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Ubuntu Linux Review
JimLynch writes "Pardon me while I pimp one of my own stories. We've got a review of Ubuntu Linux up on ExtremeTech. Check it out. Overall we had quite a positive experience with it, we think it's going to be a good distro as it matures. If you're looking for an easy-to-install debian distro, give it a download." Update: 09/27 23:25 GMT by T :
Eugenia writes with another review from USALug, and a 6-page comprehensive Ubuntu preview at OSNews, writing "Gnome's & Ubuntu's release manager Jeff Waugh also had an interesting interview detailing lots of interesting tidbits. The final version of Ubuntu is expected mid-October."
I think the OSNews review posted today is better: http://www.osnews.com/story.php?news_id=8407
See the Debian Planet story back on the 16th. Which linked you to the announcement and also an interview.
Your hair look like poop, Bob! - Wanker.
Choices.
Their packages are not binary compatible with Debian packages, so you can't mix them in a single install. Therefore, they're not really a Debian child, although they're related by starting with the Debian package selection, and bugfixing/certifying from there. More like a Debian half-clone, sent to finishing school. Which will have some effect on drawing away some community contribution to Debian, as a partial fork. Kinda like that clone beating his dad's time at the pub with his fancy accent, but then unable to get past Dad's doorman to use the penthouse jacuzzi.
--
make install -not war
QUOTE " What benefit, exactly, do Linux users get from the proliferation of distros?"
One large benefit is the fact that every distro is different, has different goals and aspirations.
Some people want a server, some people want a desktop, some want to run an FTP server.
If your looking to say, run an ftp server, wouldn't it be nice to get a distro that has an ftp server built in to the kernel?
You're more likley to find the distro that does exactly what you want with so many distro's around.
That's the purpose, and advantage to the proliferation of distros.
Don't take this wrong, but do you know a "linux user"? Most of us are little obsesive compulsive, erratic, and curious. We have nothing to do but become pastier and pastier while trying out distros.
In short....we get one more to play with, flame, fight and argue over, and most importantly compare/contrast/disect to our hearts content.
Be Safe! Sleep with a Marine. Semper Fi!
Finally, we were disappointed (but not surprised) that Ubuntu did not detect or configure the wireless card in our laptop. We've come to expect this, unfortunately. But it would sure be nice at some point if we could connect wirelessly right after installing a Linux distro, with no extra effort required.
I don't know what brand of wireless card it was, but if it was one with a Broadcom chip inside, well your SOL on that one. If they would give out the specs, we'd have drivers for them.
The review concludes that one of the few disadvantages of the disro is 'no VPN wizard'. Now isnt that a bit too picky !!! I would understnad if they mentioned the Text based Installer, no pakg selection , bad install documentation etc. but no VPN wizard is absurd.
The main thing, it seems, is that this disto provides a spoonful of sugar to make the Debian medicine go down. But this sugar may not be enough for laptop users. Quoting from the article, we were disappointed (but not surprised) that Ubuntu did not detect or configure the wireless card in our laptop. So that spoonful of sugar may be deceptive ... some real skill may be required after the pointy-clicky stage. Is it a good thing to mix the difficult and the simple?
Well at least we have to give Ubuntu folks some credit. This is the only linux distro that installed on my Apple G5. Installation was real easy on G5. They have PPC32 support only. PPC64 support coming soon. For those of us looking for an alternate OS for their G5 without paying yellowdog or without having technical expertise for debian and gentoo, Ubuntu is the distribution. The only problem sound card is not recognized. Even the thermal driver is working.
What benefit, exactly, do Linux users get from the proliferation of distros?
No-one gets any benefit directly from the fact that there are a large number of distros.
However, for each specific distro, there is apparently at least one person who likes that distro better than the alternatives. Which is enough.
If someone decides he wants to make AbominationDistro, which is existing distro X but with the meaning of /etc and /usr switched around, and he creates it - more power to him, that doesn't influence me at all - and he has the distro he wants.
I believe posters are recognized by their sig. So I made one.
Google: Ubuntu: An African Assessment of the Religious Other
http://www.bu.edu/wcp/Papers/Afri/AfriLouw.htm
and a lot of other things.. but I'm too lazy to look for them.
"It's not like your minds are as open as the source you love..." - Me to the majority of Slashdot.
To me this is "unnecessary choice". The choices only evolve because the existing procedures fail at particular tasks. Why not develop, for example, a clean, comprehendable, human as well as machine usable startup system to handle services so that one distribution could act as a server or desktop.
