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Mad Penguin on Ubuntu 5.10 Preview
atrebuse wrote to mention a preview of the Ubuntu 5.10 Preview release, on Mad Penguin. From the article: " Every community has its heroes. From the beginning of time, we've all needed that special something to grasp onto and worship in one way or another. The Linux community is no different. Sure, there are a handful of people known as leaders or visionaries that people look up to, but what other altars do they worship at? The Altar of the Distro. That's the one I'm referring to. According to the DistroWatch page hit ranking sidebar, Ubuntu Linux has held the title of '"most worshiped distro' for quite some time now. So why is that? Is it because Ubuntu is just that good? Is it because the Ubuntu followers are just sitting there hitting their browsers refresh button on the DistroWatch Ubuntu page? What is it about Mary? "
I liked the cover on the old version. You know, the one with the half-naked people
Can't go wrong with naked. Well, you could I guess, but I wasn't on the cover.
"What do you despise? By this are you truly known." --Princess Irulan, Manual of Muad'Dib
/)
...... Ubuntu followers are just sitting there hitting their browsers refresh button on the DistroWatch Ubuntu page......
You mean just like we do here on Slashdot?
But does it support booting from SATA CD drives? It is 2005 and almost no Live CD can boot off a SATA-only system...
For $40, Mary will show you what it is.
2b2b2b415448300d
I like Ubuntu for a few reasons. The first that I found nice was how fast it installed. It takes me about 15 minutes to have it all installed. Fedora and the others take much longer. I like the apps that come packaged with it. And oh yeah, the naked people were cool too.
He's a whiney little hypocrate and it's sad that something that poorly done got published on any website, let alone became a headline for Slashdot.
if it came with dhcpcd
It's Sunday night.
...
You may need to take a vacation or something.
RTFA again for the best results.
But, the impression I got, through reading forums to help me get some obscure devices to work (ubuntu it seems comes shipped with a patched X11 for enablding evdev -> logitech MX700 mice, even though it hasn't made the xorg official release stream yet), is that ubuntu seems to have a really decent and helpful community base of users (with some pretty sharp ones too), & the community you share a distribution with can be a sincere reason for picking it. If mandrake's TOO newbie & gentoo's too zealot or redhat's too coorporate then pick one you like - a distro is just a kernel with apps.
"You know you don't act like a scientist, you're more like a game show host." Dana Barret
IMHO, Ubuntu is scoring well because of the QA efforts they are making. Even the preview release of Breezy Badger had less bugs that most pay-for-released versions of Linux that I've used. The community is also outstanding... brimming over the top with help, suggestions and just plain good nature. They really are doing an oustanding job to make the Linux experience as painless as possible.
I agree.
The reviewer spends more time bitching about unimportant BS and less time reviewing the OS... "The first order of business is to remove that earth tone scheme" Sure that's first when reviewing an OS, if you are a prissy mincing gaywad.
Already Slashdotted. Its only been like two minutes.
Oh wait...
Ubuntu is currently number one with 2757 HPD, yet Kubuntu, based off KDE rather than Gnome, is only 475.
Seems it is a matter of mass hysteria much like Gentoo when it first appeared.
[K]Ubuntu is a great system, but I think it is just the fad distro of the moment.
Gentoo was the previous fad until people realized that the compilation is silly.
Its a very neat desktop distro. Since its debian based you can always find debs for whatever obscure app you want, and get it working in seconds. I have it on my laptop and my desktop and i have only good experiences from it. For a server i use RH because of SELinux.
HTTP/1.1 400
http://madpenguin.org.nyud.net:8090/cms/html/47/51 45.html
DYWYPI?
My opinion is that it would be a little more tale-tell of who's visiting their site. Granted the intention is to indicate which is the more popular Linux distro. But still, it might show how many wannabees like me there are. Actually, I had SuSE and RH running here at work for a while. But the local IT manager got pretty pissed when he couldn't log into my machine as administrator. They reimaged my machine shortly thereafter. :(
Someone hates these cans.
I think he means they can't boot at all FROM an sata CD drive.
And I think that this was exactly what GP meant.
Boot from a sata CD drive, and when you come to the point where you have the possibility of selecting another kernel - as you have with most live CDs - you select the sata.i kernel.
What is it about Mary?
Mary's genes. I (and Im sure Im not alone here) use ubuntu primarily because it's essentially Debian.
Ubuntu should just rename itself to debain-desktop, and not just for the 'under the hood' reasons. A base debian system is just that - a very basic linux install (plus SSH); Ubuntu has done a damn good job of doing the same thing in desktop form. Office apps, gaim, not much more. My mother could probably figure out how to do basic email/internet/word processing with ubuntu without much coaching. Just compare the program menus on ubuntu with those of say, knoppix and you'll know what I mean.
Besides the good base app choices there's solid driver support, ease of install, damn good UI, and great marketting. Only thing I would change is out-of-the-box in-browser media support (vlc-plugin or mplayer-plugin that works).
Yes you are. Get some rest.
If the author is so immune to hype, and into telling it straight, why is a full page of a 3 page review about the release names?
I have no idea if this is why, but I was walking down the street two weeks ago in Cambridge MA and some guy just handed me an Unbuntu cd. Two actually, one live cd and one install. I didn't even realize what it was until I had walked 50 feet past him. That's never happened to me with any other distro...
atrebuse wrote to mention a preview of the Ubuntu 5.10 Preview release, on Mad Penguin.
And I guess this is the preview of the real Slashdot article coming tomorrow... and the day after that.
According to the DistroWatch page hit ranking sidebar, Ubuntu Linux has held the title of '"most worshiped distro' for quite some time now.
Oh whopee, another article that thinks page hits on a single site is significant. Can we please have some hysterical "Redhat is dying" stories now that they are beaten on Distrowatch by distros like SLAX and Zenwalk?
Is it because the Ubuntu followers are just sitting there hitting their browsers refresh button on the DistroWatch Ubuntu page?
Yes. And possibly hype caused by fluff articles in media.
Still, congrats on the release Ubuntu team, I'm sure its good.
