Automatix Kicks Ubuntu into Gear

With the growing amount of talk on the usability of Linux for beginners, there have been quite a few people who have mentioned a script called "Automatix" for Ubuntu as a means of easing the average joe into a life of Linux. Linux.com's (a Slashdot sister site) Tina Gasperson takes a closer look at Automatix and how it could help soften the blow of a Linux switch, at least in the short term. From the article: "Automatix lives up to its reputation. It's worth any time and small frustration it might take to get through the script. And it's even worth that 'over-the-shoulder' time you might spend with a new Linux user to walk them through it. I don't see any reason why a beginner would not be delighted with Ubuntu after a magic touch from Automatix."

Comments

Nice

[jargoone]

From TFA:

There's been some discussion lately about whether Ubuntu is suitable for Linux beginners.

Ubuntu is great for beginners! If you're an experienced Linux user trying to help out a newbie, you can change anything you want, and they don't even have to tell you the password!

[ducks]

Re:Nice

[Anonymous Coward]

That one was fixed.

One thing I really hate, though - if you have not manually set a root password, and boot the machine and select "recovery mode" from the grub menu, it will boot into single user mode and you are root. OS X does this too, IIRC OS X will do this even if you have manually set a root password!

I know, I know, they did it on purpose... still sucks.

Not trying to flame, I love Ubuntu.

Re:Nice

[jargoone]

select "recovery mode" from the grub menu, it will boot into single user mode and you are root.

Though I'm sure there's another way, the easiest way to prevent this is to set a grub password.

Not trying to flame, I love Ubuntu.

Me too. Just poking fun.

Re:Nice

[Anonymous Coward]

are you talking about the "linux single" option at startup with nearly every distro? There's never really any security if people have physical access to the machines, with default options.

It takes a lot more time to secure the whole box to prevent physical removal of the hard drive for evil purposes, than it takes to configure Grub, IMO.

Re:Nice

[X0563511]

Last time I tried to boot into single user it asked for MY password or CTRL-D to continue in normal mode.

It didn't just magically give me a root prompt.

Re:Nice

[PastaLover]

Debian by default does different, but although it's a bit more effort you can also just boot knoppix, as root mount the partition with /etc on it and nullify the password field for root in /etc/shadow. More trouble for joe random user but not very hard from the teenage "haxor" point of view.

Ubuntu

[2.7182]

I tried it out, and it was easier than installing Mandrake for me, and I am a total newbie to linux. One thing though - I am having a lot of trouble with LDAP.

Re:Ubuntu

[necro2607]

"I am a total newbie to linux"

Wow... you're new here, aren't you? ;)

Re:Ubuntu

[biglig2]

No, my friend, it is you who reveals himself to be new, for it is well known that most Slashdot posters are fakers running Windows XP Home....

Re:Ubuntu

[breadcat]

Ubuntu has trouble recognizing a bunch of soundcards, too.

I had none of the problems mentioned

[scooterphish]

I had ZERO problems running Automatix.
Very nice little app/script to install on Ubuntu.

Re:I had none of the problems mentioned

[ZephyrXero]

Easy Ubuntu's pretty nice as well....

For anyone who doesn't know, since the Slashdot article doesn't even explain what these two programs do, they setup all the restricted/proprietary stuff for the user that Ubuntu can not legally distribute by default like 3d video drivers, mp3 playback and such.

Re:I had none of the problems mentioned

[BigCheese]

Easybuntu looks pretty good. Automatix borked my Gnome setup so I think I'll just pave the machine and reinstall and try Easybuntu.
Well, that is when I get it fixed. My box is a brick right now after clearing the CMOS. It just hasn't been right since I dropped it on my foot.

Not just for newbies

[rabeldable]

I contest this is a very handy tool for anyone that wants to setup multi-media, web browsing, plugins and more.

I setup most of my system without it and when I finally found it I was trying to setup Java plugin for firefox.... needless to say I kicked myself a few times, realizing that I could have saved myself days of configuring.

Re:Not just for newbies

[Mr. Underbridge]

Yeah, I don't know why non-newbies would want to waste time doing all that crap by hand either.

Re:Not just for newbies

[AeroIllini]

I contest this is a very handy tool for anyone that wants to setup multi-media, web browsing, plugins and more.

I think the word you're looking for is attest.

contest
attest

Re:Not just for newbies

[Anonymous Coward]

just wondering, does it enable all the windows oriented media like avi and stuff automagically?

Re:Not just for newbies

[iamdrscience]

I think the word you're looking for is attest.

No, probably not, I read it as him contesting the article's implication that it's just for newbies. This could have been made clearer if he had put a comma in, i.e. "I contest, this is a very handy tool for anyone".

Re:Not just for newbies

[rabeldable]

you'll never know what I was thinking.....

Re:Not just for newbies

[I(rispee_I(reme]

I attest the word he was thinking of was contend.

Re:Not just for newbies

[Syberghost]

This tool operates by turning off important security and stability features in apt-get. It will damage your system silently. The author responds to attempts to correct these problems with flames, even if the attempts are in the form of patches.

Easy Ubuntu is a better take on the same problem space.

Don't Use Automatix!!!

[Anonymous Coward]

It enables the root account, which is generally disabled in Ubuntu. Instead, it uses "sudo", which is useful to restrict root rights and such. By enabling root, it opens up a huge security hole. You can learn more about this at https://wiki.ubuntu.com/RootSudo

Re:Don't Use Automatix!!!

[chgros]

From your link:
To start a root shell (i.e. a command window where you can run root commands) use:
sudo -i
How is that more secure than enabling the root account?

Re:Don't Use Automatix!!!

[Anonymous Coward]

It forces users to consciously use root permission. IE, the rm -rf problem.

Re:Don't Use Automatix!!!

[Illbay]

Is it possible it drops root privileges?

Re:Don't Use Automatix!!!

[futuresheep]

Just like the root account, accounts with full system privaleges via sudo are only as secure as the number of people that have that accounts password. Don't get me wrong, I love sudo, it keeps me from having to su to install software, edit files, or update the system, so it's very convenient. But saying that enabling root access by adding a password enables a 'huge security hole' is just a bad case of hyperbole.

Re:Don't Use Automatix!!!

[Anonymous Coward]

Personally, I'd rather have an enabled root account than letting users sudo with their own passwords. Or am I missing something here?

Re:Don't Use Automatix!!!

[frodo from middle ea]

no it doesn't.

It only does, if you do "sudo rm -rf /", but if you do "sudo -i". you have a root shell. what ever you do next is your own responsibility.

besides, if sudo is setup with NOPASSWD, "sudo rm -rf /" is not going to help you, once you press enter.

Saying Ubuntu is secure because it uses sudo is as naive as saying gentoo is fast because you compile everything from scratch.

Re:Don't Use Automatix!!!

[frodo from middle ea]

Or am I missing something here?
Cluelessness of a fanboy.

Re:Don't Use Automatix!!!

[EzInKy]

I'd argue that requiring a user to specifically login as root to screw up his system is no more dangerous than alowing him to do it from his own shell. Hell, Ubuntu doesn't even default to requiring a seperate root password to muck things up, you can use your own.

Re:Don't Use Automatix!!!

[DeadMeat (TM)]

How is that more secure than enabling the root account?

Aside from making dictionary attacks a little harder to pull off, it isn't really inherently more secure. But Ubuntu is often recommended for new converts from Windows, where people are used to doing everything as root. Ubuntu disables the root account out-of-the-box to strongly discourage people from logging in as root for daily work, where they can unintentionally do a lot of damage.

Re:Don't Use Automatix!!!

[Urusai]

Huh, I find typing "su" just once is less of an inconvenience than continually prepending "sudo". In Ubuntu, I used "sudo su". I would argue that having sudo installed at all is far less secure, since a hacker just needs to hack any of the "wheel" accounts, and the weakest link in any security scheme is the users leaving the doors open (vs. keeping a tight reign on root).

Re:Don't Use Automatix!!!

[tehdaemon]

try 'sudo -s'

This is about the same as su.

Re:Don't Use Automatix!!!

[Cal Paterson]

It's not a huge security hole. It's not a security hole at all. It's just risky for newbies, thats all. No need to ring the oval office.

IIRC, sudo can give a shell root priveliges with something like sudo -k (i don't use the program currently; that might be wrong).

Re:Don't Use Automatix!!!

[Anonymous Coward]

I don't think the latest version of Automatix sets up a root account. There were some complaints about that, and I believe that requirement was removed a few versions back.

Re:Don't Use Automatix!!!

[Anonymous Coward]

Just like the root account, accounts with full system privaleges via sudo are only as secure as the number of people that have that accounts password.

Not entirely true. When you have the root account activated, hackers (who, i assume, won't have your username handy.. If they do, then that's your fault) already got half their job done (Or, if you know anything about combinations & permutations, MOST of their job done). They already have the username. All they need is to brute-force the password. With root disabled, they have to brute-force both the username AND password combinations, which would take a LOT more time (and i mean a LOT).

Re:Don't Use Automatix!!!

[shellbeach]

In Ubuntu, I used "sudo su"

Just "sudo passwd" and you'll have a password for your root account, and can su at will. If you're a competent linux user, both have their uses.

Re:Don't Use Automatix!!!

[Dan Farina]

Don't forget the cousin, sudo -i, which is pretty much exactly the same as su. You then have the shebang and your environment it switched to that of the root account.

eg:
sudo -s
cd ~ will take you to your user home directory

sudo -i
cd ~ will take you to say, /root, the root user's home directory.

That having been said, sudo -s is what I use in practice just about 100% of the time since I want my .emacs and other relatively pathed RC files to work.

Re:Don't Use Automatix!!!

[Anonymous Coward]

Nice feature. After installation I discovered that it had given some password to the root acvcount that I did not know. I could not do sudo, nor do anything, (mount my windows partitions, setup the sound, nothing)

As everybody knows, linux does not work without root. The only solution was to format the hard disc and start again, this time explicitely giving a root password

Old news

[Ticklemonster]

Ubuntu is great, Automatix makes it greater; detractors notwithstanding. But Arnieboy's invention has been around for months. Hard to believe it's newsworthy here (except that it's newsworthy PERIOD)

Re:Old news

[Risen888]

Agreed. This isn't the same old tired "digg had it last week" thing, either. Automatix has been around for months, long enough to be argued to death on the Ubuntu forums.

Whatup, BL?

Uhh...

[jb.hl.com]

I could share files using a Gnutella client or a BitTorrent client; Kino imported my digital video files directly through Firewire; and as a bonus, Automatix even installed OpenOffice.org and Thunderbird.

Ubuntu comes with a BitTorrent client, and OpenOffice.org, and Thunderbird. No script needed.

I don't see the point personally.

Re:Uhh...

[dabigpaybackski]

The stock Ubuntu Bittorrent client is ugly. Automatix rectifies this by installing Azureus, which has an attractive interface (looks good to Linux newcomers) and a bunch of useful features. And let us not forget that it also installs the current version of Firefox, which is not present in the Ubuntu package repositories.

Re:Uhh...

[Anonymous Coward]

well, then don't use it, duh! I don't see the point in you posting messages with no content, but here we are.

Re:Uhh...

[Tomcat666]

Thunderbird is not installed by default. Yes, one could simply install it using synaptic, but that's one of the points of Automatix - to install the packages you will need anyway.

Re:Uhh...

[OMRebel]

The point is for newbies to Linux, like myself, they are able to get everything installed with a single script that would take hours and headaches to get setup. I'm sure I could have gotten all of the codecs installed manually by taking the time to research and install everything by hand. However, with Automatix, I was able to get all of my codecs, firefox plugins, MS TTF, Java, and DMA done in one easy move. If I were try to just get those items installed and setup with my limited knowledge, I would have really struggled, and probably reverted back to Windows, as Ubuntu would still have been crippled in my mind. But, because of Automatix, I'm now running Ubuntu full time, and not missing anything I would have had to do without if I couldn't have got it setup by myself.

Re:Uhh...

[Jussi K. Kojootti]

Azureus, which has an attractive interface (looks good to Linux newcomers)

Either you are high, or we just have very, very differing opinions. Azureus, while a very featureful program, is a user interface nightmare especially for a new user... The amount of bells and whistles is staggering. Gnome Bittorrent may look boring, but it does the job (for the casual downloader, that is) quite well.

Re:Uhh...

[Anonymous Coward]

You needed to manually enable DMA on your system? Most of the time it seems the kernel gets that right on boot-up. In all my years on Linux I've only seen one system where I had to manually enable DMA. That was some old 486 era system that I don't remember the details of.

What disk controller and hard disk are you running? Have you reported this to the kernel developers?

Re:Uhh...

[Risen888]

5.10 comes with OOo 1.9.something, not the final 2.0 version.

Re:Uhh...

[fbjon]

Gnome Bittorrent may look boring, but it does the job (for the casual downloader, that is) quite well.

But not for the POWER downloader!

Have you really looked at what it does?

[Anonymous Coward]

I don't trust the guy that wrote it, I've read some of his how-tos on the ubuntu forums, and some of them offer very bad advice. Also note: "If u type liek this i think ur more liek jeffk and u want to hax me!"... and well...thats pretty much how he types.

User beware, Just because it's free or opensource, doesn't mean it's safe.

Re:Have you really looked at what it does?

[R3]

I dunno, I trust him more than the guys at Microsoft for some reason....:P

I though Automatix is open source - can't you just open it up and see what it does?

Re:Have you really looked at what it does?

[damg]

User beware, Just because it's free or opensource, doesn't mean it's safe.

What does it do that's unsafe? It is open source after all...

Re:Have you really looked at what it does?

[BroncoInCalifornia]

I ran the script. It spent a long long time downloading KDE debian packages. I must have reinstalled 2/3rds of KDE in the process. When it was all done my time zone was set to Moscow! That is a long way from California.

In the end it did a good job setting up everything though. It is a painless way to get the missing parts of the(K)ubuntu desktop installed.

Re:Have you really looked at what it does?

[Red Alastor]

Many people have but the creator and maintainer refuses to do anything about it.

http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=122797

Anybody still wanting to use Automatix after reading this thread is helpless.

Re:Have you really looked at what it does?

[antic]

I took the Slashdot summary and removed a few words to make it more interesting:

"With growing people who have mentioned a means of easing into a sister look at how it could help soften the blow of a short and small frustration. And it's even worth that 'over-the-shoulder' time you might spend. I don't see any reason why a beginner would not be delighted after a magic touch."

Re:Have you really looked at what it does?

[Cl1mh4224rd]

http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=122797

From that thread:

LordHunter317: I'm then going to write a through paper on every flaw on Automatix, both real and thereotical, along with outlines of how to fix them, and provide it to the public. It'll be submitted both at these forums, to popular news sites like /., and to security-related mailing lists (for security issues) like full-disclosure. At that point, we can see if I'm just "moron" or not.

Did he ever follow through with this?

Re:Have you really looked at what it does?

[R3]

Wow.

Touche.

Too bad. Handled properly, Automatix seemed like a nice idea to quickly get Ubuntu system up to speed.

Then again, "If it sounds too good to be true...."

Thanks for that link, Red Alastor.

Re:Have you really looked at what it does?

[Seraphim_72]

I disagree,

His distractors are just as bad as he is. I mean "LordHunter317:Obviously, that statement is contradictory with reality so your claim is invalid." Yeesh, classic post based high handed snobery. He offers a "patch" that he never provides, then gripes about how Automatix isn't right - which his patch would fix. If LordHunter317 has a better plan - then produce it - bitching about how someone else does it is not only disingenuous but anti-productive. In short, yeah Arnie types like a l33t hacker, but the supercilious attacks of LordHunter are no better.

Sera

Re:Have you really looked at what it does?

[Red Alastor]

There's still Easy Ubuntu : http://easyubuntu.freecontrib.org/

And Easy Kubuntu : http://olwin.free.fr/

It does the same job as Automatix. It's safer. But it offers less options (no Opera for instance). But for codecs and the like, it's perfect.

Re:Have you really looked at what it does?

[littlem]

Many people have but the creator and maintainer refuses to do anything about it.

http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=122797

Anybody still wanting to use Automatix after reading this thread is helpless.

Bloody hell. I'm embarrassed to share the same planet as arnieboy. What a complete asshole. On the other hand, seeing Lord Hunter's patience on that thread gives me a lot of hope: let's pray that there's always someone around to mount a clear and well-argued defence of security concerns in the face of script-kiddie dickheads and their "i think u r a moron" replies.