Hell, isn't this the purpose of the SysV init system, to provide a separate runlevel for X as well as a stripped down network-and-servers-only runlevel?
Choice is bad where it limits interoperability. You don't see browsers speaking Debian-HTTP, Redhat-HTTP or SuSE-HTTP, do you?
People seem to confuse choice with not-a-standard sometimes.
IMHO
Of course it runs NetBSD. BTC: 1NT7QvbetmANwaMzhpVL6
Eventually someone will get one right.
One large benefit is the fact that every distro is different, has different goals and aspirations.
That's a feature, not a benefit. These are not the same thing. A benefit would be something like "not all distros are susceptible to the same failure modes", or the like.
So, what is the benefit of many distros, as opposed to (say) switches I can flip in a standard distro?
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
Several people have already posted comments asking why the world needs yet another Linux distro.
I wrote a Slashdot comment explaining why Ubuntu is interesting. Click here to read it.
A comment by Doc Ruby states that Ubuntu is not package-compatible with Debian. I said otherwise in my comment linked above, but I haven't checked it out for myself yet so I'm probably wrong.
steveha
lf(1): it's like ls(1) but sorts filenames by extension, tersely
I don't see anywhere in the quote you quoted that says anything about building anything into the OS in the manner that IE is built into Windows.
"Some people want a server", doesn't imply that
"some people want a desktop", doesn't imply that
"some want to run an FTP server", while redundant, doesn't imply that.
Unless you are saying that the distributions shouldn't even bother to include Mozilla, Konqueror or whatnot in their binary builds??
There is a key difference between building a browser -with- an OS and building a browser into an OS in such a way that it (supposedly) can not be easily removed.
You've been marked as +1 Insightful, but I have a feeling I just fed a troll.
It is more productive to voice thoughtful opinions (reply) than to judge (moderate) others.
"Some people have even told me that have a low usser number.."
Well, that's all depending on the perspectve...
On Topic: Your complaint on choice boils down to the same question as when people decry the existence of mutliple desktop environment projects - who is supposed to enforce anything?
Ok, assue that we have too many distros, and that it is hurting the community in some unsepcified way. How do you suggest reducing the number? You can assume that people building on, or using, any given distro aren't willing to volontarily dump their work just because someone says so. So how, then?
And once you've accomplished your purge, how do you propose avoiding a couple hundred new distro projects popping up like mushrooms after rain?
Trust the Computer. The Computer is your friend.
I think this is the quote he meant:
" If your looking to say, run an ftp server, wouldn't it be nice to get a distro that has an ftp server built in to the kernel?"
Not a Twitter sockpuppet... but I wish I was.
You're right the review sucks. For instance, under the heading 'Installation', it says,
"At the end of the installation, we were asked if we wanted to use APT (Advanced Packaging Tool) to update our system. We said yes and our system was updated over the Internet before we even booted into our Gnome desktop."
This totally glosses over the connection to the internet. Was it by broadband, satellite link or modem? Did the installer correctly identify the modem if there was one and did it create a connection to the user's ISP?
Mandrake 10 installation fails utterly in this task, particularly if the user has the misfortune to be in North America.
In times of trouble, the smell of frying onions usually gives confidence and comfort.
Me: Hey boss, why don't we standardize on Ubuntu Warty Warthog Linux on the desktop.
Boss: Say, that sounds like it will decrease our ROI, while providing value to our shareholders. However, why don't you install Ubuntu Warty Warthog Linux on one test machine, and Indigo Salamander Pumpkin Dog Linux on another machine, that way we can objectively compare their packaging systems.
Are you referring to my install? I put it on a laptop (dual boot with XP), desktop (another dual boot) and in a vmware VM running under Windows XP. I think three different installs covered it nicely.
Jim Lynch
Tech Analyst and Community Manager
Ubuntu is a commercial distribution with 34+ full time engineers working on it. Every bug they fix they contribute back to Debian or the relevant project. There are a number of really good distributions out there that have forked Debian, but Ubuntu is one of the few who gives most of their changes back to the community. So I say it's a branch, not a fork.
How we know is more important than what we know.
What benefit, exactly, do Linux users get from the proliferation of distros?
Very simple answer for you. You like Debian, I like Slackware, my work uses RedHat, but we are switching to SuSe soon. Some people like Mandrake, other's swear by Gentoo. Every Distro fills a niche, every person has a niche. The more distro's the better. If you have an issue with an array of choices, you can use Windows or Solaris. Some of us really like to have a distro that provides EXACTLY what we want.
