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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
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...... 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.
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.
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).
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...
Armed Dolphins...
.. /Run away Run away.!!!
The Sky is burning the end is near
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.
MODS! Pay attention and read the text of this post before you mod it informative!
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."
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?"
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
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.
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.
Apt-get is a debian creation, it does use it.
Information doesn't want to be anthropomorphized anymore.
There is an option "metamoderation results" in your preferences messages panel. I turned it off long ago. It's just not interesting beyond a certain point, and the "unfair" metamods just piss you off because there is no way to say "wtf?" back to them.
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..
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.
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
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
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.
At least during this weekend Kword was still dependent on an old pre ABI change version of kdelibs - so I am without a simple kde based wordprocessor and have been for more than a month.
I guess I could use others, but kde apps seems to have the best support for cups based printing.
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.
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
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
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
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
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