Re:Have you really looked at what it does?

[fatphil]

Given how this thread started, I may as well offer a word-substitution here too:

s/distractors/detractors/

To detract is to make something less attractive (de- and a- being rough opposites. Then again, dis- and a- are opposites too, so the mistake is understandable).

Dominatix

[dotslashdot]

In other news, Automatix was so successful in making Ubuntu the dominant Linux distribution, she changed her name to Dominatix, making every Linux user LILO under her bootp. Sorry!

You should give it a spin!

[Anonymous Coward]

I've used it and I have to it's a fantastic script/app!
It installed and configured things like setting up the audio and multimedia codecs, properly setting up amsn(it crashed when i installed it through synaptic) configuring ctrl-alt-del to show the gnome system monitor plus num lock on when gnome starts and eject cd when i click the drive. And Firefox 1.5 install was the really easy!

It made things that I could have accomplished if I searched forums and mailing lists but this made me jump those hurdles and just install the things.

Then/Than correction

[SeanDuggan]

Corrected:
All slashdot folks substitute than for then and then for than.

Re:Then/Than correction

[HermanAB]

Yeah, it is funny to see someone use than the right way, however, using then exclusively instead of than is not wrong, just archaic. Go read some William Shakespeare and you'll notice that the word than doesn't exist in Elizabethan English.

Hehe

[Z0mb1eman]

I had to chuckle at the irony of a script to ease a newbie into Linux... script and newbie don't tend to go together in my mind :p

I love the instructions for installing Automatix:

wget http://beerorkid.com/automatix/automatix_5.6-2_i38 6.deb
sudo dpkg -i automatix_5.6-2_i386.deb

Yes, it's simple enough, and yes, it seems like that's the most complicated part of the entire process, but again I had to chuckle at the image of asking a newbie to open a terminal and type that in.

The script itself sounds great though... I wouldn't mind having something like that for Windows.

Re:Hehe

[fritzk3]

Seems you're not alone. FTFA: "At first I was looking around for a place to download Automatix, but as I continued to read the tutorial, I learned that I'd need to open a terminal and type some things on the command line. It's an easy thing to do, but I wonder if it would be confusing to a new Linux user."

Re:Hehe

[lagerbottom]

Nah, I put ubuntu on my GF's laptop about a year ago. While on the phone one night after not having seen her for a while I had her open a terminal (she had never done this before). sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get upgrade. She didn't have any problems. If most non technical users hadn't been "raised" on icons and clicky clicky, the terminal is an extreamly simple interface, they wouldn't be afraid of it.

Re:Hehe

[Syberghost]

The script itself sounds great though... I wouldn't mind having something like that for Windows.

Imagine if installing a new game could silently downgrade your DirectX to version 7.0, suppressing all prompts that the DirectX install would like to give you to make sure you want to do this.

That would be Automatix for Windows.

Re:Hehe

[Ticklemonster]

Hehe indeed. If you find a post on the ubuntu forums (google it) by me, BLTicklemonster, then look at my sig, there are shown two different ways to easily make .deb files install by double clicking them. Besides, it's as easy as copying and pasting those lines into a terminal anyway, is it not? How hard is that?

I have tried installing linux for years, and never had the time or patience to get past "gee, look, now what?" Ubuntu installed and had me on a desktop without any inane gibberish commands at all ever. Once on the desktop, I had the tool I had wanted with every distro I had tried; ACCESS TO THE INTERNET. Yes, right off the bat, I was online asking questions, and reading up on how to get the most out of Ubuntu.

You can't beat that for a linux distro (at least I haven't ever been able to) And as for Arnie's 1337 speak, so what, the dude's eccentric.

As for "don't use it", bullowny. (Hope arnie would be proud of my butchering) Automatix installs and puts things right back where they were to begin with; the user is in control.

Ubuntu is by far the easiest linux distro I have ever used, and automatix makes it even easier for people like me to get the most out of the experience. Imho, it is the best thing Ubuntu has going for it other than Ubuntu itself.

And the community support on the forums (okay, here's the link: http://www.ubuntuforums.org/index.php ) is the best there is. Plenty of help for anyone and everyone. Help, encouragement - you can't beat it. I can't wait for Dapper to come out to see how it looks and works. (yes, if you know me, I am presently not using ubuntu, because I am working on a project for Unreal Tournament which requires me to be able to map and script, which I can't readily do in ubuntu precisely the way I need to, though with vmware I can almost get what I want, I find that uscript doesn't compile in xp run in vmware in ubuntu as it does on pure xp. But I am going back one day. I love ubuntu, and am looking forward to the day when I can kick the windows out and have Ubuntu as my only OS)

(score me high, I actually had to think for more than a minute on this)

Re:Hehe

[Magnum7385]

Ever hear of batch files? Yeah, even if you're in WindowsXP, a quick Google search returns many useful links to start you off with.

My Issue

[GmAz]

Well, here is my issue. When I install NVIdia drivers, Ubuntu no longer recognizes my wireless connection. Would this be solved. I hope so, i may try this tonight.

Not Troll, I Swear

[Bombula]

As a non-computer-person hoping to shortly shift to Linux, here is what I and my fellow newbie dummies want/need:

1. Insert CD.

2. Click OK.

3. Done.

I'm sure that's pretty obvious, so the question is: how close are Linux distros to being to that level, and if the answer is 'not close' then what are the obstacles to getting there and how are they being addressed?

Re:Not Troll, I Swear

[twbecker]

What do you currently use? Because installing Windows isn't this easy. Both Ubuntu and Fedora are pretty easy to install, with Fedora asking a few more questions but also having a friendly GUI installer. (K)ubuntu's is text only, but still very easy.

Re:Not Troll, I Swear

[Anonymous Coward]

Live CD's are certainly at this state. Download something like either gentoo 2006.0, Damn Small Linux or Knoppix. Leave the CD in your computer, then restart. Make sure you have your bios set to boot from CD before hard drive. Any of those live CD's will boot you into a fully graphical environment, and you can play with linux all you want. None of them will change your windows setup until you tell them to. Take the CD out, reboot, and you're back to normal windows. It's a great way to get started with linux, without diving in so fast that you get lost and stuck with all there is to learn.

Re:Not Troll, I Swear

[iamdrscience]

Not Troll, I Swear

Are you sure about that?

Re:Not Troll, I Swear

[Anonymous Coward]

Actually:

Why do you need to click ok?

1. Insert live CD.

2. Answer a few easy questions about your language.

3. Done.

Re:Not Troll, I Swear

[emh203]

Never. The dirty little secret is that people who are into linux like typing in cryptic commands for things. It makes them feel smarter. The goal is to never get out of the 70's and always have a dumb terminal ( as in VT100) feel.

You will never see that in linux. That's like asking for a sports car manufactuer (Ferrari, etc.) to make a Family Minivan. They just don't want to.

I may be a Troll but I have yet to see any evidence that what I stated isn't true. :-)

Re:Not Troll, I Swear

[Bombula]

Well, I use Windows, but it's there when I pull the PC out of the Box from Dell and turn it on. (Told you I was a dummy!)

Another thing about Linux that people like me are aprehensive about is the idea that once the OS is installed, it takes a lot of knowledge and work tweaking it to get everything running properly - drivers for hardware, setting up a home network, and so on. Maybe that is no longer an issue for some distros, but the fear lingers...

Re:Not Troll, I Swear

[santaliqueur]

the guy is just asking a simple question, not trying to be a troll. could you really not see that?

Re:Not Troll, I Swear

[babbling]

Ubuntu is getting very close. Try out a LiveCD and decide for yourself, perhaps? You can get CDs sent to you for free.

Re:Not Troll, I Swear

[Jerf]

Many distros are at this level, if you don't mind blowing away anything that's on the hard drive. Not quite literally, because one-click installation, while theoretically possible, is not feasible. While the cost/benefit curve of a given installation question slopes off sharply as the number of questions increases, there are some things that sometimes need to be asked. One of them, for instance, is "can I blow the contents of this hard drive away?" It really doesn't matter if a user doesn't understand what that means; there is no practical default that results both in a Linux system being installed and no grave data loss. Saving a windows installation takes more work because there are inherently decisions involved.

Still, there are many distros that are much easier than Windows if have common hardware, and you end up with a lot more after the installation is done. (Don't overestimate Window's hardware support, too.)

Be sure you try to install XP from scratch sometime for a fair comparision, too. I just did one a few weeks ago, and along with a number of questions the installer asks, you also have (IIRC) a minimum of three "Update, Install, Reboot" sequences before you're fully up to date. (Fortunately, they've done a bit of work to keep that down. I believe there was one time period when the minimum was four, late in the Service Pack 1 time frame.) And when you're done, all you have is Windows XP, and about all it can do on its own is browse the web. Wordpad's your document editor, Paint your graphics editor, and Solitaire your game.

Re:Not Troll, I Swear

[Anonymous Coward]

The problem is, Ubuntu is a 100% Free Software distro, they can't install everything that end users will expect. Automatix is there to provide users with the "non-free" software, proprietary stuff like multimedia codecs and java.

Re:Not Troll, I Swear

[Anonymous Coward]

You weren't around for Windows 95/98, were you?

Re:Not Troll, I Swear

[Ponga]

...here is what I and my fellow newbie dummies want/need:
1. Insert CD.
2. Click OK.
3. Done.

Please MOD UP, +5 Funny (but true!!)

Re:Not Troll, I Swear

[crabpeople]

3 step install? one click interaction? You realize that windows doesnt even install that easy right? Its an OS install. it shouldnt be as easy as installing MSN, or people will start fucking themselves. no prompting for formatting hard drives? yeah that will work real well.

last time i installed fedora, it seemed mighty simple to me. The only tricky part was selecting what packages you really _need_. Windows just installs all the packages it has, but since linux is not just the OS files, that would take up a ton of space. Whats so hard about linux installs? its the afterwards configuration that always takes me the time. Even that using something like webmin is pretty damn easy to get default configs up and running.

Re:Not Troll, I Swear

[Anonymous Coward]

Last I tried out Linux was with a Debian Sarge NetInstall ISO in January 2005, and I tried it on known good and tested hardware (dual Xeon 2.4GHz, 2GB RAM on 533MHz bus, and an Intel mobo, so it's not a total speed demon, but it all "just works" when you plug it in together).

My experience was this:
1) download and burn the ISO
2) insert install CD into new machine and turn it on
3) wonder why it isn't getting a DHCP-ed address and then noticing that the network cable is unplugged. Plug in cable.
4) answer 3 or 4 questions that are amazingly similar to the ones Windows asks during installs
5) wait.
6) wait..
7) wait...
8) after 1.5 hours, have a working and stable Linux box.

Now, if you get the CD through traditional channels, remove #1. Waiting isn't really a step, it's just space between them, so remove #'s 5, 6, and 7. If you have a poster-sized "here's how to plug it in" page (like Dell gives you with a new machine) you won't have the problem in #3. #8 isn't really a step, it's the end, so dump that one too.

That leaves... #2 and #4. Insert CD, answer a few common questions, and at the end of the process, your machine "just works". Now, as a disclaimer: I lack funding for spare hardware to mess with Linux, so I don't have much experience with it. It's just nowhere near as bad as a lot of geeks like to tell people. If you can install Windows, you can install Linux. At least on hardware you know works with Linux "out of the box".

Re:Not Troll, I Swear

[Wrathernaut]

Actually, the Click OK part isn't necessary with the Ubuntu (and many other distro's) Live CD. All I need to do is put the CD in and reboot. After 3-4min (slow cd-boot) I'm at the Gnome desktop, my sound works, my (wired) network is working. I can run OpenOffice to write up a document, open up the web-browser, open my webmail account and mail it out. I can play a dozen variations of solitare. I can do this without going through a single program installation process nor a single registration form to fill out (provided you already have a webmail account). This is 90% of what "non-computer" people do with their system. The current generations of cars have plastic covers under the hood nowadays. We leave the administration/maintenance to the professionals. Linux is like that. Users click on icons in menus or the desktop to run programs. You use the keyboard to type a report or e-mail. The internet works like the internet. You put in a CD and it plays. So long as that happens, non-computer people don't know or care if it's windows or linux or OSX.

Re:Not Troll, I Swear

[Anonymous Coward]

And when you're done, all you have is Windows XP, and about all it can do on its own is browse the web. Wordpad's your document editor, Paint your graphics editor, and Solitaire your game. Those criminals! You mean they integrated all of that stuff into the OS?
I should have to buy a competitor's Solitaire. I should get a pop up link to Opera as soon as I click the IE icon ...wait, IE is integrated too?! This monopoly is ruining computing and giving us too much in one package!!!

Re:Not Troll, I Swear

[hahiss]

I can't give you an authoritative answer here (in part because I've been a computer person for a long time, and I run GNU/Linux and FreeBSD systems), but let me say this:

First: Can you do this with Windows? (I mean, really just click ok and be off and running.) OR do you have to know how to do some stuff? (For example, install drivers or software for word processing, games, web browsing, security, and the like.) When they installed my department's new printer, all the windows computers had to get new drivers, whereas the guy running OS X was ready to go through rendezvous and my CUPS drivers were fine.

If you switch to a GNU/Linux system, you'll have to learn some things because it works differently---both in terms of the graphical interfaces that come with a distribution and in terms of the way unix-like OSes work. You probably won't have to learn EVERYTHING all over again (wordprocessors do function broadly the same, firefox is identical), but some things will be different.

Some distributions require a lot of hands on stuff (gentoo and linux from scratch, I'm looking at you), while others are pretty neophyte (I hear this about ubuntu, pclinuxos, and suse).

My biggest piece of advice: find a live cd distro and try that out on your hardware. Play and WORK with it for a while, see if you think it is doable.

I should add that there are some rewards to switching. Your computer will be more stable, you'll have access to a HUGE amount of free (and gratis) software that can easily be installed, and you'll be a bit more computer literate (what can I say, I'm a philosopher, so knowledge counts for something). You'll also be supporting liberty, and, let's face it, everyone knows that having a GNU/Linux sticker on your car/bike/bookbag/laptop is guaranteed to get you laid.*

Hope this helps.
*Guarantee not valid anywhere. Your mileage may vary.

Re:Not Troll, I Swear

[xenocide2]

Ubuntu already approaches this. What Automatix does is allow you to take your habits with you. Say you need opera. It's a somewhat complicated process to do correctly; you add the repo to sources.list, you apt-get install opera, and from now on every update includes opera in the mix from that repo. It lets people jumpstart the process of tweaking their computer. The default system is pretty usable, but it doesn't do things like distribute patented software they don't have a liscence for (ie mp3 players). Automatix is a point and click tool that lets you "fix" percieved problems with the default install.

If you consider the need to seemlessly run Windows apps part of the "1-2-3 I'm done" process, automatix attempts to fix this. Amusingly, you have to enable a repo in a text file etc to get it running ;)

Re:Not Troll, I Swear

[Anonymous Coward]

And when you're done, all you have is Windows XP, and about all it can do on its own is browse the web. Wordpad's your document editor, Paint your graphics editor, and Solitaire your game.

Yeah. May I suggest, though, that you try some of the recent warez distributions of Windows XP available over Bittorrent. They're starting to resemble Linux distributions in that they bundle lots of commonly used apps right into the installer. One I've tried gives you a set of checkboxes for applications (Nero, Firefox, Acrobat, etc) and then installs everything you selected without needing to go through wizards. Very nice. Since everything is free to warezers and there are no issues associated with bundling, the pirates are now providing a better user experience than Microsoft!

Re:Not Troll, I Swear

[PitaBred]

But will you bitch when you can't save your documents from Windows? Or should it resize the Windows partition by default and make your system dual boot? Or perhaps a LiveCD would be more your speed.
I suppose that my point is that if you are so lazy and stupid that you can't go to the trouble of understanding just a little bit about your machine, stay with Windows. My mom could stick the ubuntu disc in and follow a printed-out install guide fairly easily. If you can't, you're the kind of person that drives 20,000 miles without changing oil in your car and can't understand why that might be bad.
Now I know someone is gonna say "This is why people won't switch to linux, you geeks are always wanting people to understand things!". The long and short of it is yes, I do. I get tired of people who are proud of their inability or unwillingness to comprehend even the smallest of things. I don't think everyone should have to be a kernel hacker. But I do think that people ought to have half a clue about the things they do, no matter if it's with computers, cooking, driving, whatever.