You can not please all the people all the time, but giving people more choices increases your chances greatly.
If we don't make light of everything, we are just stumbling in the dark - Blank
Good point. It was a broadband connection on the desktop, a wireless card on the laptop and I used NAT translation in the vmware install. My bad for not including the details in the review. Sorry. I'll see what I can do about adding that in.
Jim Lynch
Tech Analyst and Community Manager
To translate Jeff's market speak: you get commercial support with Ubuntu.
How we know is more important than what we know.
No, you're less likely to find one that does what you want, having to research 50 distros all claiming to be everything to everybody.
"Specialized" distros that are made for a specific purpose are great. Knoppix, Smoothwall, and Damn Small are examples of distros with specific reasons for existence. The problem comes when someone wants a desktop Linux distro, and there's an army of them claiming to be exactly what the user wants. After the user has tried 7 of them and found none of them were quite what they claimed, the user is forced to ask himself why he should bother with this whole "Linux thing".
So the core of your argument is this:
Person A: Hey, I don't like the way X and Y work, why can't they work like Z
Person B: Do it yourself or stop complaining
Asking this question is like asking, "What's the benefit of there being so many brands of automobile, as opposed to being able to buy a 'standard' car and modify it to my liking?" The work's been done for you, rather than you having to go through and configure everything the way you want. Some distros will include certain software that others will not; a "standard" distro, to meet everyone's needs, would have to include every single piece of software that every distro out there includes now. That would take up a few dozen CD-ROMs.
Hope that helps.
"Destroy science and religion. Science would re-emerge exactly the same; but not religion." - Penn Jillette, paraphrased
The name Ubuntu is zulu, a South African language, for God. The distro is compiled and managed by South African Soyuz tourist millionaire Mark Shuttleworth (Hey boet) and his company Canonical. There has been quite a bit of movement in South Africa over the past couple of years to get Linux into schools and small businesses, although the vast majority are still using pirated versions of Windows or whatever came with their computer.
This distro, from my point of view (I'm South African), makes excellent sense for people wanting to install Linux and basically just get up and working without having to fight through masses of obscure applications. It provides what 90% of average computer users need and use on their computers:Office productivity, mail, browser, messaging, graphics and media player. That's it, no fluff.
This distro is exactly what is needed (once they sort out the various bugs) for a home user or small business to get started. Given that there has only been a move to competition in the telcom business in South Africa this month, and that SA has had the world's highest rates out, wireless networking has not been a major feature in the SA IT landscape up until now, so I think that not working detection of Wireless NICs is not a major priority at the moment.
I'm really proud about this, as it gives SA its first distro aimed at the country.
Yes! I'm running the ubuntu x86_64 version on an HP pavilion a650e with AMD64 3200+ cpu, everything works well. I'm also running the standard 32bit x86 version of ubuntu on my home pentium II system. So far I'm quite happy with ubuntu. Debian, gnome, python, just works, what's not to like?
There may be hundreds of distros but a newbie only really needs to choose from among the main distros: Fedora, SuSE, Debian, Mandrake. That's essentially three and a half distros to choose from (Mandrake is Redhat based) - I can't see that as unreasonable diversity.
A newbie thats considering Yoper, Arch or something equally obscure is asking for unnecessary trouble - as a quick question to a help board, chat channel, newsgroup, etc, will reveal.
And when they find a security vulnerability in zlib, you're prepared to download every single app using it again? That's assuming the project is still even being maintained.
Having each app statically linked or with its own libraries means you:
1) waste memory
2) waste developer effort
3) waste bandwidth
4) waste hard disk space
5) make maintaining systems a nightmare (DLL-hell)
6) Open yourself up to security problems - look at Microsoft's problems with their jpeg lib spread all over the system.
6) lose the ability to upgrade a system - say the zlib developers release a point upgrade that doubles the speed of decompressing. If I'm using shared libs, I can download the 100kb package and *every app* using zlib is now twice as fast at decompressing. In a static system, I have to wait for the developer of every app to take the time upgrade their app to the new version and then I have to download it.
How is keeping twenty or more copies of the same library any better than keeping one?
It reduces to the same problem of keeping libraries and the applications using them compatible, except now you have twenty or thirty as many files to keep track of.
In which case, you might as well just use system-wide shared libraries, with a few compatibility libs installed for those apps that need it.
You can do per-application testing with a chroot, if you feel the need.