Being bitter is drinking poison and hoping someone else will die
Armed Dolphins...
.. /Run away Run away.!!!
The Sky is burning the end is near
From the parent:
There's nothing to see here, he spent a whole ranting about naming things with Ubuntu, a second page ranting about the bongo sound and some crash, and by the time I clicked on the third page, the server is in smoke.
.... got to do with desktop? Gee, some people just need their daily of injected humor.
/.ed, so I don't need to read it.
Here's the summary of the first 2 pages:
- project code name is not good. So? What does "Longhorn", "Vista", "Chicago", "Darwin"
- installation went fine, except that the HD partitioning does not give a lot of options. Well, nothing new here, everyone knew that already. I thought Ubuntu was supposed to make it as simple as possible.
- he doesn't like the earthy theme. So? And that's supposed to make it not worthy? And does he like the default WinXP theme?
- annoyed by the bongo sound. Why the fuck can't he turn it off, or turn off the freaking speaker then? I mean, I hate the beep made by stupid apps too, so I unplugged the beep wire in the box, so no more beeping.
- some crashes here and there. Yeah, wake me up when you find a system that does not cost you a leg and an arm and does not crash. And he admitted it's a preview release. File a bug, tell the developers how to reproduce it, isn't it more productive that way?
I guess there would be more ranting on the third page, but good thing it's already
Move on, nothing here.
So, I read the first 3 paras and gave up. It's all about the reviewer... this is why I hate reviews, their all so full of themselves. Think I'll just move along now.
“Our opponent is an alien starship packed with nuclear bombs. We have a protractor.” — Neal Stepnenso
MODS! Pay attention and read the text of this post before you mod it informative!
Really, do any distros really have anything that no other distro has? Maybe the PlayStation2 Linux distribution is the only one I can think of that would be radically different in what tools and apps come with it, but I'm talking about regular Linux that your average joe uses. What else are Linux distributions other than mere permutations of a set with different kernel-versions attached? Sure, choice is a good thing, but when it becomes a gimmick and everyone wants to make a distribution for the sake of making a distribution, it starts becoming a joke.
The Linux world was much simpler when it was just Slackware, Red Hat, and some other guy, and installing Linux required reasoning skills -- weeding out noobs and stupid Windows people from entering our domain.
mods come on now, please READ the post before clicking it up...
Donald 'Duck' Dunn: We had a band powerful enough to turn goat piss into gasoline.
One reason I like Ubuntu is because it also works on Macs (PPC). It's possible to have the same desktop experience whatever computer I am using.
It seems a tad stupid to be going on about horrible branding and how "developers make horrible marketing people" when discussing the phenomenon that Ubuntu has been in the linux distro "market".
To me the whimsical code names just seem another indication it really is "Linux for Human beings". It's personable and if there's a need for a more 'corporate' then a simple 5.04 or whatever is right there.
Boffoonery - downloadable Comedy Benefit for Bletchley Park
That penguin isn't mad, he's just a tad above annoyed. Look at 'em... Just standing there, mean looking eyes and that's it.
That aint mad.
I wanna see a *MAD* penguin. I mean a pissed off, flat out angry, absolutely livid, ready to kill any living thing that comes near it penguin.
A laser beam on his head would be a nice touch.
Tell the BIOS to boot from SCSI, tell the SCSI card to use the CD-ROM to boot. Put my CD of Hoary in, and it happily starts the detection process and all that. However, fairly early on, it tells me that it can't detect the install CD please insert it. YOU JUST BOOTED FROM THE DARN THING! WHADDA YOU MEAN YOU CAN'T FIND THE CD!?! I sit there re-inserting the CD for a couple of tries, and finally give up. I figured it is looking for the IDE drive, so I pop the CD in my IDE drive and it finally continues installing.
At the end of the install, it askes me whether I want to put a boot loader on my "1st hard drive." I'm not sure exactly what it means (I don't remember whether it listed which device it's refering to). Since I didn't want it to touch my Windows drive on IDE, I tell it to boot from /dev/sda1. My plan was to have the boot switching done via the BIOS rather than the boot loader on the IDE drive. This has the nice effect of leaving my Windows drive untouched, as well as the boot loader not freaking out if I ever move my SCSI drive to another computer. (is it easy to remove the boot loader these days?) Furthermore, the SCSI drive with the Linux install can theoretically be moved to another machine and boot itself (rather than depending on the settings on the IDE drive.) Perhaps all of this is supposed to be easy, but I am a newbie, so I didn't want to have to deal with changing boot loader settings or having to remove them later.
In any case, I rebooted after the install, and it couldn't find my kernel... it said something about file not found, and I had no idea how to fix it (as far as I could tell, it was supposed to be looking in /dev/sda1, and that's what I told it to do), so I had to reinstall.
This time, I thought I'd be clever so I booted from the IDE drive... but the CD gives me a checksum error. I pop the same CD back in the SCSI drive and it boots happily (and still asks me to put in the CD at the same place in the install.)
To make the installer do what I want it to do, I had to disconnect the IDE Windows drive. Now I have it happily set up so that I switch boot drives in the BIOS, and my Windows drive remains intact.
-- "This world is a comedy to those who think, a tragedy to those who feel."
Mod parent and great grandparent troll. Trolling should never be rewarded.
For a mirror, try MirrorDot
Ubuntu is good because it took me a moment while reading the replies here to remember that I'm using Ubuntu Breezy. Tech is usually only noticed when something is wrong, so the hallmark of good tech is that it goes unnoticed.
Ubuntu can do eveyrthing Windows did, and thanks to programs such as Cedega, I an even play Guild Wars. The era of Linux on the desktop is NOW.
All rites reversed 2010
Thirdly, Community based distros make it so much easier to find support answers. I deal with RHEL systems at work, good luck finding support answers on the web. How sad is it that its the year 2005 and Redhat still doesn't have an online support forum? Ever search for a Redhat support issue on google? Most of results that come are rh9 issues.. Its so much easier to use online resources with community based distributions, when I'm scouring for Redhat answers I find myself asking a simple question, "What the hell are we paying for?"