"A human being should be able to change a diaper, plan an invasion, butcher a hog, conn a ship, design a building, write a sonnet, balance accounts, build a wall, set a bone, comfort the dying, take orders, give orders, cooperate, act alone, solve equations, analyze a new problem, pitch manure, program a computer, cook a tasty meal, fight efficiently, die gallantly. Specialization is for insects."
- Robert Heinlein

Re:Not Troll, I Swear

[Anonymous Coward]

To continue your analogy, I believe it's more like preferring a manual gearbox in your sports car instead of an automatic one.. ;)

Re:Not Troll, I Swear

[Hosiah]

how close are Linux distros to being to that level

Three words for you: Damn Small Linux I have a copy and it almost is that easy. I think I had to answer about three questions, and one of them was to choose a password. Of course it's a tiny distro, but for your average script-bait user who just needs to surf the web and play a CD, it's perfect. In fact, it does make for a complete distro, as long as you don't want to do anything crazy like program something. Puppy Linux is another one. Puppy is well-known for being user-friendly; it comes with a whole menu of wizards which explain everything very clearly. To do *anything* in Puppy is three steps or less. Something I don't think people realize is that even a 50 MB Linux distro, which is considered 'tiny' in the Linux world, has more stuff on it than a Windows disk (in terms of usable features and programs).

Re:Not Troll, I Swear

[greenrd]

And if you want to dual boot, say, Windows 2000 and Fedora, you won't get any help from the Windows installer. Microsoft is, or at least was, last I checked, fanatically opposed to you running another operating system, and the installer doesn't even acknowledge that you might want to dual-boot with any other operating systems. This is symptomatic of their anti-competitive behaviour towards their competitors - and they've had competitors on the PC platform almost from day 1.

Re:Not Troll, I Swear

[jcarter]

Not Flame, I Swear

I would like to gently suggest that what you want misses the point of Linux. If installing was just a matter of pushing a single button, then you wouldn't have any choice about how your system is run. There would be no partitioning your drives like you want, specifying network peculiarites, etc. There would not be the freedom to hack your system like you choose, less freedom to play 'what if' with settings and so on.

It's like buying a muscle car and treating it like a city bus. I don't want to ride the thing, I want to drive it.

And that's the best way I can explain it. Linux lets you drive. And in doing so, it necessarily requires that you know (and do) more than you need to just to ride.

To beat this analogy completely to death (and to get a little partisan here), I suppose Windows does let you drive, but only on pre-approved Microsoft-certified highways, which a verified safe (but aren't) and you have to pay extra fees based on mileage.

Re:Not Troll, I Swear

[Hosiah]

here Of course, you choose what to see and what not to see. Incidentally, I never have to use a commandline on Linux if I don't want to. It's just that there is no GUI in the world where you can download an HTML file and remove the tags, spellcheck the text, produce word-count statistics, bundle the results with the file, archive and compress it, and mail it to your business partner in a single step.

Re:Not Troll, I Swear

[ZephyrXero]

To answer you question, Yes....with distros like Ubuntu, it's almost that easy. The installer holds your hand and guides you through everything you need to do, and you can even keep your old Windows partition in case you're not ready to commit ;)

As for jumping through hoops to configure things, this is exactly what Automatix, or Easy Ubuntu (which I personally prefer) are there for....so you can get all the proprietary/non-free drivers and whatnot installed with little to no hassle.

So, there you have it, Linux is ready for you....are you ready for it? ;)

Re:Not Troll, I Swear

[Rhys]

You can buy your linux machine with linux preinstalled from various major linux vendors depending on where you get the box from too.

You have to compare apples to apples. You're saying, "well I don't have to do anything to make windows run since I paid dell to install it" versus "I have to do something (whatever that thing is) to get linux on it."

That or reinstall a copy of windows (a real new, store-bought copy; not the "I destroy everything on your hard drive" so-called recovery CDs manufacturers ship).

Re:Not Troll, I Swear

[necro2607]

" What do you currently use? Because installing Windows isn't this easy."

Yeah, see, he's using a Mac. ;)

Re:Not Troll, I Swear

[Bull999999]

Microsoft is, or at least was, last I checked, fanatically opposed to you running another operating system

That's very true. On a dual boot system, try installing Windows AFTER installing Linux and see what it does.

Re:Not Troll, I Swear

[Pastis]

First you are comparing apple and oranges. Buy a PC preinstalled with Linux to compare it to your preinstalled Dell. And if you want a preinstalled Dell ask Dell.

And now even if you want to compare your pre-installed Dell to your Linux installation CD, your job isn't done with your Dell: it doesn't come with all the software you will need on your PC.

What about this driver for your wifi card you just bought (XP is not that knew)? What about Firefox, iTunes, gaim, etc...

From there, Linux wins hands up. It's about 4 clicks to install a program on Linux. While to install the same software on Windows you will have to find the installer (on the net or a CD), make sure it's not infected by a virus, run the installer, answer 1 to 5 questions, etc...

Otherwise, as I said, compare Linux installation and Windows XP installation (on supported systems) and Linux win hands up again.

Installing Ubuntu or any other clean Linux distrib today requires to answer about 3-4 questions. And 2 of these are for the language and keyboard you are going to use. Today a full Linux system is easier to install than a bare bone Windows PC (*) (**).

(*) If your system is supported and if your distrib distributes all the software you are after

(**) and that's also because XP is old now

Re:Not Troll, I Swear

[jcarter]

Whoa, PitaBred. The OP of this thread wasn't being offensive. There's no reason to think he's at all technically incompetent. He's probably not lazy or stupid. He wasn't "bitching".

He just wanted to when Linux would get easier. That's it. It's a reasonable question.

Name-calling and crazed ranting doesn't actually accomplish anything, PitaBred. It's an unreasonable response. Don't be mean.

Re:Not Troll, I Swear

[Jugalator]

What do you currently use? Because installing Windows isn't this easy.

But nothing wrong in looking for new standards of ease-of-use though, right? :-)

Re:Not Troll, I Swear

[Clith]

Then buy a Linux box from Wal-Mart. It's there when you pull the PC out of the box and turn it on. Then when you decide to install Windows on another partition or drive, come back and tell us how easy that was. :-)

Re:Not Troll, I Swear

[daikokatana]

Yeah. May I suggest, though, that you try some of the recent warez distributions of Windows XP available over Bittorrent. They're starting to resemble Linux distributions in that they bundle lots of commonly used apps right into the installer. One I've tried gives you a set of checkboxes for applications...

So true. In fact, the last warez edition of Windows XP I tried didn't even require me to check all those checkboxes - it installed Bonzi Buddy, Flyswat, Hotbar, Webhancer, Comet Cursor, Doubleclick and Gator all in one go, without needing a single click from little old me :)

Re:Not Troll, I Swear

[AKAImBatman]

You will never see that in linux. That's like asking for a sports car manufactuer (Ferrari, etc.) to make a Family Minivan. They just don't want to.

Reminds me of the Auto Dealers Metaphor:

Hacker with bullhorn: "Save your money! Accept one of our free tanks! It is invulnerable, and can drive across rocks and swamps at ninety miles an hour while getting a hundred miles to the gallon!"

Prospective station wagon buyer: "I know what you say is true...but...er...I don't know how to maintain a tank!"

Bullhorn: "You don't know how to maintain a station wagon either!"

Buyer: "But this dealership has mechanics on staff. If something goes wrong with my station wagon, I can take a day off work, bring it here, and pay them to work on it while I sit in the waiting room for hours, listening to elevator music."

Bullhorn: "But if you accept one of our free tanks we will send volunteers to your house to fix it for free while you sleep!"

Buyer: "Stay away from my house, you freak!"

Personally, I think the Batmobiles down the road (BeOS) are kind of cool... :-P

Re:Not Troll, I Swear

[CastrTroy]

I find that most of the time with windows (even XP) i'm stuck installing drivers, whereas with linux the driver comes with the OS. Windows XP doesn't ship with scanner drivers, because they expect that you have the CD. Linux on the other hand knows that your scanner vendor doesn't ship drivers for linux, so they include them with the OS.

Re:Not Troll, I Swear

[Dollyknot]

Nah just like learning to swim really, more a question of loosing ones fear of failure, than anything else. If you do make the transition you will end up in control of your machine, instead of your machine being in control of you. Regards Peter

Re:Not Troll, I Swear

[WhiteWolf666]

Suse has been there for some time.

1. Insert DVD.

2. Follow GUI Prompts.

3. Select Auto, Auto, Easy. Next, Next, Next. Type in Name. Press Finished.

4. Done

It's as easy as an operating system install can get, and certainly noob friendly. It'll non-destructively resize NTFS and FAT, too; this is infact the default option.

Re:Not Troll, I Swear

[RedBear]

As a non-computer-person hoping to shortly shift to Linux, here is what I and my fellow newbie dummies want/need:

1. Insert CD.

2. Click OK.

3. Done.

I'm sure that's pretty obvious, so the question is: how close are Linux distros to being to that level, and if the answer is 'not close' then what are the obstacles to getting there and how are they being addressed?

The sad thing here is that both of us need to preface our remarks with "this is not a troll, I swear".

Sorry to disappoint, but you will not find a single Linux distribution like that, despite what many people here will tell you. I've used Linux full-time as a desktop off and on for years, from straight Debian (hard) to Mandrake/Mandriva (fairly easy). I even tried Ubuntu/Kubuntu, the most recent release. Everyone who ever says Linux is easy really has no clue what easy means to non-technical people. I mean, come on, you have to find and run a special script just to get support for playing DVDs and configure other simple things that are essential for a typical desktop user. If you're not lucky enough to have heard of this special script you get to spend hours on the web learning about obscure and difficult to find packages like libdvdcss, blah blah blah. Your typical geek will wade through it all with infinite patience, not having a clue how difficult this stuff is for non-geeks. Then they proceed to tell everyone how easy it is to use Linux for anything and everything.

If you (a non-computer-person) are serious about switching away from Windows you need to get yourself a Mac, because "desktop Linux" has a loooong way to go in terms of polish. I'll keep checking it out myself every year or so, but so far I have not been impressed with the progress and I'm sure a person like you won't be either. Of course, it's a free country, so feel free to download a couple dozen distros and find out for yourself just how ludicrous it is to say that Linux is ready for the mainstream desktop.

Re:Not Troll, I Swear

[thepotoo]

Try SuSE. Installation was as easy as:
Insert CD
Power on while holding C (boot from CD)
Install
I Agree to Novell's TOS
I agree to Flash/Java TOS
Finish.

Then, it was a quick hop over to ati.com, to download the video card drivers. Worked like a charm first try. I've even walked my grandmother through the install OVER THE PHONE.
Come on, guys. Linux has a point and click graphical install, built-in drivers for most everything, and installes everything most people need by default.

What more do you want?

Re:Not Troll, I Swear

[Anonymous Coward]

What do you currently use? Because installing Windows isn't this easy.

News flash: The majority of users never install Windows. They pull their new computer out of the box, turn it on, and there is Windows. Many end users do know how to install software, most of which is just clicking OK but nowhere near as complicated as installing Windows. If you want people to switch to Linux then you have to make it as easy as what they are used to installing which is applications. Comparing the install process for Linux versus the install process for Windows for the average joe is comparing apples and oranges because the user that you want to install Linux has probably never installed Windows, nor are they likely to.

Re:Not Troll, I Swear

[poopdeville]

I would like to gently suggest that what you want misses the point of Linux. If installing was just a matter of pushing a single button, then you wouldn't have any choice about how your system is run. There would be no partitioning your drives like you want, specifying network peculiarites, etc. There would not be the freedom to hack your system like you choose, less freedom to play 'what if' with settings and so on.

I respectfully disagree. There are already hundreds of different distros, each making its own configuration choices, so you won't have to. Indeed, by the very fact that linux is open source, you could modify and compile the code to your liking. But few do it, since it's time consuming and there are much better options.

My point is that there are many different distros, each meeting particular needs. There's no reason why there can't be one, or several, meeting beginner's needs. Of course, a beginner would be in no position to choose between several, but that's besides the point.

Re:Not Troll, I Swear

[PitaBred]

When someone doesn't care enough to do a little bit of work for something they want and would rather whine, I call that lazy. I think most people would. And he's talking about the install. Installation is not an "easy" thing no matter which way you slice it, especially on current system architectures, so yes, it is a stupid question to be asking.
Thanks for playing though :) I still suggest that the GGPP just stay with Windows because thinking and research is apparently out of the question, and he would rather be told what to do.

Re:Not Troll, I Swear

[madtinkerer]

Am I alone in wanting to scream at people who use computers everyday for their livelihood and entertainment yet want to know absolutely nothing about them? As the "person to call for computer problems" among my friends, I'm getting increasingly frustrated having to fix the smallest problems for every user who is too scared, bored or lazy to understand even the easiest computing concept. I'm not trying to be elitist, but enough is enough.

Re:Not Troll, I Swear

[mrcolj]

Linux will never get anywhere until NO ONE ever needs a shell. I'm relatively advanced at computers, have taught computer-oriented classes at the college level, and have programmed for Fortune 500 companies. However, when I've tried switching to Linux for my own education's sake, there was always just too much to learn to get it working, too many unsupported drivers, etc., not enough software, and of all my professional computer friends, even the Linux fans, I could never find anyone who could answer my questions. While I firmly believe that there will one day be a financial incentive for me to know Linux, that day hasn't come yet, and it won't come as long as Linux users continue to insist their lack of usability is their greatest asset. Again, I have nothing against the shell, but it should be a quick option for hardcore users, not a mandate for the average computer-afraid user. All they hear is "we can make your new P4 run DOS!"

Re:Not Troll, I Swear

[killjoe]

"He just wanted to when Linux would get easier. That's it. It's a reasonable question."

No, he was just trolling. He lied about how easy it was to install windows. Linux is already easier to install then windows.

Re:Not Troll, I Swear

[ilctoh]

What do you currently use? Because installing Windows isn't this easy.

Way to not answer the question... What does Windows have to do with this discussion. Seriously, Linux & friends is never going to get far if the only goal is to not be worse than Windows. Just out of curiosity, why can't a Linux distro be *gasp* better than Windows in any given area, rather than "pretty easy?" Granted, much of Linux is already a hell of a lot better than anything to come out of Redmond, but too often, Desktop and UI areas seem to only strive to not be worse than the competition.

Re:Not Troll, I Swear

[westlake]

I should add that there are some rewards to switching. Your computer will be more stable, you'll have access to a HUGE amount of free (and gratis) software that can easily be installed, and you'll be a bit more computer literate (what can I say, I'm a philosopher, so knowledge counts for something). You'll also be supporting liberty, and, let's face it, everyone knows that having a GNU/Linux sticker on your car/bike/bookbag/laptop is guaranteed to get you laid.*

The problem is, the average Joe has ten to fifteen years experience and investment in Windows hardware, software, and peripherals.

There is almost nothing of interest to him in "Free" or "Open Source" software that hasn't been ported to Windows or which began as a native Windows app.

He has a middle class income and values his time more than money. He is not interested in running down a "gray market" codec to play a media file he can open in Windows with one click.

He does not define freedom as an operating system.

Re:Not Troll, I Swear

[EvilIdler]

I've installed the most recent Kubuntu DVD today. It's
more involved than merely pressing OK, but the questions
are simple enough - "What language do you prefer?",
"Shall I take care of the messy partitioning?" and "What would
you like your username and password to be?".

All drivers needed were autodetected, NForce sound
just worked right from the first (and only) reboot, plus it
both detected the name of the aging monitor and set the
resolution to something sane. WinXP installed on the same
system needed driver downloads for graphics, another one
for sound and an optional one for IDE (depending on who
you trust the most of NVidia and Microsoft ;).

If someone were to integrate EasyUbuntu (DVD/MP3
playback and other greyzone software) into an actual
Kubuntu installer, we'd have a definite winner, but the
current version is as good as I need it to be if just building
a workstation. Mepis is reported to be just as nice, and
there are a few others. They mostly seem to spring from
Debian - dunno if that is a sign of some kind.

Re:Not Troll, I Swear

[HermanAB]

Knoppix, Puppy Linux, Mandriva One, Ubuntu Live...

Any Linux LiveCD does exactly what you want!

Re:Not Troll, I Swear

[HermanAB]

Hmm, I installed Windows Web Server the other day on a garden variety Dell PE750 server, and it did not have the required ethernet driver for the Intel 1GB ethernet port. I had to reboot with Knoppix, to download the driver from Intel's web site and save the file to a USB stick, then reboot Windoze to install it...

