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Progeny seems like it's a fairly good distro, but for me, I'd rather stick with Ubuntu if I'm going to stray from a pure Debian install.

Progeny's site (btw, a link in the article would have been nice, it's Progeny) calls themselves "the linux platform company" and has a very conservative, professional (in a business sense) look. That's not for me. Ubuntu, on the other hand, is very human oriented. Looking at their site (Ubuntu), the first thing they do is explain the name as, ""Ubuntu" is an ancient African word, meaning "humanity to others". Ubuntu also means "I am what I am because of who we all are". The Ubuntu Linux distribution brings the spirit of Ubuntu to the software world.".

From a pure philosophically aesthetic standpoint, Ubuntu is far more appealing to me than Progeny. Ubuntu is great, it's Debian (like Progeny) and it stays in parity with the most current GNOME releases. Anaconda is one of the last things on my checklist of why I'd switch distros.

That's not to say I dislike Progeny, or that I wouldn't want to run it. In fact, I probably wouldn't have made any of these points had the article not been so aggressive towards Ubuntu.

This isn't like your standard corporate system where you have to root for your competitors to lose. With this diversity, we all win. Good job, and best wishes to the Progeny team. Maybe some day I'll try your distro.

For now, though, it's Ubuntu for me.

Definitely Ubuntu. Ubuntu Cheers, TdC_VgA

Sounds to me like you're describing Ubuntu Linux, a great new distribution with awesome hardware autodetection, a single standard desktop built around Gnome 2.8, and only a single best-of-breed application installed for each type of application available - Firefox for web, Evolution for email, OpenOffice.org for office tasks, etc.

If you want anything beyond what Ubuntu's core distribution offers, you're welcome to install it from their universe repository, which is derived from Debian's massive set of packages. This means that while the core distro might be desktop-focused, you can pretty easily tool Ubuntu up for just about any task. Best of both worlds really :)

On that note - who's filling up the seasonal gift box with free copies of Ubuntu Linux? The i386 version is mailed with both the live and install CDs.

I think this'll be my new standard for family desktop support:
- set it up to log in automatically
- don't give them the password for sudo
- delete the terminal option in the gnome menu

Whenever I vist, I can update everything through Synaptic Package Manager.

Instant dad-proofing.

``what other products besides Google Desktop Search, Spybot Search & Destroy, Google Toolbar and Service Pack 2 are Slashdotters installing on their parents' Windows machines?''

Ubuntu Linux. Debian, user-friendly, beautiful, and full-featured. Now if only Linux had better wlan card support...

Sounds like an area Ubuntu could step into pretty easily...

*looks at linux server in one corner*

*looks at linux laptop as recently reviewed on slashdot*

*looks at LED star canopy over bed*

most girls would run from such things. some have their own, thankyouverymuch :-)

-Leigh

ps. Ubuntu is love.

`rpm --import /usr/share/rhn/RPM-GPG-KEY`

I have had some very positive experiences with Ubuntu Linux recently. It seems powerful, configurable, yet easy to install for newer users. They also have a billionaire backing them, so their future seems fairly assured.

I have had some very positive experiences with Ubuntu Linux recently. It seems powerful, configurable, yet easy to install for newer users. They also have a billionaire backing them, so their future seems fairly assured.

Anyone care to explain how it fares againt http://www.ubuntulinux.org/?

I've been wanting to try a linux desktop for a while and I had a mixed opinion with Fedora Core 1, not I'm not sure wich one of the two to pick - since I don't have that much time to commit, I can't try both and compare ...

a couple of things to think about:

the open cd: Free apps for windoze

ubuntu livecd - if you try the cd in windoze it lets you install OO.o and a couple of other Free apps :-)

Now, to decide which to include in all my xmas presents this year....

-Leigh

Ubuntu

Here is what one would think is the URL.

XeeRz,
Jason.

Typo in your URL, should be: http://www.ubuntulinux.org/ :)

doesn't Ubuntu Linux use gnome 2.8?

I haven't been using the latest release, but I thought it had been updated?

No, as far as I know only Ubuntu has the new Gnome 2.8.