Why does the Related Links area list Review Liunux Products when I can't seem to find the misspelling on the page? Was this an error fixed before posting?
Someone hates these cans.
" I heard they're talking to General Mills and Quaker about getting them included in the breakfast cereal boxes, too"
Extremely interesting thread and it has got me thinking. Since CDs are fairly cheap to mass produce (I'd guess $0.01 per CD say if you make 100,000, anyone know?) why not include them in PC magazines, Cereal, anywhere else?
ubuntu came around at a time when (a lot of) people were getting frustrated with the delays in getting sarge out the door. ubuntu took what was in testing, mixed in a little sid, switched over to xorg & the latest desktops, and got a (good) product out the door before debian could even turn around.
5 -September/010876.html
even though sarge is stable now, it's still rather dated compared to ubuntu. if you're wanting a debian-based desktop, just the time savings of having a single-cd install, is worth looking at ubuntu.
and, ubuntu's going to really give debian stable a run for it's money, the april 2006 release is set for 3 and 5 years (desktop and server, respectively) of updates. http://lists.ubuntu.com/archives/ubuntu-devel/200
ubuntu deserves the attention and popularity it's been getting: "it's debian done right".
That number on distrowatch is not the number of hits they get from an operating system, it is the number of times someone clicked on that distro's link to read about it. It is not a count of how many people are using it, just how many people have wanted to read a review or something about it.
Regards,
Steve
Wouldnt that be 'Ubuntu 5.10 on Mad Penguin Preview'?
The system had the verbosity of HTML combined with all the readability of compiled assembly viewed as bitmap images
I think you deserve more than a niggardly "-1, Troll".
Trolling is it's own reward .... really. One could of course try to tickle but I believe that season is closed.
... Standards and Practices !
PenGun
Do What Now ???
Then this article may do a lot to skew the results for Ubuntu.
I've already clicked on it once.
Someone hates these cans.
While it is Debian based, and as you point out it's very concise like debian, extending that to desktop use. Ubuntu is developing so far away from Debian it's becoming a hassle, many times debian files won't work on ubuntu and vice versa. Ubuntu has grown so much it's practically alongside debian as it's own distro now instead of being a subdistro.
Beyond file incompatibility there are other differences too, like I believe Debian doesn't use apt-get while Ubuntu does to name one I have on my mind (though I don't run Debian so the comparison lacks proof from the other side beyond word of mouth).
For many people (though not all), Ubuntu *just works* out of the box. That's something else that few distros can claim. Before Ubuntu, I never gave Linux a chance because I wasn't willing to spend hundreds of hours just to get it to the same state of usability that XP gave me right out of the box. It's tough being only semi-geeky. I'm pretty proficient with computers when it comes to day to day tasks (I include "reinstalling Windows" under that heading), but troubleshooting a Linux box takes a much higher level of expertise, and to be honest I just didn't want to fuck with it. I loved everything that Linux stood for, but I just couldn't stand trying in vain for hours to make it work properly.
Then Ubuntu comes along and everything just magically works with the default install. Well ok, I still had a few things that didn't work 100% right, but I didn't mind tweaking with those on my own time. Every other distro I've tried--including SuSe, Red Hat, Mandrake and Knoppix--were somehow broken out of the box (usually, a key piece of hardware wasn't recognized), and I could never find an easy solution. I'm sure there were solutions out there, but I wasn't patient enough to find them--I wasn't satisfied leaving my computer in a halfway-usable state until I managed to find them.
I've often heard the "hood welded shut" analogy when comparing open source to closed source software. It's a good analogy, but I guess my problem was I didn't want to be FORCED to go underneath the hood because my car only turns left and I can't go over 40 MPH without first turning on the windshield wipers. Being able to tweak is wonderful; it's only been a few months now and I'm already doing a lot that I couldn't do on my Windows box. But being forced to basically finish building the car yourself is a royal pain in the ass, at least for those of us that aren't quite ubergeeks. Ubuntu still has a ways to go (e.g. the latest update has actually broken Firefox for many people, including me), but as long as it stays true to its motto, I have confidence that it will continue to remain at #1.
I'm curious as to how well Ubuntu stacks up versus Debian for a competent CLI/non-GNOME-and-KDE user.
One nice thing about Debian is that there seems to be emphasis on making the config utilities all available via a text UI, and I'm a little suspicious that Ubuntu might drop that.
On the other hand, I am vaguely interested in the more-frequent-release concept. It's really great that Debian stable exists, because it means that there's a Free real, stable, server-class distro out there. But all my friends that use Debian on their desktops seem to frequently bemoan how out-of-date the desktop software in stable gets, and how unstable/testing isn't really suitable for day-to-day use.
I currently use Fedora, but after a brief stint with Debian in a router that I'm building, I was quite impressed and considering, for the first time in about seven years, making my main desktop machine run something other than a Red Hat distribution.
What I'm wondering is whether Ubuntu swings more towards Debian (but with more frequent releases) or Linspire (but based on Debian). The former is more what I'm looking for.
Any program relying on (nontrivial) preemptive multithreading will be buggy.
They reimaged my machine shortly thereafter. :(
That's awful. Better set a bios password after the next install.
I agree with most of your comment, but another of the deciding advantages of Ubuntu for me is that it's more up-to-date than stable and more tested than testing.
Information doesn't want to be anthropomorphized anymore.
I've been using ubuntu since warty was officially released and generally loved it. I love the simple desktop and the apt/synaptic system of installing new software. I've rebuilt several times and even though I'm on dialup I've found it pretty quick to get going again simply by backing up and reloading the package cache after a reinstall.
Every release has given me some problems, but the latest (breezy colony 4) was so incredibly bad I had to wipe the systme out and reload. When I was trying the dev releases of hoary this never happened, so I'm a little concerned - especially since, after filing a bug report on the main problem I had (it is exceedingly slow, sometimes taking several MINUTES for nautilus to open and display a folder, then apparently having to "refresh" that view again and again as it is opened, essentially making the entire desktop useless for minutes on end) I was told this behavior is "normal when opening very large folders!" Funny, much as I hate windows I never experienced such a lockout when asking exploorer ot open a folder containing several thousand files...
