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Ubuntu Linux Live CD Release
tola writes "The Ubuntu development team have reached their first milestone in the production of the Live CD version of the upcoming release of Ubuntu
codenamed 'Hoary Hedgehog.' This edition features a completely redesigned system for creating Live CDs. While some people have tried rough previews, this is the first proper milestone for the live CD version. Anyone, especially folks who are
using our previous release (4.10 'Warty Warthog'), are encouraged to try this out.
The Live CD runs completely off of the CD and will not touch any of the data on your hard drive so is a fantastic way to get a preview of new features in the upcoming Ubuntu release without upgrading your system. ISO images for i386, AMD64 and PowerPC can be downloaded from Ubuntu."
What precautions do these LiveCDs take to prevent damage from occuring to the installed base system?
Well, the fact there isn't a RW NTFS driver makes it safe enough (your partition is mounted read-only), as well as the fact that the root partition is on the cd. Unless you do it yourself, it won't touch the hard drive.
Ubuntu is Debian with a better installer and only uses GNOME. History of licensing issues with Qt/KDE is that it was not always GPLed. GNOME was sponsored by the FSF as a "Free" replacement for KDE. Also the debian folks are sometimes a bit too radical even for RMS.
While I don't know specifics, but I imagine this is probably why.
Just a Tuna in the Sea of Life
Everyone's always saying how Linux will take over the desktop soon. Well, we're almost there. I've been following Ubuntu closely since recently. I think it really has a chance to provide a real, workable, usable alternative to OS X and WinXP. Even the Warty release is very impressive, and Hoary promises to be amazing!
e pisode19
What makes me think so? Remember that guy that has so much money that he paid the Russians to take him to space? Well, he's decided he wants to make a good Linux distro. He started Canonical, the guys behind Ubuntu.
Here's a very interesting radio interview with the man himself, Mark Shuttleworth, where he talks about the need for a "technically superior" distribution.
http://www.lugradio.org/guide.php#
It's also funny when he mentions that he's "disgustingly rich".
Considering that I am currently getting 1.5KB/s, I think you should -all- start downloading. :)
My Systems
NO.
RMS recommended distro is Ututo-e, from ARGENTINA!. Look at this article (in Spanish, sorry). You could even find Ututo-e in FSF FTP server. The e in Ututo stands for Desktop (in Spanish).
DNA in your Linux: DNALinux
For the more advanced user thinking about trying it out...don't. I checked out array-3 of hoary a couple of days ago and quickly decided it wasn't for me.
My mini review:
The install is a two-phase process using text-based menus and is not difficult, however I remember thinking that the menus were layed out rather awkwardly and could have been streamlined. The second part of the install which actually performs application package installs failed mysteriously for me and gave me no option to restart it when I reran base-setup(yes, this is a pre-release cd). apt-getting the required packages manually worked fine.
Once installed, you are presented with a very clean and polished Gnome desktop with the standard amenities including Firefox 1.0, however there was little difference between it and other Gnome installations aside from a more pleasing tan theme consistently applied to everything.
After a few hours my athlon-xp 1600+ with 1GB ram slowed to a crawl. There were a few hundred megabytes of free memory and cpu usage was always well uner 5%, however even typing at the console was unbearably slow and loading the desktop took a couple of minutes. Never did figure that one out and killing allmost all running processes didn't help a bit. Doubt this was a kernel driver bug too, since I've run other late 2.6 based distros on this machine with no problems. This didn't occur again however...but I didn't have it installed many hours after that.
Boot times were atrocious, maybe worse than fedora due to innumerable services being started by default...many of them which I did not recognize. I seriously doubt postfix is a necessary service for the desktop audience they're targeting.
In summary, the desktop is great for new users, however the rest of the system leaves a lot to be desired. I would advise people to wait a while before adopting ubuntu so that they can have time to work out their issues. For now Mandrake, Suse, and the like perform better as desktop distros, and Gentoo/Slack/vanilla debian work great for the more experienced.
The only huge win over other distros that I see at this point is ubuntu's web community, which is comparable to what you would find in the gentoo forums for helpfulness.
Um... you probably didn't allow the multiverse and universe repositories. i didn't need to get ANYTHING from debian. just got transcode type things (which aren't in debian either.)
it works beautifully. i love my machine. installed it the same day warty came out. haven't changed yet.
What comes first, finding a teacher or becoming a student?