they came from with "dpkg --search /usr/lib/win32/wmv9dmod.dll"; then find out where that package came from with "apt-cache policy packagename".

so do it.

I'll do even better, I'll give you her address! Right now, she's sleeping with a lot of people though. They're making sure she's clean so if you're worried, you can wait a bit :p

(/. says beta Ubuntu say Alpha)

Ubuntu tells me it's a beta when I log in (splash screen says Ubuntu Dapper Beta). Maybe you accidently downloaded an old version? The beta is downloadable here.

Quite a few people in India are beginning to switch to Linux. To be honest, I haven't actually tried looking in shops for Linux, but Ubuntu ships free CDs. You can also try linuxbazar.com; I bought some CDs from them, and they say they ship to Pakistan too.
Usually, Linux enthusiasts are more than willing to copy their CDs for just the cost of CD, so unless the dealers are charging only 15 Rs for Windows (that's less than 33 cents in USD!), I think Linux might still be cheaper.
As for open-source in general, it's already widespread — lots of people use Firefox, Gaim, etc on Windows.
Also, the government (NASSCOM, actually) has started to crack down on piracy, but I don't know how much of an effect that has.
All in all, I think open-source can easily become reasonably common here within the next couple of years or so. (Or am I being too optimistic?)

You know sometimes I wish I could just goto Help -> Check for Updates in Firefox on Linux as easily as I can on MS Windows.

Other distros have similar things.

Click here for the patch.

How'd you get that? The version of ruby1.8 from Breezy is 1.8.2; Dapper uses 1.8.4. What does 'dpkg -l ruby1.8' say?

File a bug report!

look here (love the url)
http://www.ubuntu.com/testing/dapperbeta#head-c56a 98f3cc839f858104f654c0f6900908721f73

it's the notification section. gnome 2.14 has a sexy new notification box at last. there's a message saying updates are avaliable. and then it says 'a restart is required' what's that about. when do you ever need to do that in linux? obviously if you want to boot into a newer kernel, but i wouldn't recommend rebooting JUST for that. wait till you next turn on tomorrow. any other application is the new version when you run it, and you can restart X without rebooting. madness...

also they should real help us by aclling it rebooting. not restarting. that doesn't mean anything.

I'm going to keep XP on that machine for as long as it runs, or until I replace it with an open OS.

So why haven't you replaced it now?

You can get Ubuntu up and running in minutes, with full functionality. If you're more of a tinkerer type, set aside a weekend and take the plunge with Gentoo.

I don't think I did miss your point. You tried to score a cheap point by pointing out that repositories also use those code names. You can probably think up some more things that do if you wish.

My point is that in the end, those names are meant to be completely hidden unless you go looking, which effectively means they will be for the developers use only. It's quite likely that if not today, someday soon, a user can enjoy several versions of Ubuntu without ever seeing or hearing those names. Thus, those are development names.

Not that I personally think the names are bad, I like them. It's so much nicer to say Breezy and Dapper instead of 5.10 and 6.06, feels much more personal.

On a sidenote, seems like the update-manager already knows how to dist-upgrade: http://www.ubuntu.com/testing/dapperbeta#head-ab14 ca6ed574c075d6fca55646707133e6a68110.