Re:Not Troll, I Swear

[Anonymous Coward]

My solution to you:

Buy a mac.

Re:Not Troll, I Swear

[QCompson]

True that. Most average Joe/Janes use their computer as an appliance to access the internet, check email, word process, sync their ipod, etc. XP functions very well for what most people need. However, if the DRM scale tips too far (corporations/governments applying frustrating and intrusive tactics), then people may begin to understand the advantages of free (free!) software.

Re:Not Troll, I Swear

[Anonymous Coward]

No, it's not quite single click. As others have pointed out, that's not really feasible. But it is fairly straight forward with XP.

You get asked a few questions about where to install, and it tells you in plain language if you're going to damage any existing data. If you're installing on a clean disk, you can just press enter a few times, the defaults are for one NTFS partition covering the entire disk.

If you've got a network card, you get automatic or manual as options. Automatic simply asks you for a computer name (and suggests a random one) and netbios workgroup (defaults to workgroup, and doesn't mention netbios). Again, pressing enter through this will give you defaults that will work perfectly. Windows then boots to a desktop. If it was an SP2 cd, you'll already have the firewall up and running, updates will automatically download in the background, and you'll be prompted to restart when they're done.

So no, it's not one click. It's 5 or 6 enter presses (and 3 restarts)

When they installed my department's new printer, all the windows computers had to get new drivers, whereas the guy running OS X was ready to go through rendezvous and my CUPS drivers were fine.

It's not hard. In a proper networked environment you just open \\printserver\ in windows explorer and double click the printer you want. Drivers are copied from the print server and installed and the printer is added to the printer list and immediately available. The whole process usually takes under 30 seconds.

I used to work for a computer that supported many windows based networks, and the only time we had a real problem was with old printers that didn't have drivers that worked on 2000 and above (WDM drivers) and a few consumer printers that force you to use a crappy installer (one required us to move a printer and connect it to the terminal server on a different site by USB to install the drivers, then take it back).

Re:Not Troll, I Swear

[Anonymous Coward]

Agreed. At this point, the average user buys a machine preloaded with Windows. Windows suits their needs fine. They know how to do things in Windows. They have no reason to change.

The only way people will begin to switch is if other operating systems do things better. As you mentioned, if DRM becomes too intrusive, this may be the straw that breaks the camel's back. If not, Windows it is for the average user.

Re:Not Troll, I Swear

[the_womble]

If it is installation that is worrying you and you do not want to buy a PC with Linux pre-installed, either: 1) lose your fear of doing the install. It is not as bad was you may think. 2) take your PC to an installfest. Lots of Linux user groups hold them fairly regularly. As for the "tweaking" issue, once installed Linux is very stable. New software installation and updating varies from distro to distro, but the most user friendly ones have a single GUI that handles it all with a few clicks. It could not be easier.

Re:Not Troll, I Swear

[chiskop]

The next release 6.04 will have a graphical installer - esspresso.

Re:Not Troll, I Swear

[Bombula]

I understand where you're coming from, I really do. But think of the car analogy for a moment. What if you replace 'computers' in your comment with 'cars'?:

use cars everyday for their livelihood and entertainment yet want to know absolutely nothing about them?

Now how many people know anything about their cars? My grandfather has exactly the attitude about cars that you have about computers - it infuriates and exasperates him that people don't bother to understand this tool that is completely central to their lives. But one problem is that they (cars and computers both) are so complicated that it genuinely is difficult for a non-expert to understand the intricacies of how they work.

For some people, there is joy associated with tinkering with your car. My grandfather still works on his mid-60s Cadillac, and loves every minute he has to put into to keep it running. But the vast majority of people just use their car to get from A to B. Similarly, the vast majority of people just use their computer to do a few straightforward tasks - internet, email, IM, word processing, digital photos.

The reason why I want to switch to Linux isn't because I want to be able to get under the hood, it's because I don't want to support Microsoft (or Apple, for that matter). I think monopolies and oligopolies are a bad thing. I believe in open-source software as a matter of principle, not because I'm an uber-geek computer programmer.

I have to say, it does make it hard to be supportive of Linux when so many people say to non-experts like me, "well if you're just too stupid and lazy to figure it out, that's your fault." I support the small car companies too, but if I can't just get in and turn the key and go, then I have to buy my car from another company. It really isn't about stupidity or laziness - it's about time. My time is more valuable than the money I currently fork over to Microsoft. And when something goes wrong, I pay someone else to fix it. The exact same thing is true about my car. When my grandfather says "well if you're just too stupid and lazy to figure it out, that's your fault" when someone's car breaks down people look at him a little funny.

Re:Not Troll, I Swear

[Bombula]

I understand where you're coming from, I really do. But think of the car analogy for a moment. Now how many people really know anything about their cars? My grandfather has exactly the attitude about cars that you have about computers - it infuriates and exasperates him that people don't bother to understand this tool that is completely central to their lives. But one problem is that they (cars and computers both) are so complicated that it genuinely is difficult for a non-expert to understand the intricacies of how they work.

For some people, there is joy associated with tinkering with your car. My grandfather still works on his mid-60s Cadillac, and loves every minute he has to put into to keep it running. But the vast majority of people just use their car to get from A to B. Similarly, the vast majority of people just use their computer to do a few straightforward tasks - internet, email, IM, word processing, digital photos.

The reason why I want to switch to Linux isn't because I want to be able to get under the hood, it's because I don't want to support Microsoft (or Apple, for that matter). I think monopolies and oligopolies are a bad thing. I believe in open-source software as a matter of principle, not because I'm an uber-geek computer programmer.

I have to say, it does make it hard to be supportive of Linux when so many people say to non-experts like me, "well if you're just too stupid and lazy to figure it out, that's your fault." I support the small car companies too, but if I can't just get in and turn the key and go, then I have to buy my car from another company. It really isn't about stupidity or laziness - it's about time. My time is more valuable than the money I currently fork over to Microsoft. And when something goes wrong, I pay someone else to fix it. The exact same thing is true about my car. When my grandfather says "well if you're just too stupid and lazy to figure it out, that's your fault" when someone's car breaks down people look at him a little funny.

Re:Not Troll, I Swear

[Bombula]

How many people really know anything about their cars? My grandfather has exactly the attitude about cars that you have about computers - it infuriates and exasperates him that people don't bother to understand this tool that is completely central to their lives. But one problem is that they (cars and computers both) are so complicated that it genuinely is difficult for a non-expert to understand the intricacies of how they work.

For some people, there is joy associated with tinkering with your car. My grandfather still works on his mid-60s Cadillac, and loves every minute he has to put into to keep it running. But the vast majority of people just use their car to get from A to B. Similarly, the vast majority of people just use their computer to do a few straightforward tasks - internet, email, IM, word processing, digital photos.

The reason why I want to switch to Linux isn't because I want to be able to get under the hood, it's because I don't want to support Microsoft (or Apple, for that matter). I think monopolies and oligopolies are a bad thing. I believe in open-source software as a matter of principle, not because I'm an uber-geek computer programmer.

I have to say, it does make it hard to be supportive of Linux when so many people say to non-experts like me, "well if you're just too stupid and lazy to figure it out, that's your fault." I support the small car companies too, but if I can't just get in and turn the key and go, then I have to buy my car from another company. It really isn't about stupidity or laziness - it's about time. My time is more valuable than the money I currently fork over to Microsoft. And when something goes wrong, I pay someone else to fix it. The exact same thing is true about my car. When my grandfather says "well if you're just too stupid and lazy to figure it out, that's your fault" when someone's car breaks down people look at him a little funny.

Re:Not Troll, I Swear

[ipp0]

Windows XP does not play DVD's

Re:Not Troll, I Swear

[cheesybagel]

Sorry to disappoint, but you will not find a single Linux distribution like that, despite what many people here will tell you. I've used Linux full-time as a desktop off and on for years, from straight Debian (hard) to Mandrake/Mandriva (fairly easy). I even tried Ubuntu/Kubuntu, the most recent release. Everyone who ever says Linux is easy really has no clue what easy means to non-technical people. I mean, come on, you have to find and run a special script just to get support for playing DVDs and configure other simple things that are essential for a typical desktop user. If you're not lucky enough to have heard of this special script you get to spend hours on the web learning about obscure and difficult to find packages like libdvdcss, blah blah blah. Your typical geek will wade through it all with infinite patience, not having a clue how difficult this stuff is for non-geeks. Then they proceed to tell everyone how easy it is to use Linux for anything and everything.

Any free Linux distro is not going to have that. DVD or MP3 playing support requires paying royalties to the software patent holders. On the other way, most Linux distros come bundled with a media player which will play the Ogg audio format, which isn't patented.

Software patents suck.

Re:Not Troll, I Swear

[Anonymous Coward]

The reason why I want to switch to Linux isn't because I want to be able to get under the hood, it's because I don't want to support Microsoft (or Apple, for that matter). I think monopolies and oligopolies are a bad thing. I believe in open-source software as a matter of principle, not because I'm an uber-geek computer programmer.

I understand what you are saying and it is very reasonable. I personally don't have the time to tinker around with setting up any OS either. Just keep in mind that even if you try to install windows, there is a fair amount of getting under the hood to be done.

My time is more valuable than the money I currently fork over to Microsoft. And when something goes wrong, I pay someone else to fix it.

People in our category should be the ones paying (yes paying) for linux, and people like the GP should be the ones being paid to install linux. That way everyone is happy. And that is one of the ways Free software can actually make you money. ;)

Re:Not Troll, I Swear

[Anonymous Coward]

People in our category should be the ones paying (yes paying) for linux, and people like the GP should be the ones being paid to install linux. That way everyone is happy. And that is one of the ways Free software can actually make you money. ;)

And in this way, instead of paying and making one company (let's say 60.000 people) rich, you are actually spreading the wealth to a bigger audiance. This is very good for the economy and very bad for corporate greed....

Re:Not Troll, I Swear

[fatphil]

There's no freaking way jcarter's post was a troll.
It's only people with opinions like his that are helping linux steer away from being as bad and luser-friendly as Windows.

If I meet you in meta-mod, I'll know what to do.

Re:Not Troll, I Swear

[Alioth]

By your measure, Windows XP isn't ready for the mainstream desktop, either.
With Windows, if you install from the XP CD, you DON'T get:

- a DVD player
- a word processor/spreadsheet application
- drivers for quite a lot of hardware (certainly no accelerated 3D drivers)

The only reason these things come by default is that most people do NOT install Windows XP. It comes pre-installed with their computer, and the maker of their computer did all of the hard work in installing, testing and building a Windows XP ghost image that included all these things.

What would help many Linux distributions a lot (including Ubuntu) is having a simple 'Start Here' application that allows a user to add more software repositories. For instance, Fedora Core does not come with a DVD player because of patent and DMCA issues. But it wouldn't kill them to add a "Third Party Software Repository" GUI tool that allowed users to choose Livna or DAG - both of which DO have DVD players - and because they are yum repositories, all the user has to do is select 'VLC Media Player' and all the dependencies are automatically installed too and their DVDs will now play. It would also mean you could just click on Livna's nVidia drivers, and have accelerated 3D drivers which get updated with the rest of your system (the nVidia and ATi drivers on that repository are a simple install - no editing configs required, they are prepackaged, and yum resolves dependencies automatically)

Re:Not Troll, I Swear

[madtinkerer]

I understand your point, but there are differences between computers and cars that I think you are missing. First, how many people do you know that will add parts, upgrades to their car without considering how it will effect the car? Will the average car user change the steering wheel, pedals, meters, etc in the car? No, probably not. Will the average computer user download the talking monkey program that is full of spyware or programs that change the look of the interface? Yes. My point is that, in reference to cars, there is a sort of healthy respect - a boundry that people don't cross. When it comes to computers, that boundry is much farther on than it should be. People may not be able to take an engine apart, but they know enough to say "x thing is probably not a good thing to do to my car". I'm also not talking about major breakdowns...I should have made that clear before. Certainly if your computer has a meltdown or total system crash, you call a pro. However, installing the latest version of adobe acrobat, upgrading IE plugins, installing more smileys for MSN Messenger, etc should be something the average computer user does understand. For example, I use an overhead projector everyday for my work. I know that it will break, probably at some time I urgently need it. Therefore, I know how to change the bulb, clean and adjust the lense and check the switches. It only makes common sense that I understand well a thing I rely on every day. That's my point. And before you ask, I can change a flat, visually check an engine for obvious problems, and use a phone to call a mechanic when I need one.

Re:Not Troll, I Swear

[thopkins]

I am mainly a linux user, but Windows XP actually does come with accelerated 3D drivers for many cards.

Re:Not Troll, I Swear

[PitaBred]

Notice how I said "Don't become a kernel hacker"? But if you can't tell that your car is just out of gas, and it won't matter if you turn the key, well, then I will call you stupid. But knowing that it's out of gas takes just a teeny bit of learning about the machine, and that's all you really need to do with Linux. Computers are complicated. Don't think they aren't because you know the quirks of Windows. Perhaps you should take a step back and realize how much you actually have to know about Windows to make it do what you want. You've actually spent a lot of time acquiring those 'skills'. All you need to do is invest a little time in Linux, and you could switch.
I'm not telling you that you should be able to hack together a network driver. But I am telling you that you'll have to make a few more decisions than just blithely clicking "yes" like a retarded muppet.

Re:Not Troll, I Swear

[fbjon]

So, what are the differences between Automatix and Easy (K)Ubuntu? Most importantly what are the big downsides of both?

Re:Not Troll, I Swear

[ZephyrXero]

Well, first off Easy Ubuntu is just easier....so if you're new to Linux that's a very good thing. Secondly, Easy Ubuntu strives to not mess up or change too much with your system like Automatix does. Let's just say if you do it wrong, I've heard many tales of automatix majorly screwing up people's system, while never heard to many problems from E.U. users...

Re:Not Troll, I Swear

[Alioth]

It comes with accelerated 3D drivers for probably the same cards that Linux comes with accelerated 3D drivers (i.e. older ATi stuff and the motherboard integrated stuff).

FUD, not informative

[Anonymous Coward]

Let me first say that I don't use Automatix, so I do not claim to have much knowledge about what security holes it may or may not have. But your post is BS.

Enabling the root account is "a huge security hole?" I almost never log in as root, but the account is enabled (with a strong password). Did you even read the link you posted? It warns of a few potential downsides to enabling root (as well as a few downsides to not enabling root). Of coarse sudo is better for day to day use, but enabling root is not a "huge security hole".

You have to be trolling.

Re:FUD, not informative

[ZephyrXero]

Agreed.... as while disabling the root account is a good idea for newbs, so they don't get in the habbit of trying to use it for daily use, if you have any Linux experience it's perfectly fine to enable it.

Re:FUD, not informative

[rcmiv]

It's not Automatix' use of a root acount that is most troubling. Automatix also replaces your /etc/apt/sources.list (without backing up or asking), and use -force yes during installs which is generally a nyet.

That being said, Automatix rocks, and I have used it on all of my ubuntu installs with no problem (other than repositories at freecontrib being down occasionally).

Easyubuntu is good too, and safer, but is not available for Dapper yet. Of course, replacing all instances of "breezy" with "dapper" in a detect.py isn't all that difficult either, now is it.

I'd recommend Easyubuntu.

-rcmiv

HA! HA! I have the cube!

Re:FUD, not informative

[Nosklo]

replaces your /etc/apt/sources.list (without backing up or asking),

In fact, it does makes a backup. Look your /etc/apt/sources.list_backup_TIMESTAMP files.

I checked this out earlier

[DoctorPepper]

And it works great. Just make sure you back up your Firefox and Thunderbird files before using this. Also, I can no longer get enigmail to work. Other than that, it provides a nice addition to Ubuntu Breezy.

Re:I checked this out earlier

[Anonymous Coward]

I got the impression you want to tell us that you use your machine for browsing and email most of the time?

In the United States...

[Anonymous Coward]

With Automatix... you're only a checkbox away from being a criminal.

DONT USE AUTOMATIX!

[FunnyLookinHat]

Has anyone here been to the #ubuntu channel on irc.freenode.net? YOu will find that Automatix is regarded as THE WORST option for ubuntu users. It has huge security holes, overwrites configs, and uses very risky command line options. Instead you should use easyubuntu. http://easyubuntu.freecontrib.org/

Re:DONT USE AUTOMATIX!

[j0217995]

Easy Ubuntu is a lot better and should be used instead. Everyone is discouraged from using Automatix. Mod this parent up

Re:DONT USE AUTOMATIX!