It seems to be related to dnotify (or inotify, whatever they're using) and it also has the effect of causing memory leaks like nobody's business. The chatter I've seen on the list says things like "we don't know if this will be fixed before release" (!)
The only real difference I can see is the updated compiler support (which also proved to be a nuisance, since the system is built with 3.4 but installing their default "build-essential" package loads the 4.0 compiler!) and the newer version of gnome desktop. Mono is also updated but that's not a big deal since you can get the mono installer in one 50MB package and have pretty much the latest official version anyway. I'm personally not convinced that's such a big deal anyway, since beagle has NEVER, EVER worked properly for me and muine (which I loved) is no match for Quod Libet (which looks very much like Muine but has a tag editor from heaven and is written in Python).
Unless things really, really change with breezy in the next 30 days or so I can't see a single reason to change from hoary. Install the build essentials and the header files and build gnome-panel, nautilus and the panel widgets and you'll have a faster, more robust machine than the breezy I saw.
Apt-get is a debian creation, it does use it.
Information doesn't want to be anthropomorphized anymore.
The article is completely slashdotted. Even the coral caches of the second and third pages don't work.
You should have read it on OSNEWS when it was posted a full week ago.
Calling and e-mailing for answers to support issues is a great "traditional" option, but it doesn't take a way the usefulness of having an official support forum.
E-mail and phone support is not searchable. A lot of the good support solutions come from actual users, not the people paid to talk with them. It also fixes the problem of answering the same question over and over again. Sure, Redhat has a knowledge base, but it requires an employee to manually post to the knowledge base. An on line forum provides a nimble interactive knowledge base with a sense of community.
Any company providing software support in 2005, that cannot see the clearly obvious benefits of on line support forums, needs to really take a step back and reassess their support strategy.
>>>They reimaged my machine shortly thereafter. :(
That's awful. Better set a bios password after the next install.
Because circumventing a bios password is MUCH more work than reimaging a machine.
L
I could have done that. And they could have just bypassed it at the jumper. Had it only been the two-bit hack, IT people we had, I would have just continued to fuck with them. But it was a manager. Besides, I had two running machines, that they knew about. The main problem was the IT infrastructure had changed. We were still using IBM's old token ring network, even after IBM had abandoned it. They finally threw the switch and kicked us off, forcing us to switch to a yet tested ethernet. The need to access my workstation was to reimage it to work on the new corperate network which uses active directory. They knew less about setting it up on a linux machine than I do, which ain't much. Funny thing is, the machine I've been using since still logs in to the local machine, haha. But the main reason was the apps we use are Windows only, ex EXceed. I had had a manager in cahoots ask about a linux based interface. They didn't want to say yes or no. They wanted to know why he was asking in the first place. Turns out there was one, but it wasn't as 'mature' as the Windows GUI, which sucks in my opinion. Even when I was running a linux machine, I still needed access to Windows since the Java GUI for SAP doesn't support, or didn't at the time, the ability to download raw data to text files or spreadsheets, which I specifically needed. To be honest, my foray into the world of workplace linux was just a self educating, time killer. It would be impracticle for me to do it now, even with as much time as I have. Shhh, don't tell management.
Someone hates these cans.
This is my third Ubuntu install now, before that I ran RH9.
One of the main reasons I switched to Ubuntu was because I wanted a distro with 2.6 kernel with proper package management. At the time, there were 2 realistic options; Gentoo and Ubuntu. Gentoo seemed to be too much of a fuss.
The breezy preview installed pretty smoothly. The majority of the work however comes after the install. I keep an install log to make it easier to tweak the install to my liking.
I took out my soundcard in favor of the one that's on the mainboard. I found that the
MIDI device was not detected properly 'out of the box'; because of this, amidi --dump did not find the default MIDI device. This was solved after making a symbolic link (ln -s midiC1D0 midiC0D0). No big thing here; by what I could tell this behaviour was present in the previous release as well.
The main difference I found with hoary is that GCC 4 is the compiler of choice now, as
x.org instead of xfree86 can be considered the 'main difference' to the version before hoary. This is actually a bit of a fuss, however being on the leading edge is why I went for Ubuntu in the first place.
To allow realtime capabilities in userland, recompiling the kernel is needed (as it was before) to allow running the realtime-lsm module. This requires pointing the Makefile of the linux sources to gcc 4 rather than 3.4. I find this a bit odd.
I found the kernel sources initially didn't compile on gcc 4; In one instance, a filesystem function declaration in the header file (.h) differs from the source file (.c/c++), which is a matter of things being declared 'static' in one place and not
in the other. I fixed this by letting the function declaration in the source file follow the declaration of the header file.
After this, the kernel compiled and things seem to be stable. I have the impression it runs slightly smoother than hoary, but this is subjective.
The main thing I haven't gotten around to buidling yet is mplayer. I did notice that it complains about GCC 4 because it hasn't been tested on it. It will refuse to build unless forced. When forced, GCC 4 will give some errors. I'll still have to figure out how to complete building it properly. I've heard some people run gcc 3.4 alongside 4 for cases like this. YMMV.
Main question I have myself is, will the 5.10 preview automatically upgrade to 5.10 once it is released?
Visit http://ringbreak.dnd.utwente.nl/~mrjb/growingbettersoftware to download your free copy of the book
Naked people?! OMG, you have not yet seen pr0n?
Virgin troops, rescue him..
i started out with slackware and used it as my personal distribution for almost 10 years (alongside with debian and a few FreeBSD machines). at my work, we use fedora (migrated from redhat) and gentoo (wasnt my choice). i hate working with those distributions because none of those distributions feel natural to me. i've tried moving onto other distributions just to play with, none of them felt right (mandriva, redhat, fedora, suse, arch, gentoo, just to name some). i decided to give ubuntu a try and i was in love with it ever since. now all my personal servers are running ubuntu.
Simply MEPIS works right out of the box too, at least for me, a Linux noob. Totally painless install. I'm using it right now.
