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? "
In a corporate setting where everyone's afraid of a sexual harassment lawsuit, you can go wrong with even an image like this. It sucks, but you got the play by other people's pretend rules they've established through verdicts.
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.
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?
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
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
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."
Damn uptight americans. What exactly is harassing about that photo? :-/
This is your sig. There are thousands more, but this one is yours.
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).
There's not a lot of difference between regular debian (sid that is) and ubuntu. Ubuntu is more focused however on providing an up to date gnome-centric desktop system (kde for kubuntu). So for instance, xorg is the X server, gnome 2.12 is in breezy, etc. Debian is more supposed to be the 'universal' OS. I've come to like both personally. That said, on my current home system (a dell laptop that's pretending to be a workstation, hooked up to a monitor and all), I switched from ubuntu back to regular debian. I was having trouble with some of the funkier hardware on the system, and found a good site someone made with instructions and debs to work around the problems using debian. If you're not interested however in gnome/kde, I might suggest staying with debian (testing or unstable). There's still more packages available in the debian repo (I think), and less hoops to jump through to get interesting software installed. I wouldn't pay much attention to those saying that testing/unstable is unsuitable for day to day use. I wouldn't put it on a server, but for a desktop who cares? Plus keep in mind that ubuntu itself is based off a frozen snapshot of sid anyhow.
I believe that the grandparent post is incorrect and that the image wasn't changed to keep American Corporations happy but that Ubuntu is extensively marketed as having very good internationalization and in many cultures other than our own, the amount of flesh exposed would have been considered obscene.
I always find it amusing how American's call us British people "reserved", yet they freak out at a nipple on TV, or, gasp, a few "naked" people showing nothing but a bit of skin and hugging each other.
:p
Then again, I've seen some American TV, and it's awful. "Reserved" isn't the word for us Britons, it's "not making a tit out of ourselves" that is.
(I'm not painting all American's with the same brush here, btw. I'm already OT so getting modded troll as well...)
Dammed Mako.
http://mako.cc/
He just moved to Cambridge MA from NYC.
I can't believe I'm replying to an AC but here we go...
:p
I always find it amusing how American's call us British people "reserved", yet they freak out at a nipple on TV, or, gasp, a few "naked" people showing nothing but a bit of skin and hugging each other.
Then again, I've seen some American TV, and it's awful. "Reserved" isn't the word for us Britons, it's "not making a tit out of ourselves" that is.
(I'm not painting all American's with the same brush here, btw. I'm already OT so getting modded troll as well...)
If you bothered to notice his concession at the end of his post it would become painfully obvious that he was not stereotyping every American, just the ones that give us a bad name; they are numerous.
Your decision to selectively quote and reply to a portion of the post will only help to further any stereotypes that have already been made. However, you have proven yourself worthy of a job at FOX news.
dude.
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.
So. The only problem you actually introduce is the fact that (in the preview release you used), all of the apps were built with 3.4, yet the buildtools are 4.0. Hmm.
(Note: GNOME's Nautilus is a piece of crap. Ubuntu knows this, and I'm sure they have a developer or two working with GNOME to try to figure out why this is such crap, but technically you're placing blame on the distro for what the desktop environment does wrong.)
From what I've seen in the forums, they were madly dashing to rebuild everything they could with GCC 4.0, fixing what errors there were in the compiles, and warning users to not upgrade anything during this time because it has a high likelihood of borking your system. Inconvieniently the forums are down or I'd post a link for you. So things will probably be a lot better before they get released to you.
Oh, and about that initial problem; you're probably on an older machine like my desktop, you're probably trying to open your pr0n folder which has over 10,000 files, and you're probably running into GNOME's Nautilus trying to go through each and every one, generate a thumbnail and then list the file. And this, of course, will take a very, very long time on older machines. Of course, it's my belief that Nautilus could be a lot smarter about it than that, but until the day I magically get a grant to work on Nautilus, let's just say I won't be the one solving that problem.
"Victory means exit strategy, and it's important for the President to explain to us what the exit strategy is." G.W.Bush