They'll send you a CD if you ask. Actually, they'll send you a whole BOX of CD's so you can give 'em away. The default is for them to send you 10 x86 install CD's.

Anyway, if you want a modern flashy desktop based on Debian, look no further than here.

From the FAQ.

"Ubuntu" is an ancient African word, meaning "humanity to others". Ubuntu also means "I am what I am because of who we all are". The Ubuntu Linux distribution brings the spirit of Ubuntu to the software world.

This is answered in the FAQ.

Ubuntu, SchoolTool,Translate.org.za are some of the projects you support that seem to tackle the digital-divide head-on. Do you have any views or ideas on how to make Internet access cheaper so more people in developing countries can have access to it? More specific, any plans on convincing the South African government that not over-regulating the telecoms industry will be good for everyone?

Who is the blonde?

Not so as far as MP3 support goes. See the faq where they acknowledge that they're leave out all such formats, including MP3s. A friend confirmed this when he tried Ubuntu a few days ago.

Install a better distro. Like Ubuntu or something.

Try Ubuntu - not a live CD, but excellent Mac support, both for iBooks and PowerBooks.

here, here and here

I've been using debian with KDE for nearly 2 years on my PC at home but GNOME seems to be getting really cool. I really like the automount thingy they have and the interface seems simpler which is great since that my main machine now is an iBook.

I think when I get home (in about a year), I'll give ubuntu a spin.

Several supported Linuxes run on Macs. Yellow Dog Linux 4.0 just shipped.

Ubuntu is shipping PPC in its upcoming 4.1 release, and has PPC ISOs as recent as last month.

Mandrake and Suse have downlevel versions for PPC.

For a more complete, albeit sometimes inaccurate, list of what Linuxes run on what hardware, visit Linux.org's distribution page.

I wouldn't switch, because I'm perfectly happy with GNOME running on a Linux kernel.

OSX is really pretty. But GNOME is pretty enough for me. I love the clean, tidy look, and the antialiased fonts. And I have chosen a desktop theme that I like.

OSX is really stable. So is GNOME.

If you want to try out GNOME, the best way is to install Ubuntu Linux on a spare computer. (It doesn't have to be a brand-new computer, but the older and funkier the computer is, the greater the chance of a problem.)

The easiest way to try out GNOME is to get a Gnoppix CD. You boot from this CD and it will run GNOME on a Linux kernel, without touching your hard disk in any way. So you don't risk your data. And by the way, this makes a great disaster recovery tool, even if you are a Windows user and you aren't ready to switch yet.

I'll bet there is someone writing a "KDE works for me" posting right now too. KDE is also a good environment, although I personally prefer GNOME. To try out KDE, you could get a Knoppix CD. This works the same way as Gnoppix (and in fact Gnoppix was derived from Knoppix, not the other way around).

In short, anyone who has already switched to a *NIX desktop (GNOME, KDE, Xfce, whatever) is unlikely to be tempted by an x86 OSX.

steveha

sorry about that link...
here....

-Frank

> The latest seems to be Ubuntu skyrocketing up the distrowatch charts

Oh, great. http://www.ubuntulinux.org/ubuntu/philosophy/. Compare with http://www.debian.org/social_contract. What a waste of time...

No, you are suffering from binary logic disease. There are more than two options: 100% compatible (eg. all Debian), 100% incompatible (eg. Debian/Windows), and X% incompatible (eg. Debian/Ubuntu). Even a little incompatible means incompatible. Especially because there's no way to plan which incompatible ones to avoid in the current system. "Unexpected behavior may occur" means "not compatible - we warned you, don't bother us". If a new distro could possibly claim "compatible" without that falsehood causing the distributors a support nightmare, it would. It didn't, and it isn't.

You seem pretty hung up on the potential for a fork - odds are, we define the word "fork" differently. I view Ubuntu as a short-term, temporary fork, similar to the branches in the Mozilla project, where every new release is effectively a short-term departure from a frozen snapshot of the trunk, which returns to the trunk to refresh and renew on a regular basis. I also do not view it as the end of the world. Unlike rpm based distros, most Debian-based ones (or at least those that lasted, anyway, progeny, etc) do not appear to fork to the same degree as RedHat / Mandrake / ten thousand others.