Ubuntu disables the root account. If you need to run root commands, you use sudo from your user account. This operation will ask the password for this user account.
To enable root, just do sudo passwd.
More information here: http://www.ubuntuguide.org/
I find highly incredible someone willing to compile an entire os and apps; can't figure something this simple. Its just like knoppix, but sudo in ubuntu asks you the user's password.
The rest of your problems might be addressed in the forums, chat or wiki.
IMO the strongest point of ubuntu is the community.
Artix
Your Linux, your init.
I'm being a slight prick here, but if you spent 200+ hours learning the guts of *any* distro of Linux, or Windows, or..., you will be an ubergeek (or close to one) in that system. And if you can open the hood, and make your car go over 40 mph with the wipers turned on, share that knowledge. Disclaimer: Windows, of any flavor, scares the hell out of me -- I'll stick with Slakware.
But seriously.. Did you miss this discussion on A Gimp In Photoshop's Clothing?
Besides the good base app choices there's solid driver support, ease of install, damn good UI, and great marketing.
I don't know about everyone else here, but I'm holding off for Vista- I hear the marketing in that OS is going to KICK ASS.
Seriously, that's a pretty a strange criterium to judge software by (on slashdot, anyways...).
pi = 3.141592653589793helpimtrappedinauniversefactory7
+5 Insightful
I'm moving some users from Windows to Linux.
Ubuntu was one of the things I wanted them to try, and they really liked it, but there was a huge problem - fonts look like sh*t on TFT screens. I've tried just about everything (including HOWTO on their forums) I could find in order to tweak fonts, but to no avail.
I ended up installing CentOS 4.1 (which I use on my desktop, with CRT) and fonts are rendered MUCH nicer, without any tweaking.
Am I the only one that actually likes the Ubuntu version names? Warty Warthog, Hoary Hedgehog, Breezy Badger: they're quite funny, easy to shorten and memorable. And "Hoary" is quite a common word, at least where I come from (South East UK). Linux distros don't have to be dull and corporate - just use "Ubuntu 5.10" to management if it bothers anyone that much.
fwiw, it's mostly over. My current Sid desktop has gcc4-built KDE 3.4.2, X.org instead of XFree86, all from official Debian servers. I think there are a few KDE apps that are still held up. I don't know what is going on on the Gnome side.
Mad Penguins, Armed Dolphins.
May I be the first to welcome our animal overlords.
When the posters fear their moderators, there is tyranny; when the moderators fears the posters, there is liberty.
I could not agree more with you, Slackware should have been enough for geeks, and the later distros (Red Hat, Mandrake,...) came out to satisfy the needs of the Enterprise and of the Joe User.
Instead, today the proliferation of distributions seems inarrestable, and drains a huge amount of contributors' time, that could be much better used.
Instead they keep enlisting people to maintain yet another distro, with yet another package format, with yet another huge repository of pre-digested packages to madly try to keep working together.
Very bad allocation of resources, for the sole purpose of filling some egos.
Ubuntu means humanity to people! That's what we need when choosing OS! Humanity has been lost in OSs, but Ubuntu is here to save it all. Ubuntu project has expert QA team that will tackle any problems efficiently. Ubuntu just works! Can you imagine I'm running Windows games on it with Ubuntu-Cedega? Can you imagine I'm surfing Microsoft IE only websites with Mozilla that has Ubuntu-MozillaActiveX component installed? FREE DESKTOP IS HERE NOW! This is the day that we can say so! Ubuntu does everything your Windows OS does and it does even more. When you and your brother and sister can use your computer seamlessly without even noticing that it's running some other OS than Windows, then you know that the work has been done right! This is the exact situation with Ubuntu! I want to thank Ubuntu team for such a kick-ass product! And if you are hesitating whether or not give Ubuntu a try I only want to say - Make the switch today!
I haven't given ubuntu a try yet.
I use the KDE, it seems to be the easiest to deal with.
All of this praise has made me think about giving Ubunutu a try once I get a high speed connection and can apt-get the kde in a reasonable way.
He can't understand what a development preview release is!
Of course there are things that are broken! They released the darn thing so you can find what's wrong and tell to the devellopers, so they can fix them.
If you don't want to deal with the bugs, fine, stick with hoary as it's the stable release. The Colony releases are for those who are willing to help find bugs.
---- You know how some doctors have the Messiah complex - they need to save the world? You've got the "Rubik's" complex
That's where I quit reading. Too bad, too, as I was looking forward to reading the review. I've downloaded and installed Ubuntu, liked it, but also couldn't find a compelling reason to switch from my distro (gentoo). Not that there aren't many reasons to like Ubuntu, I am sure.
But I'm a follower. I like to sit safe in the herd (hurd?). I can't think for myself. So obviously my poor wits aren't ready for so heady of a review.
The only problems I had with Ubuntu is the lack of an easy to configure display utility that lets the user manage dual monitors. I don't know if thats the fault of the graphics card manufacturer or Ubuntu.
Other than some other driver related problems (sound card) I had no problems with it.
I've heard this comment for a year or so now, and finally tried Ubunutu two weeks ago. I'm coming from years of monstly Mandrake, but have recently tried Xandros, Yoper and a couple other distributions, and have installed Suse and RedHat as recently as 18 months ago.
/mnt/windows partitions and automount them for me. Ubuntu doesn't do that, at least not out of the box.
Ubunut does not 'just work' any more or less than other distros. I would actually say it works *less* than some other distros at certain things. I've known a few people that haved *raved* about Ubuntu "just working", and I could NOT understand what they were talking about. I realized at least one of them came from the gentoo/lfs world where getting a system running is days of work, so in comparison, yes, it's great.
A few things Ubuntu didn't have which other distros had on the same hardware:
1. Automatic mounting of available Windows partitions
Mandrake (and I think Xandros and Yoper, can't remember others) would make
2. Auto detect network printers. My wife has an inkjet shared on her eMac on the wireless network. Xandros (and I think the LE2005 Mandrake) auto-setup that printer and made it available via CUPS out of the box. No way of doing that in Ubuntu.