[Holi]

Too bad it does not upgrade firefox too.

Re:DONT USE AUTOMATIX!

[Anonymous Coward]

easyubuntu works with dapper too

well, at least it says automatix doesn't in the forum

Re:DONT USE AUTOMATIX!

[Chanc_Gorkon]

From what I saw on the ubuntu forums, the guy who wrote this has no idea how apt is supposed to work. He's using things like --force-yes in his script....you should NEVER have to do this. It's basically telling apt to shove it and install anyway.....never do that on ANY Debian box unless you know what your doing. As he's asking new users to use this, it should NEVER do things that may break the system. It's not like it's really hard to write the script to do it right even. The biggest reason he used those flags was to avoid having to load the GPG keys in the apt keyring.....apt has this for a REASON! I can understand if it had a pop up and ask you to approve it if there was a BADSIG issue in the repository (there was one this weekend in the Debian sid repository....). Just ignoring it to begin with is VERY bad form.

Re:DONT USE AUTOMATIX!

[Kristoffer Lunden]

It's true. You should only (be allowed to) use it if you are going to reinstall the system soon anyways and if you promise to never ever ask for support after running it.

That said, the very fact that the script exists means that there is demand for solutions to these things, but I'd rather see a real solution instead of a system trashing hack. It may be ok for Windows users to reinstall when the system gets too old, but Debian-based systems are supposed to be "install once, update forever". Automatix breaks this, often irreversibly (at least to non-experts).

Edubuntu

[Illbay]

I tried setting up Edubuntu on my grandkids' computer the other night. Mostly an "unmonitored install," I would just check back by every so often to see if it needed my attention, so I wasn't really thinking about it.

Lo, and behold, I finally stop by and it has the login screen there. I use the very fancy userid "kids" and password "kids" (not really worried much about "security" on my home network behind the NAT/Firewall), and started playing with it. Sound didn't seem to be working so I went into the configurations, and it asked for the Root password.

It dawned on me suddenly that I had never GIVEN a root password during the install! I tried various passwords that I though might work including "" (nothing) and "kids," but no go.

I still have no idea what the h*ll happened that the system set up a "root" account but didn't bother inviting me to participate!

Re:Edubuntu

[TheRealMindChild]

Root isnt used. The initial user you created, in this case "kids", will have access to use sudo.

Re:Edubuntu

[ZephyrXero]

Ubuntu does not setup a root password by default specifically so novice/beginner users will not use they're root account by default as many screw up and do. All you have to do to setup the password though is to goto a commandline and put in "sudo passwd" from the main account ;)

Not the best solution

[xenocide2]

Pretty much what Automatix does is route around the usability problems in the GUI apt systems. Automatix is good for two reasons: firstly, it hides the apt-get frontend. It handles adding unofficial repos, installing, and configuring the packages. Secondly, it takes the massive array of software ubuntu inherits from the Debian infrastructure and selects some useful stuff they think people might not know about but likely want or need.

This stuff is useful, but things could be better if a lot of effort was put into synaptic and the default repos. Some of this stuff should make its way into upsteam, in this case, base-config and ubuntu-desktop. NumlockX enabled on startup is simply a good idea and a cheap and trivial fix. Ubuntu should be working on getting permissions to distribute the official JVM as part of Ubuntu, and gftp is pretty useful so I don't see why it shouldn't be thrown in. Obviously some of the stuff Automatix does is dangerous or illegal (installing mp3 support) and thus won't ever make it as part of Ubuntu proper, but I'd like to see them cherry pick some of the better ones. The benefit is that everybody gets these improvements rather than just those who've heard of automatix.

The second part of what Automatix does is a very important and thus far unaddressed problem in the Debian model. The ubuntu-desktop virtual package mildly alleviates this problem by selecting a few of the most basic applications you'd want. Plenty of packages are provided, but there's no way for users to know what's useful to them. If you think of synaptic as a software sales tool every bit as a package manager, it's doing a horrible job on the sales front. From a beginner usability standpoint, if Synaptic presented a a list of say the 10 most popular packages you don't have installed, that would improve things a lot. Debian / Ubuntu have a lot of great things packaged, but they have a hard time promoting the use of any particular software they actually distribute. The good news is that a lot of the tools to accomplish this already exist: popcon is a system for reporting software installs back to the central server. One of the most popular installs is the acrobat reader and plugin. On the one hand, reporting this information may be dangerous and also requires an mailer service. On the other hand, raw package downloads don't tell us information like "people who've installed acro-reader also have acro-reader-plugin" or "people who have blah installed usually don't have blah." Much of this will be obvious, but sometimes these sorts of Bayesian inferrences are important. It allows you to say things like, 'hey we noticed you have acroreader-plugin installed, would you like to try out the firefox plugin to mplayer?'

Re:Not the best solution

[Syberghost]

It handles adding unofficial repos, installing, and configuring the packages.

The biggest problem with it being, it adds unofficial repos, installs things from them, and configures them.

Re:Not the best solution

[jrumney]

NumlockX enabled on startup is simply a good idea and a cheap and trivial fix.

Its a terrible idea on a laptop.

Re:Not the best solution

[Anonymous Coward]

Actually, under the Applications panel in 5.10, there is an "Add Applications" launcher that provides a list of popular packages under various categories such as Office, Multimedia, Internet Games, etc. along with detailed descriptions of each package.

For the uninformed user, this launcher gives an easy interface to add new programs that they may want but aren't included in the base desktop. Synaptic is primarily for people who know what they're looking for to begin with.

But the idea of a popularity database is a pretty cool idea.

Re:Not the best solution

[shadowpuppy]

I agree. The popularity and existance of tools like Automatix indicates that Ubuntu is lacking these regards. The fact you have to downlaod and install Automatix manually is a indication of a problem. Joe Sixpack is not going to like those command line steps. Even as an experienced user I hate the process of beating my system into sumbission to do the things I do on an daily basis. I don't get paid to fight with my desktop. I get paid to program.

I don't mean to be picking on Ubuntu here. I haven't tried it but I've had to fight with usabilty issues in every other OS I've tried. And the existance of Automatix leads me to believe Ubuntu is going to have the same vein of problems.

Re:Not the best solution

[swillden]

But the idea of a popularity database is a pretty cool idea.

And the data may already be available, too, thanks to the 'popularity-contest' package:

Description: Vote for your favourite packages automatically

When you install this package, it sets up a cron job that will anonymously submit statistics about your most used Debian packages periodically to the Debian developers.

This information helps us make decisions such as which packages should go on the first Debian CD. Also, we can improve future versions of Debian so that the most popular packages are the ones which are installed automatically for new users.

Seems like it should be a relatively simple process to mine this data for popular apps that are not installed by default. It would be interesting to see what the results would be. There are some obvious forces that may skew the results, since it might bother people to have it installed by default.

Re:Not the best solution

[codemachine]

NumlockX enabled on startup is simply a good idea and a cheap and trivial fix.

Its a terrible idea on a laptop.

It is also terrible if you have a server "space-saver" type keyboard. A lot of distros turn it on by default, which means you have to disable it for every machine you switch to on your KVM. I quickly disabled this "feature" on all of the machines in this rack.

However it is handy for most desktops and workstations, which is Ubuntu's primary usage area besides laptops.

Re:Not the best solution

[Anonymous Coward]

We live in a sad world, when enabling someone to listen to his own music on his own computer is illegal, regardless of operating system...

Re:Not the best solution

[miro f]

and the number one most popularly reported package? "popularity-contest" of course!

why 100% of users have it installed and are using it!

Re:Not the best solution

[xenocide2]

I know. That's why I said popcon does this. popcon = popularity contest. The trick is getting something like popcon that's trustworthy to install by default. I forget where debian places the results, but I've seen the raw "most popular stuff" before.

Re:Not the best solution

[xenocide2]

Surprisingly, I just discovered that it is installed by default on Ubuntu as part of ubuntu-base. And that it's got an HTTP interface that no longer needs the MTA. Not found any website yet but I bet it's there somewhere.

Re:Not the best solution

[advocate_one]

so how do you uninstall it if it's part of the ubuntu-base metapackage then???

Satire?

[Lord Bitman]

This is satire, right? It certainly seems to be a huge "stay the hell away from linux!" warning message.

Re:Satire?

[Quirk]

This is satire, right?

Given the angst I'd say it's closer to Sartre

Re:Satire?

[Lord Bitman]

this isn't informative, it's a question. I have no idea if the author is a mediocre satirist or merely a shitty writer.

What it does...short version

[Benanov]

This script installs Free implementations of patented algorithms, proprietary codecs, Sun's Java, P2P file sharing programs, non-free programs like Adobe Acrobate, MS true type fonts (unsure about Tahoma; you need a Windows license to use that one), non-free-illegal-in-US codecs, non-free Nvidia binary blobs, and makes some GUI behaviors mimic a W32 environment.

In short, it takes away the Freedom portion of a GNU/Linux system and makes it Yet Another Windows Competitor.

About the only thing I like from that list is disabling CD-ROM drive locking, turning DMA on, and the ESD sleep fix. I'm not sure about the locking, either. Ctrl-Alt-Del bringing up the task manager seems kinda nice, but I would rather just discover keybinding on my own.

Then again, I'm not this script's target audience.

Re:What it does...short version

[iamdrscience]

This script installs Free implementations of patented algorithms, proprietary codecs, Sun's Java, P2P file sharing programs, non-free programs like Adobe Acrobate, MS true type fonts (unsure about Tahoma; you need a Windows license to use that one), non-free-illegal-in-US codecs, non-free Nvidia binary blobs, and makes some GUI behaviors mimic a W32 environment.

Thanks for the warning, RMS, but some of us live in the real world and have to get real things done.

Re:What it does...short version

[Anonymous Coward]

What happened to your nose? It looks like you cut it off to spite your face...

Re:What it does...short version

[MadMidnightBomber]

Thanks for the warning, RMS, but some of us live in the real world ..

Tried that, it's overrated.

.. and have to get real things done.

See above.

Re:What it does...short version

[trawg]

This is an excellent point.

I installed Ubuntu this week for the first time (I've tried LiveCDs before but I had a spare PC that needed an OS and Ubuntu was the frontrunner in the absence of Windows licenses). I was disappointed to see that, out of the box, I couldn't play any media (even MPEGs!) but then I remembered that these generally include patented algorithms.

After some Googling, I found a resource on the Ubuntu site that explained how to get it all working. What impressed me though was the fact that it actually pointed out that it might be illegal in my country to use these various software packages and that they're NOT officially supported by Ubuntu for this very reason.

So, Automatix basically sounds like its just a bunch of stuff that, if you install it, puts you at risk of infringing copyright and patents and all sorts of other stuff. If you live in countries that respect patent laws, anyway.

(This is something that people often seem to get confused about - open source does NOT always mean its legal)

Re:What it does...short version

[jb.hl.com]

This is just a quick question, because I'm genuinely intrigued. Has a Linux distributor, or a creator of third party packages for say Debian ever been sued or threatened legally because they distributed MPEG code or other patented stuff? I'd really like to know.

Re:What it does...short version

[Hektor_Troy]

About the only thing I like from that list is ... turning DMA on

Wait ... turning DMA ON? It's not on by default? Why wouldn't the Ubuntu installer turn it on by default if the machine is capable of handling it? I don't think I can even find a drive in my collection that doesn't support DMA.

I realise that you're often trying to get as big a target as possible, but come on - DMA off by default? How difficult would it be to check to see which drives supports DMA and enabling it for those instead of leaving it off? Yes, this is a somewhat loaded question, but I'm actually rather curious why it isn't done.

Re:What it does...short version

[Cl1mh4224rd]

In short, it takes away the Freedom portion of a GNU/Linux system and makes it Yet Another Windows Competitor.

Say what? Your conclusion makes no sense...

By your logic, by installing Free Software on Windows I'm putting the Freedom(TM) into Windows. That's just dribble.

Windows is still Windows, and Linux is still Linux...

Don't use Automatix

[Tomcat666]

I'm not familiar with the details of automatix, but I lurk quite much in the Ubuntu channels, and it's generally seen as some virus-like script with all kinds of disadvantages and shortcomings.

Or to make it short (from IRC):
[...] !automatix
[ubotu] it has been said that automatix is unsafe, it overwrites configuration files, and does things like "echo -e 'ynYn'" that are considered risky. Please do not use it. There are alternative applications, but it's often best to read the documentation.

U-Butt-NU ?

[Anonymous Coward]

yes, I kown tahts not how you splel it.

But my mind tries to fit known words to it.

So I see:
You-Butt-Knew.

My butt knows what?

Re:U-Butt-NU ?

[bbc]

"My butt knows what?"

That's between you and the crew of the USS Nimitz.

(But I bet it knows more than your brain.)

please clarify "does not support AMD64"

[ChrisCampbell47]

Here was my initial problem with Automatix when I first encountered it months ago: they say it doesn't support AMD64.

Now, that could mean ONE of two things:

1. It doesn't support the 64-bit AMD64 distribution of Ubuntu Linux.

or

2. It doesn't support the 32-bit i386 distribution of Ubuntu Linux if it happens to be running on an AMD64 chip (i.e. in i386 compatibility mode).

I'd bet money that it's #1, not #2, because I have yet to encounter an app that cares that I'm running an AMD64 chip under my regular 32-bit Ubuntu. It's running the standard i386 instruction set, maybe with some accelerated functions, and that's that.

They really need to be a hell of lot clearer on that, because it's a big source of confusion. Word choice matters.

Re:please clarify "does not support AMD64"

[Peter La Casse]

Does anything fit into category #2? If "yes", then the wording is vague, but I believe the answer is "no", so the wording is fine.

How is this easy?

[danielluke]

Why is this making news when everything that Automatix installs and enables is already pre-installed in PCLinuxOS. Heck, it even has Opera in the repositories.

Automatix screws up dual-boot

[Anonymous Coward]

I have a dual-boot Ubuntu/Windows XP system where I had set up menu.lst to have Windows XP as the first/default option. After running Automatix, all the programs were indeed updated, but it also modified the menu.lst file to remove the Windows XP boot option completely! I knew how to fix it, but how many newbies would see that and not know what to do to get Windows XP back? It only takes one experience like that to sour people forever on Linux. Dumb.

Messed up my X server

[HampiRocks]

Used it today and it messed up my X server.

Why I, the AVERAGE POWERUSER switched to Linux

[Yo Grark]

One word. Ubuntu.

For those who read Slashdot regularly, the subject may sound familiar. I was the window user who commented on why the average user DOESN'T switch.

I'm full time Ubuntu at home now.

I have everything working that I had on my windows box. I may have a learning curve when it comes to using new apps, but the point is, I switched almost painlessly.

Hardawre worked out of box? Check
Re-installed all needed software? Check
Printer installed? Check
Kick ass support system in #ubuntu-support? Check
kick ass add/remove program clone? Check
Plays Movies? Check
P2p? Check
Finance software? Check
Remote administration? Check
Virtual Machine Capable? Check
Free Free Free? Check

Best of all is the performance. I've heard that Gnome is slow overall, but man o man, my xp box always BOGGED down after about a year of use to the point I have to reinstall. Hope that doesn't happen with Ubuntu, but in Xp, I was getting "buffer" errors with windows due to too many tcp/ip calls. I had 8 apps that used the internet open. I had mysterious IDE errors with no resolution...I had explorer and svchost issues, Now, I have NO problems and my speeds are incredible.

While it's STILL not ready for primetime for mom and dad (cept for simply browsing...can you believe my wife found firefox, surfed and printed without even knowing I had switched the pc?), I would recommend it for anyone who remembers how to use limited command line options, can follow instructions and who is interested in change.

Sure I had to Sudo apt-get this, and tar xvf that (still don't REALLY know what I'm doing when I use these options, but I'm sure there's a HOWTO when I get a moment) but like I said, I'm HAPPY with ubuntu, the first distro I've found to satisfy my curiosity of Linux and delight me with it's power and ease of use.

This script just makes it LEAPS and BOUNDS simplier than it already is.

Kudo's!

Yo Grark

P.S. Completely separate topic, I'm looking to hire a website developer/programmer to implement a backend to a new e-business, any idea on where to start looking?

Re:Why I, the AVERAGE POWERUSER switched to Linux

[kidcharles]

The most common "howto" system on Unix/Linux systems is looking at the "man" pages. Usually you can see them just by typing 'man ', e.g. 'man tar'. They can be kind of cryptic sometimes, but they should always have some description of the command line options (your x,v, and f).

