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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? "
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?
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
Damn uptight americans. What exactly is harassing about that photo? :-/
This is your sig. There are thousands more, but this one is yours.
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 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...)
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