3. My wireless card wasn't detected. Doesn't matter what distro, it doesn't work out of the box - I need ndiswrapper and custom setup. Not bitching about that, but Ubuntu didn't magically make it happen.
A slight bitch about apt-get here too - it won't inform me of partially matching package names. In urpmi, if I run "urpmi ndis" it'll come back with a list of package names which match 'ndis' if there's more than one. Debian/Ubuntu, I have to use a separate command to search the 'cache', which is just frustrating. Again, for someone coming from LFS background, yeah, Ubuntu is a breath of fresh air. But there are distros that 'just work' out of the box - providing a much more robust environment - more than Ubuntu.
creation science book
But does it run Linux? ...Oh wait...
Does anyone know whether ACPI works in Breezy?? I installed Hoary on my Dell Inspiron 8200 and I couldn't get suspend to RAM working. I had to move back to Debian testing.
this is an easy question. Ubuntu is easy to set up, has a ton of community support (not to mention several official and unofficial pages dedicated to how to get it running the way you want that have never failed me once), great hardware support and since it's debian based you have all those lovely debs. Once I got the universe repos on there I have not had one problem finding packages I want via apt-get or synaptic (if you like that graphical interface stuff).
This is a classic case of servant backstabbing the master and stealing his wife and riches (metaphor). Ubuntu creator was just a Debian contributor, but decided he wanted to create his own distro thus "backstabbing master". Undertaker killed the master and became number one distro. Debian is dead, Ubuntu is the dominator.
Hmmm maybe I should have included that as a reason for healthy en masse uptake as opposed to a personal reason for using it. Seriously though their combined message/artwork/general packaging is very well done. Everything they release is coordinated by color, photographs, logo, typeface, etc - from their gnome theme to their website to the free CDs you can request. The importance they place on appearance is underlined by the fact that they maintain a 20 person art team
So I tried to install on a 700MHz eMac. Install runs perfectly then screen goes blank. And stays blank. Boot runs perfectly till screen goes blank and stays blank.
Yes, I know, useless newbie etc. etc, hasn't RTFM...but "just works" doesn't. On the eMac I can't even find a way of switching to runlevel 3 so I can try and find why the video is down.
I guess this is where a pair of old Macs are heading for a dumpster experience, because they are too slow to run OS X sensibly.
Panurge has posted for the last time. Thanks for the positive moderations.
I tried running one of our company web servers off an Ubuntu livecd and is stunk! I don't know why people like it! I'll keep all my servers on Yggdrasil thank you.
I'm against picketing, but I don't know how to show it.
Just pointing out that breezy comes with a totem-based mozilla plugin that does an excellent job playing media in your Web browser. Cheers.
does anyone else get the impression that this guy is so full of himself, he believes it's a treat to read any pile of ish that happens to dibble out of the corners of his mouth? What's with the page devoted to the naming scheme for Vista, and Ubuntu. Get to the point already guy, you're not clever or funny just tell me if the distro is good or bad, save me the "if I were to name it would be better because I named it" BS.
There are some very good parts to it though, seeing the menus in action was cool, and info on installing CVS, and getting clearlook up and running was informative, and helpfull.
-manno
Dear Slashdot,
;)
Considering that Ubuntu is arguably the most popular linux distro, (at least according to distrowatch) doesn't it deserve a suitable Ubuntu icon at Slashdot? What's up with the Debian Icon? I'm a bit offended that the Debian icon got used, since Ubuntu is a different beast than Debian. It wouldn't be right to potentially confuse newbies into thinking that a for-profit company is actually a non-profit organization.
Debian and Ubuntu both rock, btw. I just think they deserve to be well-distinguished from each other since they represent fundamentally different philosophies and economic models.
At least, could you please use the penguin icon only until you can get a proper Ubuntu icon? Come on guys, professionalism!
And there is a tendancy to always check out the number one rated item on lists...which perpetuates its number one status. Very unreliable indeed.
I think, therefore I doh.
I think the reviewer should have tried to install it onto a laptop and see for himself the real challenge. From Irda to speedstepping (to slowdown processor) to WPA- wireless lan is still a big problem.
0. CPU freq daemon
1. Irda
2. Wireless
3. Bluetooth
4. S-Video
5. 3D-acceleration
6. Suspend to Disk
My brother-in-law handed me down his old G3-400MHz iMac. Normally, one would flinch, but he had also been running it with 1GB of RAM. We've got 10.3.9 on it. Works fine.
Consider a RAM upgrade and see how it goes. If you're in doubt (before taking the plunge on buying new RAM), swap some in from another computer and try it out.
I haven't tried Linux (Debian or Ubuntu) on a Mac yet, but I've got a G3-333MHz iMac in the box that I've been tempted to put into service! (Just got to find a cheap source for 144 pin SODIMMs - 32MB is not enough!)
I have older machines on our SOHO. None of them has dual-cores or multiprocessors, and not huge amounts of memory, so I wanted to upgrade from RH 9 to something still fairly lightweight (I don't want bleeding-edge Fedora). A friend suggested KUbuntu.
/mnt. Nope.
I d/l it, burned a live CD, and tried it.
I have an old Logitech serial mouse. It refuses to recogize it. The menu doesn't offer a way to configure it, and not having used xorg, it took me a while to find the configuration tool. I used that, and when I finished, it said, "ok"... but Kubuntu *still* doesn't recognize my mouse.
Had I built the distro, it would have expected it to also check your hard drive, and automatically mount the partitions under
In effect, it comes across as, "hi, try me, if I work, but you can't make any changes, even in memory." And yes, I *did* post to the new users' list, several times, and got zero responses.
So no thanks, I'll pass. Now I'm looking at SuSE, esp. since it's now owned by Novell, and is moving up in the US market. Jobs, y'know, esp. when all the companies in the country are full of abysmally clueless HR folks, who think there are some mystical differences between, say, RH and SuSE (which just happened to an aquaintance).
mark
...and it's arguably just as popular as Ubuntu among us nerds/geeks/techies.