Re:Why I, the AVERAGE POWERUSER switched to Linux

[pavera]

Just as a quick question, what financial software are you using?
that is one thing that still keeps me on windows at least part time, no decent quickbooks/quicken replacement...

Re:Why I, the AVERAGE POWERUSER switched to Linux

[Anonymous Coward]

may want to say what state/country you're in. or try monster.com

Re:Why I, the AVERAGE POWERUSER switched to Linux

[Yo Grark]

This is the internet, it doesn't matter what state/country I'm in!

And right now it's listed in ifreelance.com

But thank you for the suggestion!

Yo Grark

Re:Why I, the AVERAGE POWERUSER switched to Linux

[Yo Grark]

Well aware, but I'm a newbie and haven't started READING how to use the command prompt more efficiently.

Context searching the man pages, what the "1 page at a time" command is for ls, learning how to tell a directory apart from an executable...these are things that will come with time.

I just haven't dedicated the time to it yet....and I think I admitted that. But I'll get there when necessity dictates.

Yo Grark

Re:Why I, the AVERAGE POWERUSER switched to Linux

[Yo Grark]

Gnucash is the most common, but there's another one....grisbi.

I'm currently evaluating (and by this I mean just installed and looked at) both, though Gnucash is winning on the startup look/feel. It actually asked me for the QIF file to get started!

I'm hoping I can "import" it from Quicken and not have to reinvent the wheel.

Yo Grark

Re:Why I, the AVERAGE POWERUSER switched to Linux

[pavera]

Hmm,
Ok maybe I'll take another look at gnucash, I tried to move from quickbooks to gnucash about a year and a half ago and it was awful. The interface was just horrid, and I couldn't get myself to use it, so I went back to quickbooks...

Re:Why I, the AVERAGE POWERUSER switched to Linux

[Yo Grark]

Well there's a definite difference between QUICKBOOKS and Gnucash.

My experience is moving from Quicken to gnucash. Apples and Oranges.

I haven't found any good Business/accounting oriented software...yet.

But gimme a day :)

Yo Grark

Re:Why I, the AVERAGE POWERUSER switched to Linux

[smeenz]

Sure I had to Sudo apt-get this, and tar xvf that (still don't REALLY know what I'm doing when I use these options, but I'm sure there's a HOWTO when I get a moment)

x = extract (extract the files from the archive) v = verbose (show the filenames while doing so) f = filename (you specify the name of the tar file after the f)

so 'tar xvf filename.tar' eXtracts (Verbosely) from File filename.tar

you may also have used the z (use gzip compression) or j (use bzip2 compression )options - eg,

tar zxvf filename.tar.gz

tar zxvf filename.tgz

tar jxvf filename.tar.bz2

Re:Why I, the AVERAGE POWERUSER switched to Linux

[spvo]

I have been using MoneyDance. Its proprietary software, but it seems to work as well as quicken for me. Plus it works on all the major operating systems.

Re:Why I, the AVERAGE POWERUSER switched to Linux

[pavera]

I need a small business app that can do invoices as well as the basic checkbook balancing type stuff...
more of a replacement for quickbooks than quicken... but I'll take a look

Re:Why I, the AVERAGE POWERUSER switched to Linux

[pavera]

:) Yeah I've been looking for a year... so good luck :) My business partner and I are about to undertake a sizeable investment to start writing an open source small business accounting/invoicing/quickbooks replacement app cause we haven't found anything and nothing seems to be moving in that direction.

Re:Why I, the AVERAGE POWERUSER switched to Linux

[Magnum7385]

It may just be me, but I would have thought the "average poweruser" would be able to keep Windows from encountering any of the problems you mentioned? Or am I setting the bar too high? I do, actually, reboot no less than once a week, and that's for a scheduled defrag session. Hotfixes can wait. The firewall is working fine, right? How often did you reboot when you had Windows?

Re:Why I, the AVERAGE POWERUSER switched to Linux

[Yo Grark]

Weekly reboots, weekly defrags, weekly backups (nightly incremental), only installed critical security updates, use a router, used a snadbox to "test" software until I knew I wanted it on the main system and was sure it played nice, ran logs against installed software and manually cleaned up old ones, ran mydocuments on a separate drive, used low resource apps, ran firefox since it was a wee baby......but tcp/ip stack buffer errors? Like how is that a power user's forte? Isolate the offending set of apps? it was any of them. No, I'm afraid I was giving a "well it was time to reformat anyway" argument too many times. I formatted alright. Right into Ubuntu and I haven't been sorry yet. But then again, I was ready for a change because of a "pain". That's an important part. I was experiencing "pain". That's what makes customers look elsewhere. You can only call tech support so many times before you dump the app.

Yo Grark

Re:Why I, the AVERAGE POWERUSER switched to Linux

[milimetric]

About your unrelated question: me!

I've been doing web work for 6 years now. JSP, ASP.net, mostly SQLServer 2000, I can use MySQL. I run my entire network at home on Ubuntu (samba, ftp, nfs, apache servers and a pc to play media).

I subscribe to strict CSS style rules and I can easily use Flash, Photoshop. Basically I can make awesome sites. Problem is, I've always been working for square heads who can't design to save their lives and I've never had a chance to really make a whole site the way I want it. If you're interested in me, let me know.

Otherwise, check out justwebjobs.com or dice.com or even get an ASP.NET Web Commerce starter kit and do it yourself, it's actually pretty easy. I recomend Authorize.net if you have to deal with credit card authorizers

Dan

Re:Why I, the AVERAGE POWERUSER switched to Linux

[thedletterman]

I've read several parts of this article, and I appreciate your input on Ubuntu, but I also raised an eyebrow at the idea of a "poweruser" that couldn't get Windows to perform without a full reinstall.

I changed over to Ubuntu about six months ago from windows, because I wanted to try a 64bit build of linux for my laptop and desktop (both AMD 64). I was rasied on SunOS, and by the late 90s, was installing BSD on all my non-sun servers. I have been tempted for years to play around more with linux, as it appeared to have the best chance of appealing to a personl computer, and spent a little time with gentoo.

What made me decide to keep Ubuntu on my laptop were several reasons you mentioned, mostly it's out of the box functionality. I've refined my scripts for years to install all the software I need for my servers, and automatix seems to be the exact same thing I've been doing, except for desktops.

My only complaint so far for linux s a desktop replacement has been that sometimes finding the right software is a pain in the ass. Automatix installs DVD ripping software for linux? Great. That's one thing I couldn't find on Doom9.

As far as your corrupt TCP/IP stack goes.. next time, try un/reinstalling your networking before you reformat your drive.

Re:Why I, the AVERAGE POWERUSER switched to Linux

[Magnum7385]

>>but tcp/ip stack buffer errors? Like how is that a power user's forte? Isolate the offending set of apps?

No, I suppose they aren't. From the activities you listed, although my comment was intended to be mostly tongue-in-cheek, I can see you are by no means at fault for the errors you encountered.

I retract any implied negligence or lack of user aptitude. I would have done the same thing as you, faced the situation.

Kudos, and my apologies. :-)

Is the summary from the same article I read?

[heinousjay]

So ready for beginners includes such niceties as failing without warning and running it three times in succession as a leap of faith to getting things finished? Don't get me wrong, I like Ubuntu, but I'm a techie.

I know for sure that the software I produce can't have gotcha like that and still be considered 'ready'

Ubuntu craze

[porkThreeWays]

Disclaimer: I've been using Linux and Unix in general for many many years.

That being out of the way...
I don't find Ubuntu all that revolutionary in user friendlyness. It's never detected a piece of hardware most others couldn't (for me). The installer isn't anything special (ncurses based). It doesn't play patent encombered media types. It uses a dickload of ram. On top of all that, they didn't even put any good eye candy.

I mean its not bad, just not revolutionary like everyone would have you believe. I find Fedora and Suse to really be of equal quality (I generally use Debian anyway).

I know I'll get flamed as a troll, but please enlighten me how Ubuntu is light years ahead of any other distro in user friendlyness. I'd like to believe it's some great leap forward (and I run it on a couple of machines myself), but I just don't see it.

Re:Ubuntu craze

[OMRebel]

I run SUSE on my desktop, and tried SUSE on my laptop, but it just ran way too slow and seemed to be unstable. I installed Ubuntu Breezy on my laptop, and it runs great. I don't have any slow response times, and never have had a single lockup like I did with SUSE (most lockups occured when either running Firefox or listening to MP3's with amaroK). Granted, that may have just been KDE causing the problems, and it's more of a KDE vs Gnome issue with my laptop. But, my laptop is an older laptop (P3 600 with 256MB RAM), but it is extremely quick. SUSE works awesome on my desktop, so I haven't even thought of trying a different distro there. Anyways, that's just my two cents on this.

Re:Ubuntu craze

[dreemernj]

I am a n00b when it comes to Linux.

I've installed Ubuntu a ton of times on relatively ancient computers (p2 233s come to mind) and its always very easy to do, and very easy to get help with from Ubuntu's user forums.

I've more recently tried out Fedora on a couple of higher end comps (I have no $$ for computers so higher end might mean P3 700 )to act as servers to small groups of the Ubuntu comps and really enjoyed that as well.

I think there is a nice feeling to Ubuntu, its labeled, packaged, and branded very well. But, at the same time, I'm a complete Linux newb and I set up Fedora (plus suse just to try it out) and had no more problems with any of them, well actually I didn't have any problems with any of them. After I got used to it a bit more, I prefered working in Fedora to the others.

I think its image more then anything. People don't feel as threatened by Ubuntu. Linux can seem daunting sometimes and Ubuntu has built an image and community to get people past that painlessly. I never got the same impression from the other distros I've tried (not saying there aren't others out there that do this, just not ones I've tried).

In the end I think it comes down to Ubuntu defining their target audience differently then most other distros, and the audience they are (successfully) appealling to is a pretty large one.

Re:Ubuntu craze

[Anonymous Coward]

I have another experience with it. I was using Mandrake for a couple of years, But i switched to Ubuntu for :

- Better hardware detection on my case (laptop works 100%, fn keys and all)
- Sane packaging system (not only apt, but organization of the repositories )
- Ugly but easy enough installer
- Easy codecs/mp3/css installation (Follow 3 simple steps, automatix now makes it even simpler)
- Great community : forums, mailing lists, the now outdated ubuntuguide, and wiki (for advanced stuff) helped/helps a lot
- OK translation (Mandrake was good on that one too)

In short Ubuntu makes for a great desktop or laptop system. (Not a fanboy, part-time FreeBSD user)

Re:Ubuntu craze

[Anonymous Coward]

Ubuntu has got a nice clean Gnome desktop without too much crap and software options, and more importantly, whenever I have a problem with some real-life multimedia/fun/games issue, Google seems to find a friendly howto or wiki for me. The forums are a real treat, compared to my experiences with Debian (which I also like).

With Debian which I'm typing this post with, I have a hard time finding friendly help for any issues that don't involve compiling the kernel. Novice users really find wikis and howtos more useful than reading TFM. Manuals for one are sorely lacking in EXAMPLES.

The other great thing that Ubuntu has beneath user-friendlyness that Suse and Mandrake don't have, is the Debian packages and apt!

Re:Ubuntu craze

[tuna_boat_tony]

The user friendlyness of Ubuntu is greater than that of all the other distros (slackware, gentoo, debian, arch) I've used. Not one of them (sav ubuntu) automounted my iPod with a cute little desktop icon, as soon as I plugged it in, but aside from that almost all the other newbie-features were a little hindering. My machine screeches to a halt everytime ubuntu runs it's update manager. It's the little things, like automatic iPod support, that keep Ubuntu in it's own partition next to whatever other distro I'm using (currently Arch.)

Re:Ubuntu craze

[buraianto]

How come everyone here is a "n00b", and yet they've installed Ubuntu a ton of times, tried out Fedora on a couple of higher end comps ... to act as servers..., etc. When do you become a non-n00b?

Re:Ubuntu craze

[dreemernj]

I assume that would be when I do something more then just install a distro.

Re:Ubuntu craze

[VendettaMF]

When you fork your first distro, think of an original and meaningul name, and have one of the MS big three curse you out in print.

Re:Ubuntu craze

[Anonymous Coward]

When you can configure ALSA for this damnable sound card

All the best,
A Clueless Noob

Re:Ubuntu craze

[HermanAB]

Got to agree there. All modern Linux distros are pretty darn good and super easy to install and maintain. I regularly use Mandriva, Fedora, Suse and Ubuntu - they have all pretty much caught up with Mandriva, which used to be the ease of use leader. However, Mandriva diskdrake is still the best. Installing an encrypted software RAID with a journaled file system is super easy with Mandriva and almost not worth trying with any other distro.

Re:Ubuntu craze

[tolan-b]

I agree to a point, there's no single wow-factor in Ubuntu, it's just all nicely thought out and many small tweaks add up to a nice whole.

Until I switched to Ubuntu a couple of months ago I'd been using Redhat / Fedora as my primary desktop since Redhat 8. I also gave Suse a try for a couple of months in-between.

I really liked Suse for about a week before things started randomly breaking and I got very frustrated with Yast's slowness.

Fedora improved a great deal each release, but there were still niggling annoyances.

I think the top advantages for ubuntu are having such complete core repositories (if you include universe and multiverse) where you would have to go to 3rd party repos for Fedora or Suse, having Synaptic ready for use and the modification of the Gnome app manager to use apt.

Re:Ubuntu craze

[Spliffster]

i have had the exact oposite situation. i've bee using RH, SuSE at my job and been using primarely debian at home. when i got that acer travel mate i had a hell of a time getting debian sarge/testing to support my hardware (i had to apply 5-6 kernel patches first).

on the other hand, ubuntu was installed in approx. 1 hour and it supported all hardware out of the box (things like bluetooth, firewire, wifi, irda, the buggy intel video card [including accel support], etc.).

ubuntu is now my default linux on the desktop, it is not as stable as debian because they seem to use patches relatively early if a certain piece of hardware is commonly used.

BTW: ubuntu has a hardware database and they seem to force code into their release that is most probably used, not the most stable code tough.

Cheers,
-S

Re:Ubuntu craze

[xivulon]

Ubuntu is not revolutionary. It is evolutionary... ...and being an evolution of Debian is a BIG thing...

The main advantages are:

1) It uses Debian apt which is the best package manager, anywhere. And IMO the package manager is by far the most important piece in a distro. You select the software you want from a list, and everything else is done for you. No downloads, no dependency hell, no awkward set-up programs. You want to update ALL your installed software? Hit one button. Want to uninstall? Uncheck the installed package. And they tell me windows is easy... And not only it is easy, it is also powerful. Do you want to compile from source (a la gentoo)? No problem.

2) Unlike Debian, it is VERY easy to install. I.e. it comes with one of the best hardware detection system around, and it gives you a default system with sane settings and a good (but not overwhelming) selection of software. The current installer may not be graphical but it is efficient and intuitive. After all, most part of the installation of windows is non graphical... By the time you get to the graphical part of the windows installer, Ubuntu has finished installing everything (and I mean not only the bare OS, but also the drivers, the settings, and all the main applications). In windows you need several more hours to achieve the same level functionality. It completely smokes windows installer away. And if that is not enough the Dapper live CD will have a nice graphical installer called espresso.

3) Unlike many other distros it is "clean", one app per task, only necessary settings, even the menu makes sense (no cryptic names, but task-oriented)...

4) Unlike Debian, because of the above points, this is a very good distro for beginners since in most cases it "just works" and the default environment is very straightforward to grasp.

5) But, like Debian it is very good also for experienced users, because it is Debian, and Debian is very powerful and flexible. You can configure it as much as you want. And you can even compile your apps using source packages (a bit like Gentoo). For maximum flexibility you can do a server install and move from there. If apt is not enough you even have meta-packages to greatly simplify installation of multiple apps. Try: "sudo apt-get install xubuntu-destop".

6) The main advantage for the experts is that it saves them a few hours in setting up their distro to a decent state. Yes I know that sweating a bit to set up your system from bare metal using Debian/Gentoo/LFS/etc is a good learning experience, but after having done that 7 or 8 times I think I got my lesson straight...

7) Unlike Debian you have a release every 6 months, which is a good thing. It is a much needed intermediate stage between stable (very slow releases = old software) and testing (far to many updates).

