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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? "
Slackware can. You just need to choose the sata.i kernel on startup. I suspect that most others can as well.
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.
http://madpenguin.org.nyud.net:8090/cms/html/47/51 45.html
DYWYPI?
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.
I installed Hoary from my sata dvd drive with no problems. Don;t see why a newer release wouldn't do it.
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).
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.
In a slight aside from your joke... DistroWatch gets those numbers by pretty much whichever distro is making the most buzz in the geek news world at the time. It in no way reflects actual download counts or user counts. For instance, if you run Mandriva, Suse, or Fedora and click on Ubuntu on distrowatch, the Ubuntu number goes up. So I guess what that number represents is the number of folks who are interested in reading about it, or reading a review about it.
Regards,
Steve
Mod parent and great grandparent troll. Trolling should never be rewarded.
For a mirror, try MirrorDot
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?"
Normally I don't feed the trolls, but the narrow mindedness regarding what is good for everyone else (in Distro's, Window Managers, blah blah blah) is often not just limited to Trolls, so I'll bite.
Compilation is not silly for everyone. The 2 biggest problems I had with Fedora and RH was that although with apt and yum I had a nice updated system, I often needed features in packages (particularly the Kernel, PHP and Apache, from memory...) that were not compiled into the RPM's that were in the repositories. So I'd end up hand compiling these anyway... With Gentoo I set the USE flags I want when I emerge it, and thats it.
With RH and Fedora, upgrading was also a big annoyance to me. You can't just upgrade to a new release. With Gentoo I just point at a new portage tree and I've upgraded.
Community support is also excellent.
Each and every distro has its strengths, these are a couple of Gentoo's.
Just don't tell me compilation is silly, it suits my needs right down to the ground.
Yeah, yeah, I know. This site represents every Gentoo user, right? http://www.funroll-loops.org. Just thought I'd get that out the way for you.
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
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.
I understand your situation. Ubuntu is incredibly overrated. Although while I say this I haven't tried any distro, but I have to hope some are better. Ubuntu does NOT like non standard PC setups, and by standard I mean only IDE disks and optical drives, 1 video card, a rather generic and well supported audio card, etc. If it runs into anything even remotely out of the ordinariy it screws up all over the damn place. With me it was a minor issue of having onboard video and a pci video card and not having the ability to disable th eonboard video in my bios. I did, however, have the ability to specify which card should be the primary card in the bios. Despite this ubuntu tried to start X on the onboard video which I was not using and did not have a monitor plugged into. Once I plugged the monitor into the onboard I tried to edit the config manually after it installed only to find out I did not have access to the root account. I had to search google and find some obscure entry on some obscure forum somewhere to find what ubuntu sets the root password to! Overall I must say I am HIGHLY disappointed by ubuntu. It was recommened to me by many people as a great newbie distro to introduce some people to, and in the end I ended up tossing windows xp back on out of frustration. I had an easier time getting Gentoo working on my home box. Pathetic.
The only half naked person in your link was the dude.
I preferred the full naked picture.
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
What is this "Page Hit Ranking"?
It is a lighthearted way of looking at a popularity of any given distribution. Since each distribution has its own page, I decided to track the number of visitors viewing individual web pages. The HPD figure represents hits per day by unique visitors, the emphasis being on the word unique; the uniqueness is determined by the visitor's IP address. This prevents those visitors, not disciplined enough, from rigging the results by reloading the pages multiple times. The idea is to identify which distributions attract most attention and to rank them accordingly. This also introduces an element of competition and competitions are fun, aren't they? Admittedly, the page clicks by themselves may not always reflect the popularity correctly. They are also "seasonal", meaning that distribution currently in beta testing will often receive much more clicks than the one past the stable release. All in all, these numbers should, over time, provide an indication about the popularity of Linux distributions.
These rules have been implemented to prevent various counter reloading schemes:
Repeated page and counter reloads in short or regular intervals are not allowed. If you are inclined to set up cronjobs to repeatedly wget your favourite distro's page counter, then please do yourself a favour and go to see a psychologist. You need help.
All suspicious page hit counts will be investigated and any regularly reloaded counts will be deducted from the total count.
The repeat offender's IP address will be banned from accessing all areas of DistroWatch, including mirrors, for a period of 30 days.
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 a Slackware user myself for the most part(stupidly easy upgrades btw, i run the -current branch with few issues), but I recall that apt-get in Debian actually does support grabbing source and compiling it. Not sure if theres a provision for feeding it your own flags, but i'd imagine so, or why bother?
I still haven't found anything that Gentoo would do for me that any BSD can't already do. Unless a particular situation required a Linux kernel, as opposed to just some common piece of software like Apache or BIND, I'd pick a BSD anyday for that. And of course, if I want a nice source-based BSD-derived package system with a Linux kernel, theres always NetBSD's pkgsrc on Slackware. I'll readily admit however that installing Gentoo is going to be easier for most people than setting up pkgsrc+slack would be. I'd personally love to see someone build a distro around slack and pkgsrc, with a nice simple installer. One wonders why the Gentoo people didn't do something like this in the first place, but I'm sure they had their reasons.
once you go slack, you never go back
Not sure your guess is right. Yes, there may well be an element of fashion/kewl kred driving Ubuntu's ratings, leading to folks soon leaving it or perhaps not even installing it. However, it's hard to think that Ubuntu's success is a kind of accident. They've been darn canny in the way they've set up the whole outfit and in following through on all the details, not just a few of them.
Ubuntu is the first distro to stick to the KISS principle the whole way down the chain - from a single install CD, single best of breed app per task, sensible defaults all done for you right through to an online support system which is as strong as any at building their brand and actually helping people. Other distros can match or exceed some of these aspects, but imho Ubuntu is the only one that features all of them.
Believe me, it makes a real difference being able to give someone that nicely designed official CD and know that it contains all of the above. I mean, I like Debian and am typing this on it, but Ubuntu's ability to get things down to essentials that might put Joe Sixpack at ease is pretty awesome whether you use it or not.
Las qué passoun
tournoun pas maï
Got Breezy on my laptop at home.
Did have a problem with the 3.4/4.0 versions of GCC trying to compile
ndiswrapper (fo WiFi card).
Maybe it was a cheat, maybe not, but I created a link to GCC-4.0 called GCC-3.4
and haven't had a problem since, yeah OK I needed a modprobe -f in a
start up script for ndiswrapper, and kept all I did in a script for
after kernel upgrades but I've had to do worse in windows.
Check out Gimpshop. It's a version of the Gimp customised to behave as closely as possible to Photoshop. http://www.gimpshop.net/
Try #ubuntuforums on Freenode. It's reasonably friendly in there...
Use aptitude search. In general, aptitude instead of apt-get does a little extra. Installing packages with aptitude, for instance, keeps track of automatically installed dependencies, which apt-get won't. This is nice if you like to try out lots of different software.