Amazing! Windows games really work on Ubuntu! Once you have switched your distro to Ubuntu, you can find instructions here about how to install Ubuntu-Cedega and run Windows games on it! http://cityofheroes.gameamp.com/guide/viewGuide/33 0.php
I have used Ubuntu for something like 6 months and finally switched to SuSE.
Here are the reasons:
1) Ubuntu is a Gnome desktop. I don't like Gnome, I prefer KDE. This is an entirely personal matter since Gnome apps work in KDE and KDE's stuff works in Gnome. But in their rush to usability Gnome developers strip off so many stuff that you end up with an IMHO not usable but crippled desktop.
2) They don't have a nicely polished distro with a graphical boot screen and GUI configuration tools. Making bluetooth work was a nightmare. However, Ubuntu doesn't interfere you carefully-crafted configs. So, in this way it's closer to Slack or Gentoo. In SuSE for example, I haven't touched the console to do any configuration. In Ubuntu, it is not possible.
3) One CD is not enough. To get a decent development workstation you have to download about 200 megs, and network traffic can be quite costly.
4) Brown theme, unpronouncable name, dark Gnome icons, Clearlooks theme. I simply hate those.
They have some good points, too:
1) Free CDs by mail!
2) All packages are avaliable through Synaptic. And Synaptic (and apt-get) is really good.
3) Packages included in Ubuntu are as close to the original ones as possible.
4) They don't charge money for forums, updates, packages etc. unlike Mandriva and some others.
And was impressed by how usable Linux can be made. It was running on a 825MHz Duron as well, yet was very responsive - showing good optimisations in Gnome certainly.
I installed it on my test rig at home, and I also installed Windows XP MCE on another hard drive. I took both around my girlfriend's on Sunday to replace her broken hard drive.
Ubuntu booted just fine, but needed the X Server reconfigured, which it didn't do automatically - I think it should detect that the hardware has changed and react accordingly.
Windows XP MCE crashed repeatedly on boot, regardless of selecting safe mode or anything. In the end I had to do the CD juggling repair reinstall on it to get it working. However the repair install at least does not wipe out the boot sector, so Ubuntu was still able to boot afterwards.
Ubuntu issues: X Server Package Upgrade failed because X Fonts conflicted with another package.
Latest i386 kernel upgrade had a kernel panic. However the i686 version of the same kernel boots just fine.
So my rating, given that it is a preview and the above should be fixed for the release: 8/10 (hey, it's free too!).
Lets hope the new release will automatically mount hard disk partitions and make them available for browsing.
Try MEPIS. It's closer to Debian than Ubuntu, so you can use the entire Debian archive of software safely; it's just as easy to install (comes on a bootable CD so you can check everything will work before installing, installs in about 15 minutes); and it has the browser configured so all the usual plugins work. Oh, and it also has the added benefit of KDE instead of Gnome.
Ubuntu vs MEPIS is an interesting example of hype vs substance.
GCHQ Quantum Insert installed. If only our tongues were made of glass, how much more careful we would be when we speak
Seriously, that's [marketting] a pretty a strange criterium to judge software by
Technically, marketting is a much broader topic than most people give it credit for. The textbook description of marketting typically includes promotion (advertising), price, product, and placement. The most important is probably product, eg working with designers and developers to create a product customers want. In my opinion, Ubuntu seems to do this fairly well and that is a large part of why I eventually settled on them after trying debian stable/unstable, red hat, and fedora.
Mod up! This is interesting!
Will they finally put in a reasonably recent version of Postfix from the 2.2 tree?
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
From Google define:dapper :
marked by smartness in dress and manners;
"a dapper young man"; "a jaunty red hat"
I have met plenty of badly dressed gay guys.
So, for the vocabulary-challenged, "metrosexual duck" might be a better translation.
After reading these threads, I feel compelled to give my 2 cents. I mean really, complaining about how a Desktop oriented LiveCD makes a lousy web server?! Here's a brief synopsis of my ubuntu experience. First - excellent desktop integration. My computer illiterate friends who had chronic windows problems are now running ubuntu with few complaints. Hardware detection is adequate, although much of the problem is with the hardware vendors themselves failing to release drivers for linux. As far as the liveCD complaints.... Most of them are true. The ubuntu livecd is great for giving a Windows user a preview of the Gnome interface, but other than that, it's useless. Ubuntu comes with a minimum of default packages, and if you have other preferences you'll need to experiment with a full install to get them. The installation is not difficult if you're familiar with the linux file structure and file systems, but I can see how it would be confusing for a linux novice. The most frustrating (yet most admirable) issue with ubuntu is it's insistance on including only open software in the default installation. To play DVDs or even a simple mp3, you have to download additional software through synaptic (which is still absurdly easy). If you are an ubergeek who is looking for a superpowered server or a system that is tweakable to the nth degree then go play with gentoo. If you're that technically savvy, then you are well aware of the limitations of a Desktop oriented distro and a LiveCD and should not be overly critical when they don't work for other purposes. For those of us who just want a linux distro that feels comfortable on a desktop, has adequate support (don't forget that you can purchase tech support if you don't like the forums or irc) and is absurdly easy to use - then install ubuntu and find out if it's right for you. It's free, so what do you have to lose?!
He who would be a man, must be a nonconformist. -- Emerson
seriously though, think about it.. ubuntu, even though has it flaws for the linux novice, and might be a little hard to figure out, its STILL motivating people to be a little bit more "savvy" as far as their computer knowledge is concerned.. why must everyone insist on having their asses wiped for them?? this is the perfect opportunity to actually educate computer users about their system, and how an operating system works.. they are definitely going about it the right way as well.. promoting themselves as this "revolutionary" hero.. introducing free OS's to an extremely wide audience.. its very good for their PR.. i support them, and i see nothing but good coming from their distro..
*plays the Apogee theme song music*
My 6-year-old daughter likes Microsoft Windows (preferably blue, because pink is for babies
See HERE my good man.
They released the darn thing so you can find what's wrong and tell to the devellopers, so they can fix them.