The only category of people that are a bit disoriented by Ubuntu are the so called "power-users"... Such users see that everything works but do not find any "advanced tool" (i.e. settings dialogs with lots of checkboxes) and quickly dismiss the distro as a newbie toy... Boy are they wrong...

The only thing missing from a default installation is the interoperability with proprietary "standards" and binary apps/drivers (things like MP3, DVD, skype...). Those are excluded because they violate the open-source philosophy of Ubuntu (and I strongly agree with that) and/or their inclusion might lead to legal problems. Installing such software is the role of external and unofficial tools such as automatix. And it should therefore be obvious why automatix cannot be in the "universe" repository...

So yes, it might not be revolutionary, but it makes common tasks simple and complex tasks possible. Not many distros, on any platform, can claim that... It is evolution... ...in the right direction... ...and evolution in the right direction = best genes from best parents = new genes passed to next generation...

Re:Ubuntu craze

[ElleyKitten]

>>I don't find Ubuntu all that revolutionary in user friendlyness.

I don't know what it is about Ubuntu. If you compare it spec-by-spec to any other user-friendly distro, it doesn't come out ahead. In fact, it could even come out pretty low, considering it's lack of mp3/dvd support, no automounting of windows partitions, and the sound problems that are still pretty prevelant as far as I know. I'm sure you could find more. But for some reason, Ubuntu just clicks with many Linux newbies.

When I was a linux newb (I guess some would say I'm still a newb, but whatever) I tried several distros out, and I even took a basic Red Hat class. Despite my efforts (which, to be fair, weren't exactly my best) I never got comfortable enough on a linux system to use it for any of my day-to-day activities. When I tried Mandrake, I screwed it up trying to install Firefox, and never touched it again. My attempts at other distros didn't go any better, so when my classmates started hyping up Ubuntu, I was skeptical. But I installed in on my spare partition, and booted it up. I expected to only use it for a little, get confused, and reboot to Windows. So I boot it up, clicked on firefox, and set out to do some web surfing. I discovered this Ubuntu faq and I learn about apt-get and absolutely fall in love with it. Instead of spending the few minutes I expected to with Unbutu, I spent days. And when I went back to windows, I exported my firefox bookmarks and stuff, and went right back to ubuntu.

The difference in usability between Ubuntu and other "newbie-friendly" distros like Mandrake for me then was like night and day. Mandrake I couldn't do anything. Ubuntu I could quit windows cold-turkey for, without knowing anything about it beforehand. Now that I know more about linux, it doesn't make sense. There's just something about Ubuntu that just really gets newbs into it, whether that's logical or not.

Not gonna happen.

[PhoenixPath]

Like my parents would *ever* download something from a site called "beerorkid.com".

Give me a break, this is professional? This is for the average Joe? CLI installation and unprofessional URLs do not a professional program make.

Perhaps...

As an OOBE automatically launching immediately after install on first boot, before the desktop loads.

Otherwise, it's crap for "new users" or "the average Joe".

A lot of us will use it, and it may get even more popular, but calling it a tool for new users and the average Joe is stretching it a bit.

Re:Not gonna happen.

[beerorkid]

awwww... yeah www.beerorkid.com might not be that professional, but it is not arnieboy's site, it is mine. arnieboy asked for someone to host the automatix deb and being that I had been active on the automatix thread he chose me. it is much better than some of my other domain names. most if not all of the controversial issues in automatix have been addressed and removed or worked around.

Re:Not gonna happen.

[PhoenixPath]

No offense meant to you in particular, man.

The article posted here and elsewhere is simply trying to lead one to believe that this will bring the average joe from Windows to linux. It's just not the case.

I love Linux. I love Ubuntu, and as soon as Automatix is ready for dapper, I'll be using that as well. But, for everyone, it is not.

You made a comment on the automatix forum that CLI was professional. I disagree. Geeks ain't professional. I mean, c'mon... When was the last time you saw a Middle Manager wearing a Thinkgeek T-shirt? ;P

CLI does not impress Most managers. It scares them. Now, I know they are not average joes, but....

*shrug*

My comment had nothing to do on the quality of the tool. It had to do with the slant the writer was taking on it's usefulness to non-techies.

Again, if this were to somehow be integrated with dapper as an OOBE...now that would be spectacular.

Re:Not gonna happen.

[beerorkid]

I agree. Your first comment made my day though. lol I can't argue with it, cuz it is true.

Automatix

[u16084]

I also Dabble with Linux on my Home machine Its an OLD mac.. struggling at 300mhz. I installed YELLOWDOG a distro, that was desgined for the PPC.. yea right... Jumping through hoops just to get the MAC Volume controls on the keyboard to work.
I tried Ubuntu next, EVERYTHING worked out of the box, volume, eject all flawless. I'm struggling with Flash Plugins as MAcromedia forgot about PPC binaries/sources :) I will be waiting patiently for automatix PPC to be released...

Re:Automatix

[idonthack]

Easy Ubuntu supports PPC, and is safer to use than Automatix.

I find out late again

[amigabill]

If only this came up a week ago. I got ticked off that a Gentoo update mangled something and I coldn't get into KDE anymore so I dumped it and tried kubuntu. Probably from my lack of familiarity with the ubuntu/debian packaging methods, I couldn't figure out how to do things that had become rather easy for me in Gentoo, such as get the proprietary binary Nvidia drivers going, install mythtv, etc. Even trying generic system full update had lots of failures for some reason, perhaps the network wasn't quite right or something, but after a coupel days of it doing very little that I wanted it to, I'm reinstalling Gentoo again. And I don't particularly want to anymore. I like portage, but I hate having to compile freakin everything in the universe...

Maybe I'll try kubuntu again with this script..

Re:MOD PARENT UP (more)

[greenrd]

When I tried to install Ubuntu, the installer asked me "Do you want to install optional packages?", then started running some complicated apt-get command for no reason when I said "Yes", and then crashed halfway through, leaving the machine with a full root partition (which as long time Linux users will probably know, tends to render your machine unusable).

Note that at no point in time did I say "Yes, I want you to install gazillions of useless packages that will fill up my hard drive". When I chose "Yes", I thought I was saying "Yes, I want to choose optional packages to install".

What a crap summary

[Richard Jones]

Apart from the link to the OP, there was *zero* useful information in that post summary about WHAT THE HELL AUTOMATIX IS!

ATI drivers?

[rsilvergun]

any script that could make it easy to get those installed (and maybe warn you if you're missing/have extra kernel modules) would be worth it's weight in gold. Even the oss ones are a bit of a pain if you compile your own kernel ( remembering the right mix of modules to get it all working).

Re:ATI drivers?

[Attrition_cp]

I have an ATi card and I agree with you. I don't have Ubuntu on right now, but I just check EasyUbuntu and it has an option to install the ATi drivers. But I've tried to get them working before, and something about a little option button seems a little to easy for those bears..

Re:ATI drivers?

[ZephyrXero]

I'm not sure how EasyUbuntu's ATI driver installation would mesh with a custom kernel...but I know it works pretty well with the prebuilt kernel(s) that come with Ubuntu. I would perhaps install the ATI drivers with the default kernel, and then try compiling your own after you know it's working...

Re:MOD PARENT UP (more)

[Jussi K. Kojootti]

And the only support I got in the forums was, "you idiot, why didn't you [perform precaution mentioned nowhere in the install instructions]".

That is demonstrably false[*]. People honestly tried to help you. While some people did get frustrated because of your tone, no-one called you names like that. My take on this as an outsider (I'm not a regular at ubuntuforums and I didn't take part in the thread) is that you provoked people who tried to help you and refused to do what they suggested.

It's ok to say that "Distro X sucks cause it didn't work for me". Badmouthing volunteers who try to help is not.

* http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=122473

You don't get it: CLI commands are easier than GUI

[rduke15]

I had to chuckle at the image of asking a newbie to open a terminal and type that in.

The point you seem to be missing with terminal commands is this:

Nobody has to type them in. You paste them in.

I do a lot of support, and the first thing I explain to the people I work with is

1. how to open a terminal (or "Command prompt" etc.)
2. how to paste a command into it (presumably from an email I sent them)
3. how to copy the (text) screen to send it to me if needed.

It's so much easier than this endless hunting around the GUI to find the application, listen to a full explanation of what is on screen, having the user find the correct menu/tab/whatever to continue, listen to what is on the screen, etc. etc.

The GUI changes all the time, and when you have to deal with it in different languages (I have users with German, French and English systems), it is a nightmare over a phone, it takes ages, and the user gets frustrated.

With a cut/paste of CLI commands, it is simpler and faster, and user appreciate it.

Admins also constantly paste commands from web pages into the shell, because it's the easiest. Why would they suggest to users to use the hard way instead.

not quite

[Anonymous Coward]

I decided to set my friend up on Ubuntu. We will be loading windows XP on it this weekend.

Never could get the sound card to work, and it refuses to play with the DLink USB router.

Linux is great, I use it primarily myself, but it is not yet where windows is, all the pretending in the world wont make it so.

Re:not quite

[Yo Grark]

I already admitted it wasn't ready for primetime.

If you're comfortable enough to reinstall an OS, why the hell would you blow away his XP? Why not just use a LIVECD and make sure everything works for you BEFORE you inflict your pain onto your friend.

I do not quite think you're a power user my friend. If YOU're the one installing it on a friends computer, it defeats the purpose. Do you build a 2-wheel bike for someone who doesn't know how to ride them? Then give them back their tricycle and blame the bike you built? What sound card? Refuses to play with the USB router? Windows has the same problem my friend, but you probably already know that since I'm responding to an AC and your post is rated properly.

Take Care.

Yo Grark

Re:You don't get it: CLI commands are easier than

[zippthorne]

you can do the whole operation with the mouse even.

simply highlight the text to be pasted.
middle-click in the terminal window. if the command is more than one line, it'll run automatically. if it's only one line, you might have to hit the enter key..

Actually the sudo way IS the security hole...

[flithm]

First of all enabling the root account is in no way less secure than giving unrestricted sudo access to a user account. In fact it's actually quite a bit less secure if you think about it. Yeah it's handy because you don't need to su and remember TWO really strong passwords, but that's the great part of needing to su. It really makes you think about what you're doing before you do it.

But, besides that, having a passwordless root account (which is what is actually happening on your default *Ubuntu install) means that if you switch to single user mode you can gain full root access to your machine without a password.

So say you're at your buddies house who happens to run Ubuntu. He goes to the bathroom or something... you quickly reboot, boot up in single user mode (very easy to do with GRUB), set a password on the root account, reboot back into multi user mode. When he comes back you might have to make up some story about how there was some kinda weird power glitch or something and his machine rebooted, but other than that you're home free.

Go home, ssh into the machine with your new root account, create an SUID binary somewhere handy, and reset the root account back to normal. There yah go. Permanent root access on your friends hyper-secure Ubuntu machine :).

Basically doing things the Ubuntu way, is doing it the lazy way. Enhanced security via sudo is a total misnomer.

Re:Actually the sudo way IS the security hole...

[zerblat]

Yeah it's handy because you don't need to su and remember TWO really strong passwords, but that's the great part of needing to su. It really makes you think about what you're doing before you do it.

And this is different from needing to sudo how? In what way does su make you think but not sudo?

So say you're at your buddies house who happens to run Ubuntu. He goes to the bathroom or something... you quickly reboot, boot up in single user mode (very easy to do with GRUB), set a password on the root account, reboot back into multi user mode.

You can do that with any distribution if you have physical access. Just create a new user with UID 0.

Re:Actually the sudo way IS the security hole...

[biglig2]

Yes, but remember the third rule of IS security; if the bad guy has physical access to your box, you're screwed.

The first rule of IT security is you do not talk about IT security. The second rule of IT security is YOU DO NOT TALK ABOU... wait, sorry, that's wrong, the second rule of IT security is no smoking.

Aw, why aren't we allowed to smoke?

Shhh! We don't talk about it.

Re:Actually the sudo way IS the security hole...

[Anonymous Coward]

Bullshit. When someone has physical access to a machine they can circumvent all security regardless of operating systems.

You could reboot an OpenBSD machine to boot from a flash device or live CD. Replace the kernel, key config files, libraries, and userland utils with your rootkit versions, then reboot back into OpenBSD.

The same process works for any OS. The only way to protect against that kind of attack is to store checksums of your boot sector, kernel, and important libs/utils remotely, then boot from a live CD and check that nothing has been tampered with before booting from the hard disk.

Re:Actually the sudo way IS the security hole...

[flithm]

And this is different from needing to sudo how? In what way does su make you think but not sudo?

Well... obviously this is more dependant on personal psychology than anything else, but in my own experiences with using a sudo based system, it becomes second nature to use sudo. And because you're using your own password there's not that second level of thought required before you do something. PLUS you kind of get into the feeling that things ARE more secure and since you're only executing things command by command, you don't need to be so careful.

Whereas when you su... you KNOW you gotta be careful. Accidentally do something like "rm -rf dir/ *" instead of "rm -rf dir/*" and you could be ****ed :). And then there's that additional psychological level of a second password.

But having said that you're right it's not inherently more secure just for those reasons alone. Those are purely human factors, although I would argue that eventually they will affect most people in some degree or another.

The main point I was making was that going into single user mode won't require a password any more. People get around this by arguing that local access to a machine is a huge breech of security anyway, so all bets are off. But this simply isn't true. My case has a decent lock, and has a cover opening sensor. If you're super paranoid use some loctite on the screws :).

Yes this isn't total security, but basically it takes the time and effort required to locally root an Ubuntu box from zero effort and 2.5 minutes (or less) to a fair amount of effort and probably well over half an hour. Which is really a big difference if you think about it.

Ubuntu user-friendliness

[CarpetShark]

Why is Ubuntu user-friendly? Because it's Debian, and Debian has the best package installation/management system on ANY platform. It's years ahead of the rest. Problem is, most people tried Debian years ago, didn't know it was easy to install now, and also didn't know it was easy to upgrade to the latest software. So debian + an ubuntu splashscreen + the latest software makes what the rest of us know and love available to them.

Re:Ubuntu user-friendliness

[codemachine]

I still don't understand what makes apt-get years ahead of something like urpmi. Both seem to just work, and do about the same sort of thing. I don't have problems with either.

I have a feeling that most of the people who keep mouthing off about how .deb is so superior to .rpm haven't tried anything like urpmi, and are stuck with the impressions of RPM hell from many years back.

At one time apt-get was revolutionary. Now everyone has either copied its ideas (yum, urpmi, etc) or ported it to their system (or sometimes both). Some RPM based distros have used apt-get for package management for a number of years.

I imagine Ubuntu may have other benefits though, so I do intend to try it out at some point.

Re:Ubuntu user-friendliness

[Anonymous Coward]

Ubuntu is a bloody nightmare for windows-users first trying out linux. Try Kanotix or MEPIS if you want an "easy" Debian, or stick to a major commercial distro like SuSE.

I, really, cannot get what all of the hype about Ubuntu is. If noobs keep trying it, they will go back to Windows.

Issues I've found with Ubuntu include non-working floppy drives, no support most popular media types (unless you get a huge add-on package that's not included), ommision of many useful programs, problems with a second login account - the list goes on and on. Ubuntu is a significant challenge to get up to a modern, usable, OS.

Re:Ubuntu user-friendliness

[51mon]

"I still don't understand what makes apt-get years ahead of something like urpmi. Both seem to just work, and do about the same sort of thing. I don't have problems with either."

I don't think "apt-get" was ever that revolutionary in a technical sense. Coming from an HP-UX background, I was using Software Distributor, that did a lot of the things that "apt" did years ago, including clearing out superseeded packages from repositories, and such like. Okay it wasn't as "web ready", but then the web wasn't so important then.

The thing that distinguished Debian is both the quality of the packages (in terms of how well packaged, not the software contained), the variety of packages (in official archives with set standards of quality and support), and that they have long been used with reliance on the dependencies, and their automatic resolution. So when you type "apt-get install libapache2-mod-perl2" you do get the right set of packages underneath to make it "just work".

Sure the tools to do this in the RPM world have been catching up, but I doubt if you take a vanilla system minimal install with most of these distros, and type a selection of similar commands to the above, that you'll get them all to "just work" as slickly as Debian Sarge will. But that is nothing to do with the tool itself, just the data it has to work with. Although some of the RPM tools can be painfully slow (don't mention yum).

Re:Ubuntu user-friendliness

[Triffid_Hunter]

Debian (and by extension ubuntu) has always fought with me when I want to do things, especially the package manager. I find gentoo's portage works better for me. Portage allows one to customise a system a *lot* more before it descends into anything even resembling dependency hell, and one doesn't need to scour the internet for alternative repositories which, in my mind, is one of the main reasons that apt always chokes when installing more than 10 or so applications.