You might find the following blog entries from Jeff Licquia (a Progeny developer) interesting. He's got a lot better perspective on the issue than most:

• Being Debian
• Ubuntu and Progeny

Ubuntu universe is a snapshot taken twice a year, without any security fixes or updates. I have run sid for several years now, and quite like living on the bleeding edge - I do not plan on updating only every six months, and I also don't worry too much if anything breaks beyond my repair skills - that is why /home and /var live on their own partitions. But Ubuntu fills a gap for someone who is not ready to deal with sid on a regular basis - who wants a different compromise of stability and freshness than the regular Debian release cycle.

Ubuntu says mixing Debian and Ubuntu packages is not a very good idea. They might not want something bad to happen to Debian while they create a distro that can fork away from Debian, but it could happen anyway. If developers' intent were the determinant of what happened to software, we wouldn't have bugs.

"Ubuntu" is an African word, meaning "Humanity To Others". The Ubuntu Linux distribution brings the spirit of Ubuntu to the software world.

When marketing Linux on the desktop we have to put into the center the gigantic set of free and useful applications that people can get on a Linux PC, as opposed to the blank slate that a Windows XP (without Office) is. We have word processors, spreadsheets, presentation programs, sound editors, drawing/painting/image editing programs, cool web browsers, download managers, text editors, the best email clients, free games (some of them nice), RSS aggregators, heck, clients for any Internet service you can think of. Spyware is unheard of, all of this is free and installed if you want it.

I hope that with Ubuntu and Userlinux we'll see serious attempts to build user-ready Linux desktop computers with cool extra services like remote support via SSH and auto-update via apt-get, and with a lower price thanks to the lack of a Windows tax.

It has recently been released and it has caused quite a stir for its ease of use despite being based on Debian. For me its the first GNOME since 1.4 that is better than KDE. I suggest you try it and you will see why Slackware is a minority and why thousands of user are switching to Ubuntu!

Ubuntu Linux
Wikipedia article.

SuSE, Mandrake, Xandros, Linspire, Knoppix, TurboLinux, Ark, Mepis and more have had those three points solved ages ago. Nowawadays you CHOOSE your difficulty.

If like me you just want a system to surf the web, play games, write documents you use one of those distros.

If you want to do stuff like programming and servers get Debian, Redhat or Whitebox.

If you have no life and want to tinker all day you get Gentoo, Slackware, Arch etc.

Thats the point of distros, if you don't want to tinker, don't download the tinker distros.

For the record, I use Ubuntu, the hot new GNOME 2.8 based desktop distro, its so easy use I thought someone replaced my computer with a Mac!

Together with Impi, this makes two linux distros with Zulu names - impressive. Does anyone know whether South Africans are involved with Ubuntu?

http://wiki.ubuntulinux.org/PossibleReleaseNames

To get those free CDs shipped to you, you can go directly to this link:

http://shipit.ubuntulinux.org

We've got torrents online. They are here:

• http://archive.ubuntulinux.org/cdimage/releases/wa rty/preview/warty-i386.iso.torrent
• http://archive.ubuntulinux.org/cdimage/releases/wa rty/preview/warty-amd64.iso.torrent
• http://archive.ubuntulinux.org/cdimage/releases/wa rty/preview/warty-powerpc.iso.torrent

We've got torrents online. They are here:

• http://archive.ubuntulinux.org/cdimage/releases/wa rty/preview/warty-i386.iso.torrent
• http://archive.ubuntulinux.org/cdimage/releases/wa rty/preview/warty-amd64.iso.torrent
• http://archive.ubuntulinux.org/cdimage/releases/wa rty/preview/warty-powerpc.iso.torrent

We've got torrents online. They are here:

• http://archive.ubuntulinux.org/cdimage/releases/wa rty/preview/warty-i386.iso.torrent
• http://archive.ubuntulinux.org/cdimage/releases/wa rty/preview/warty-amd64.iso.torrent
• http://archive.ubuntulinux.org/cdimage/releases/wa rty/preview/warty-powerpc.iso.torrent