Yes, and it really looks promising when YOU DO EXACTLY THIS and those developers then mark your bug report "resolved" and tell you "it's supposed to do that."
If the Breezy preview I saw is "normal" and the best the Gnome desktop can do, Windows truly has a bright and promising future. Beagle and dashboard and a thousand more features don't mean a thing if simply clicking to open a folder containing a few hundred files causes a 2GHz computer to thrash about on the desktop like a dying trout for the next ten minutes.
I just want to throw my hat into the ring regarding Ubuntu - I installed it on my (unimpressive) 1.8GHz laptop with 512MB of RAM last week and have been extremely impressed with its usability, performance, and just plain prettiness (though I will note that the prettiness is largely a function of x.org and GNOME). I'll be using this Linux installation for real-time scheduler experiments so it's not terribly important how good the user experience is, but nevertheless, the overall experience with the distro is leading me to possibly install it on my desktop at home.
One niggling peeve: No good wireless sniffer packages appear to be included in the default package list (correct me if I'm wrong). Guess I'm gonna have to install Kismet and gkismet myself.
Also, this post is a test to see if that crazy loon apk is still stalking me.
+++ATH0
I just sudo bash
That gives me a nice root promp.
There is *no* reason for Ubuntu to be this popular. It's been hyped, probably by people who get paid to hype. They do make money off of their tech support, don't they?
PS I'm COUNTING on flames, and have my filters set accordingly. This is the God's truth as I type it. Normally I'm all for an open debate on Slashdot, but this time, if your opinions differ from mine on this subject, you can basically tell it to the wall.
Do you know of any decent, GUI-based, fax programs for linux?
nt
Adam Doxtater has written a review of Ubuntu 5.10 Preview and he's done a damn poor job of it.
Some hints:
- List your hardware configuration before you start.
- In fact, it's useful to have two or maybe three computers to install on.
- Use a checklist of items for newbies and items for geeks.
- Develop your checklist by actually talking to newbies and geeks!
- Organize your review into logical segments.
- When explaining, explain fully and clearly - eschew obfuscation.
- Write the review on this software, not experiences with previous programs/distributions.
- Keep personal tastes, allergies and prejudices out of it. The reader isn't interested. The reader chooses the review for information, not personal colour.
Adam Doxtater did none of these things in his review. I'll take care not to read any other crappy reviews by this person. I'm amazed that Slashdot gave him the time of day. For the record, I have Mepis and Kubuntu currently installed. I use Mepis, but that's a matter of personal taste and my own hardware configuration:
Old Tekram motherboard, AMD k6-2 256 megabytes of ram, old ATI Rage Pro graphics and Soundblaster card with a slow dial-up connection. Works for me.
In times of trouble, the smell of frying onions usually gives confidence and comfort.
I would like to coment to Hosiah first: there are people who are not paid and are satisfied with Ubuntu, and I'm one of them. New to Linux as I am, I tried to download Fedora, I worked with Suse Linux (9.2), and wasn't able to update one single program with their so credited YAST....... and then I was refered to Ubuntu by some dude on Orkut..... as I needed a alternative for windows, which had crashed. Ubuntu installed fine with me, didn't take that much time and after the first boot it operated ok. Now I can choose between Gnome (the default for Ubuntu), KDE (tyhe default for Kubuntu), xfde, and enlightenment desktops..... and with the right repositories or Linux knowledge I can imagine anyone to be able to install any desired desktop manager! The programs to come with Ubuntu are meeting the basic needs for any computer user, and that's what Ubuntu aims for: a Desktop Linux, as an alternative for windows..... So OpenOffice (I agree, it's still 1.1.3 instead of the new 1.1.5 or a working 2.0) or Abiword, Mozilla Thunderbird and Firefox, Gaim... some P2P's, SQL, etc.... and of you go! Do I have any negative comment, or am I an Ubuntu marketeer in disguise? Yeah there are some negative coments, but they apply more to Debian distro's in general: APT is ok, but the repositories are difficult to find, many software is long updated, but the developer sites offer a range of RPM's etc... but no Debian repositories. Secondly, this refers to Ubuntu: the choice not to join the new DCC initiative, and thus drifting away from Debian and thus the Linux Standard Base.... seems not that smart to me. Further, again to the program updates: to lead people through Ubuntu repository sites, limit their possibilities, why not add the developers sites as well...... then people can enjoy the latest stable releases. And if you're renewing anwyays: for the newest newbee, a graphical installer would be nice, as people can get scared by the old styled installer! But overall, in my opinion, Ubuntu is one of the easiest Linux Distro's...... I've tried the much aclaimed PCLinuxOS, Foresight Linux and MEPIS....... all refused to boot from CD, claiming errors on the CD..... now this is possible, but why does a later downloaded Kubuntu CD install? Just some thoughts...... it doesn't btw mean I will never try these distro's again, but for the moment, I'm satisfied, and people who ain't and instantly claim "it all sux, and isn't worth a dime"....... that's to me a harsh remark.
The wise are not erudite, the erudite not wise!
How can I be offtopic when I am answering another posters reply/question, deep down in a thread?
Of course it's not on the original topic, but the whole idea is that we discuss here whatever we want to discuss. This article in particular, provided a discussion with different shades of seriousness about nudity and freedom of expression. I don't think that "offtopic" applies here.
I believe we just need better metamoderation.
Anyway, other than some super-being metamoderating at will, I can't come up with a better proposal for metamoderation that what we have right now.
See? that was actually an off-topic rant.
Mod parent and great grandparent troll. Trolling should never be rewarded.
The wedgies I am sure you have received throughout the course of your painfully sad life were, in fact, pre-emptive punishment for this post.
Get back in your locker!
While it might happen in Cambridge at any time, on September 10th it was supposed to happen in many other cities too -- it was Software Freedom Day.
This was a premeditated event, perpetrated by Mako (as previously linked in this thread) and the BLU crew. Sorry I couldn't be there, maybe next year. (I would suspect there may be some Ubuntu CDs at the Ocbober BLU meeting too, since Mako is speaking on Ubuntu.)
--Bill