Slashdot Mirror
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."
Apparently Ubuntu is Richard Stallan's recommended distro. "Apparently" ... the place where I saw this made no mention of why, but I assume it has to do with licensing issues.
Anyone care to enlighten me?
Recently I was asked for my expert opinion (IT admin for 5 years) on the architecture for our new groupware solution for inter-office communications. My boss told me the current plan was Windows Server with Sharepoint and SQL Server.
Well, normally I would just go along with it and quietly get my paycheck, but this time I had been inspired by recent Slashdot postings about the power of open source. I had done some studying up on my own, too.
So when my boss put the question to me, I responded with "That could work, but I'm thinking Ubuntu Warty Warthog or Debian Woody, with Derby 0.9 database and of course X-Bitch client to keep in touch".
Well, now I'm unemployed just like you all and I'm looking for a job. All I know is, nobody ever got fired for buying Dell and Microsoft. Damn slashbots... a curse on you!
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.
Just a little preface. I am a Windows user. I probably always will be a Windows user. I like using it and am proficient in it's workings.
For years I've tried several distrobutions. Redhat (starting with 5), Fedora, Mandrake, Debian, Suse, and I even managed a stage 1 Gentoo install once (with limited results). The problem is I would be able to "use" the systems I set these up on, but never as well as my Windows setups. I just had trouble learning how to walk again.
Four days ago, I started installing Ubuntu on a recommendation from someone. I had enough spare parts to whip up a competent PC (Athlon XP 2500+, 512mb RAM, 18gb 10,000 rpm scsi drive, Geforce 2 GTS).
I installed Ubuntu, and was absolutely shocked. This was a distro that a dumb lifelong Windows user could run, and have it do everything I wanted. Granted, any other distro could do the same, but this one made it simple for someone like me. I've had no trouble keeping my software installed an up to date, thanks to the use of apt-get and not having to worry about dependencies (always a big roadblock for me). I've been able to get all my hardware working (even my digital camera, amazing for me), play some of my Windows only games with Cedega, and even get proper video playback with my media player.
Being that this is Slashdot, many of the linux aficionados may say "So? all that is pretty trivial." The thing is, it was always a struggle for someone like me. Ubuntu has made me love linux, and even make it contend for my attention away from Windows.
And what seems like a little pinch of fate, my main Athlon 64 box just died (lousy MSI motherboard issues). Now I am "forced" to use my linux box as a primary computer. And now I'm even considering putting Ubuntu on my laptop!