Note that I'm not saying debian has a poor system, just that its often completely incapable of doing things that I do on a daily basis.

I find Gentoo's longer and more involved (hence easier for those who know exactly what they want) install process is well worth it purely for its package management system, especially since debian has descended into dependency hell immediately after a fresh install every time I've touched it in the past couple of years.

Installing KDE without the crashtastic aRts? debian: requires manual compile from source. gentoo: unset a "use" flag
Use a different mpm with apache? debian: manual compile from source. gentoo: change a use; flag
Set up transcode on a headless machine without pulling in xorg (for clustered encoding)? debian: manual compile of transcode from source, and most other packages it uses too, plus some clobbering of apt so it doesn't choke. gentoo: set a couple use flags.
Samba without ldap or kerberos?
PHP with x,y and z but not a, b or c? gentoo has 108 use flags for php alone last time I checked

The list goes on...

ps: one could substitute almost any binary package based distro in the above list with the same outcome, so don't take it as a tirade singling debian out from the flock

Re:Ubuntu user-friendliness

[neonmagic]

I honestly can't see the "dependency hell" that you're talking about. If you install Sarge, and solely stick to Sarge, you won't have any issues. If you pin to Etch or Sid or Scud, the you might get issues from time to time. Wait a few days and update and it usually fixes the problem.

By the way, you can use apt-get to install source packages. man apt-get. It's very powerful, and very configurable. Maybe not as much as Gentoo, but then, Gentoo takes configurability to the ad infinitum. Overkill in my humble opinion. And, in years of using apt-get, I haven't seen it "choke". Can you define what you mean by choke?

Now, Debian and KDE. I use KDE as my desktop of choice, and 3.5 has been a total mess I admit. Now before anyone disagrees with me, consider that I've pretty much troubleshooted this reasonably well, done the usual stuff. I've been using Debian for a few years now, so not much gets me these days with stuff like this. I haven't had ARTs crash once. I've had konqueror crash, kicker (several times a day), I can't use the splash screen that I want, I can't use the Mac OS style menu bar at all (screws kicker). Networking is partially borked somewhere (God knows where, I can't figure it out), Konqueror refuses to open many sites now, or is dead slow opening them. Downloads just stall. It's a mess. It's slow, I'd rate it as being slower than a dead snail nailed to the floor. It's as buggy as hell. But I haven't had any ARTs crashes. In fact, I don't think I've ever seen ARTs crash!

I haven't used Gentoo, but it's just simply too much for me. I want a usable system, not something I have to play and tinker with. With all of these problems, and the purchase of a Canon eos1D (not supported by libgphoto2), and the purchase of Photoshop CS2 (doesn't run under WINE from what I can see), I'm returning back to Windows. I need a system that just works, and doesn't require endless fiddling, either to get it to work, or to keep it working. No Linux currently does that imho.

Cheers,

Dave

Re:Ubuntu user-friendliness

[martalli]

Debian-based distributions really are easy to maintain (as long as your stick to apt-get). Plus, the breadth of software kept on the debian repositories is unequalled by other linux distributions. If it is available for linux, its likely to be in the debian repos.

Ubuntu is a fine distro, but the appeal come from the large community around it. Great, but less popular distros like Vector don't have projects like automatix appearing out of their fandom. The enormous community also means that users of all skill levels can get help more quickly. Other distros have less help available, or it may often be tailored to certain (often high) skill levels.

Re:Ubuntu user-friendliness

[Air-conditioned cowh]

"I still don't understand what makes apt-get years ahead of something like urpmi."

Well, the package lists take too long to load in urpmi unless you remember to download the compressed version, which is an extra non-obvious step for a newbie. Then you don't get much info on each package. A better solution would be to download more detailed package info for an individual if and when you click for it rather than all n-thousand of them at once.

Also the Mandrake mirrors aren't stable. The paths on the mirrors keep playing musical chairs and the next time you use Urpmi it can't find the repositories. That means another trip to that "easy urpmi" site to try and fix it. All this nonsense should be transparent to the user. Urpmi should get a repository mirror list from _one_ place and choose the repository based on load and locality automatically. No one has to choose repositories and have them break all the time using Windows Update (although they have other problems!).

Re:Ubuntu user-friendliness

[somersault]

whoah. Weird that I'd never seen a post about use flags from a Gentoo user until 2 days after I see http://funroll-loops.org/ =p

Re:Ubuntu user-friendliness

[tolan-b]

Having used apt-rpm and yum for years on Fedora, and Yast for a month or two on Suse, the biggest advantage I found with synaptic/apt on Ubuntu was speed. Updates and installs take a lot less time.

Re:Ubuntu user-friendliness

[Anonymous Coward]

PHP with x,y and z but not a, b or c? gentoo has 108 use flags for php alone last time I checked

Oh my, that's quite dreadful indeed. Does this distribution have any major benefits that offset such disadvantages?

Sigh

[FishandChips]

Ok, good idea, kudos to the author. However, Ubuntu need to sharpen up a bit if they want to get into the corporate market and play for the bigtime, which they say they do. Using a third-party script, however useful, comes over as a bit amateur. (Some might say the strange new tangerine theme in the Dapper Drake edition comes over in the same way, but that's another story.)

Automatix sounds a good half-way house that will become better as it gets refined and polished. But the real question is why this stuff should have to be downloaded separately in the first place. I know it is not Ubuntu's fault and is common to Linux generally, but until desktop distros knock this missing multimedia and non-free apps issue completely on the head to the point where it is just history, there will still be hassles for new users. The write-up for Automatix mentions the dread word "terminal" which is enough to make plenty of new users feel queasy.

Perhaps Ubuntu should step back, stop trying to reinvent so many wheels and come up with something really new and worthwhile such as an improved apt which offers more granular choices and clearer explanations of what programs do what. If I am new to Linux and I want a suite of best of breed apps, I will still be Googling next month before I work my way through all the mysterious items thrown up by Synaptic. For example, Ubuntu installs Evolution by default. But what would I get (or lose) if I opted subsequently for Thunderbird or Sylpheed-Claws? All good programs, but it shouldn't be too hard to build some kind of "guidance" into apt to help me make some better-informed choices from a smaller list of options. The same is true of, say, Xine, MPlayer or VideoLan and many other things.

Re:Sigh

[Chanc_Gorkon]

You know I agree with you however there are certain patent holders that can swing lots of money and lawyers your direction. MP3 has a patent held by Thompson Electronics (I thing that's the name...parent company of RCA). Even though LAME andother decoders have been around a while, most Linux distros stopped including MP3 ability a couple years ago.

Also, the only way to get w32 codecs working on linux is to have the dll's installed....a company could be sued by Microsoft for including them in thier distro.

There's more reasons then those two but there's alot of "issues" just including these features in a default install....non of which Ubuntu wants to do but they sort of have to do it just so they can stay in business.

Re:Sigh

[beerorkid]

well you have some points. I agree with the above reply as well.

You have to realize that the forum is not a part of ubuntu. The forum is a contribution to the ubuntu community. It is a privately owned and run entity.

automatix is a script made by arnieboy. An individual who wanted to contribute to the linux community. I host the .deb to also help out the ubuntu community. We also host a mirror where I work for 4 different distro's, once again giving back to the linux community which has given us so much.

That is the great thing about linux. The community of users and developers do what they do to make it what it is, purely awesome.

Re:Sigh

[FishandChips]

Yes, I realize the legal position is tricky to say the least and none of this is down to Ubuntu, which cannot be expected to fight alone. However, I do wonder whether something couldn't be worked out which the whole oss community could get behind. Some of the non-free problems rather call the bluff of the big operators - whether Red Hat, Sun or even IBM - who prattle on about open source love but promptly disappear when the realities of "user-friendly" and "ease of use are mentioned.

Re:Sigh

[rusty0101]

The legal problem is especially tricky for those distributions that are attempting to be free/gratis, as well as free/libre.

Free/libre prevents you from using tools that have restrictions on their distribution. Specifically things like w32 codecs that Microsoft may very well feel comfortable giving away to anyone who can use them, but may not modify them in any way. There are often other issues, such as the software is freely available to anyone who has some other specific licence as well. None of that would be acceptable under the Free/libre distributions.

Free/gratis (free beer) has other issues. An example would be the Unisis GIF pattent restrictions that prevented people from distributing software that could create, and by some people's interpretation view, GIF images, unless a per-seat fee was paid. When you offer a Free/gratis distribution, how exactly are you supposed to pay for those per-seat fees?

None of this prevents any company who wants to go through the negotiations, pay the fees, and collect sales revenu from users, from doing so, and offering a distribution that includes everything you can imagine. Whether they would ever make enough money on the distribution to stay in business is questionable, but they can make the effort.

There are a number of people who would advise people not to purchase or use such a distribution, on the grounds that it violates some of their own lofty ideas regarding how software should be distributed. Whether any specific individual would be influenced by those arguments or not, would be up to each individual.

In any case, if you would like to try a distribution that works something like that, i.e. pretty much everything you would consider including, either is, or is a click or two away from being installed, you may be comfortable with Linspire. Just understand that the CNR service does come with a fee.

-Rusty

I don't use it because of the --force flag

[ubuntu2005]

Automatix is convenient in a newbie, but the fact it uses the --force flag makes me uncomfortable and at times it can cause breakage. So I would recommend if you are comfortable with ubuntu, just install the stuff yourself, but for newbies the pro's can outweight the con's.

Obligitory Rip

[Anonymous Coward]

..It uses a dickload of ram....

So for you, thats like, what... 4MiB?

Sorry, too open a shot not to take... ; )

Here are five ways it is better

[Pausanias]

1) Like Debian, has apt, there is so no dependency hell when you install new packages or upgrade

2) Unlike Debian, has regular releases (every 6mo or so), so you can regularly get quality-tested new software. Plus the Ubuntu unstable is usually usable three months into development.

3) Newb-friendly community; people will go out of their way to help newbs, not flame them. Yes, even if they did not RTFM. They believe that you deserve help even if you don't RTFM. Can you imagine that?

4) Plus, the forums provide an environment that newbs are comfortable in. Check out the other distro's forums and you'll see the difference. Admittedly this is tied to their considerable financial resources.

4) Most people (including myself) report superior hardware detection to Fedora/Suse. On my laptop it detected everything perfectly. I am not sure how it compares to Debian.

5) They will mail you a free CD. Anywhere you are in the world. And the whole distro fits on a single CD. It truly aims to be a universal distribution, for everyone. The whole community treats itself/Linux as gospel to be spread, especially to Win users, which I think is a good thing but you may not.

Re:Here are five ways it is better

[Dolda2000]

I'm not the GP, but I still don't quite get the point.

1) Like Debian, has apt, there is so no dependency hell when you install new packages or upgrade

People keep bringing this up, but I never understand it. In what distro does one actually experience dependency hell these days? Using RPM on FC without using it through yum would be just as wise as using dpkg on Ubuntu without using it through apt. I don't know about Mandriva or Suse, but I'd be guessing that that's what urpmi and yast do. Portage certainly handles it well on Gentoo.

2) Unlike Debian, has regular releases (every 6mo or so), so you can regularly get quality-tested new software. Plus the Ubuntu unstable is usually usable three months into development.

On the other hand, that is true for FC as well, and I don't think anyone has ever recommended Debian to newbs. Admittedly, I don't know how Suse or Mandriva does in this regard, though.

3) Newb-friendly community; people will go out of their way to help newbs, not flame them. Yes, even if they did not RTFM. They believe that you deserve help even if you don't RTFM. Can you imagine that?

4) Plus, the forums provide an environment that newbs are comfortable in. Check out the other distro's forums and you'll see the difference. Admittedly this is tied to their considerable financial resources.

OK, that is cool, but I have to wonder: How large percentage of newbs go to the forums anyway? I can't say I know, but I just can't imagine it to be too large a ratio.

4) Most people (including myself) report superior hardware detection to Fedora/Suse. On my laptop it detected everything perfectly. I am not sure how it compares to Debian.

Well, I've experienced that as well, but I've experienced the opposite as well. Just as often as Ubuntu handles something which FC doesn't handle, FC seems to handle something else which Ubuntu doesn't. In my experience, they're pretty much tied in this area.

5) They will mail you a free CD. Anywhere you are in the world. And the whole distro fits on a single CD. It truly aims to be a universal distribution, for everyone.

Last I installed Ubuntu, that wasn't quite true. It did install the base system from one CD, but then it got the rest from apt, which obviously requires Internet access. I'd imagine that might be quite a problem on e.g. a laptop on which it doesn't recognize the WiFi interface or in similar situations. Don't know if they might have changed this lately, though. I didn't really think about it too deeply when I installed 6.04 Flight 5. As for the free CD, it's definitely cool, but I for one would rather download an ISO image in less than an hour than wait for two weeks for that package to arrive from South Africa (that's about as long as it took the two times I've tried it).

On the other hand, Fedora Core has the excellent NetworkManager program, which makes it at all possible for newbs to move between different wireless networks. Ubuntu will have that in 6.04, but that isn't released yet.

If anything, I can definitely say that Ubuntu is positioning itself for the "ease of use" kind of stuff. They have definitely made headway into creating package manager front ends that are easy to use, and I absolutely adore their use of sudo instead of su. They also have graphical admin tools that I'd imagine are quite nice, but I can't say that I can truly imagine how a newb would think about them. FC seems much more targeted at the corporate desktop or Linux enthusiast to me (in other words, something which a newb can use, but not install or administrate). On the other hand, I can't say that I think that Ubuntu 5.10 has come far enough to match FC's polish. Hopefully, Ubuntu 6.04 will be better.

Re:Here are five ways it is better

[Pausanias]

People keep bringing this up, but I never understand it. In what distro does one actually experience dependency hell these days? Using RPM on FC without using it through yum would be just as wise as using dpkg on Ubuntu without using it through apt. I don't know about Mandriva or Suse, but I'd be guessing that that's what urpmi and yast do. Portage certainly handles it well on Gentoo.

Well, I don't know very much about yum. The first time I tried redhat, it was version 8. There was no yum. Upon upgrading to version 9, a lot of my files became fubar. I couldn't upgrade some apps because (through some update error somewhere) they erroneously dependended on an older version of themselves(!). That's when I swore off redhat for good, and bought a Mac. Oddly, enough, fink for os X, which uses apt, schooled me in the goodness off real package management. So when I bought a PC laptop, I went for a debian-based distro, which happened to be Ubuntu. Just goes to show you how much power first impressions have, that I didn't even consider trying an rpm based distro.

From what I've read about yum, it's about the same as apt. But does it have a supported GUI, features like version locking, and smart upgrades (conflict resolution)?

OK, that is cool, but I have to wonder: How large percentage of newbs go to the forums anyway? I can't say I know, but I just can't imagine it to be too large a ratio.

Actually, you might be surprised. There are so many people on the forums who come in saying, "OK, I know absolutely nothing about Linux, but I'm ready to ditch this windows thing. Help me." Often they are the sort of people you and I can't stand to deal with---refusing to understand instructions, for example. But the forums denizens seem to be very patient with them. More often than not, even the most difficult newbs seem to get somewhere near where they want to go. On the other hand, Fedora Core has the excellent NetworkManager program, which makes it at all possible for newbs to move between different wireless networks. Ubuntu will have that in 6.04, but that isn't released yet. Yes, their current network manager is pretty user-unfriendly, isn't it? It would be nice if they upgraded to a more intuitive one. However, as of Dapper Flight 5 I didn't see any changes in the network manager, but maybe I'm looking in the wrong place?

If anything, I can definitely say that Ubuntu is positioning itself for the "ease of use" kind of stuff. They have definitely made headway into creating package manager front ends that are easy to use, and I absolutely adore their use of sudo instead of su.

Yes, I'm addicted to sudo now (thanks to OS X, actually). And the synaptic package manager is a wonder to use.

They also have graphical admin tools that I'd imagine are quite nice, but I can't say that I can truly imagine how a newb would think about them. FC seems much more targeted at the corporate desktop or Linux enthusiast to me (in other words, something which a newb can use, but not install or administrate). On the other hand, I can't say that I think that Ubuntu 5.10 has come far enough to match FC's polish. Hopefully, Ubuntu 6.04 will be better.

Well, yes, I can't imagine redhat allowing a vulnerability like the cleartext admin passwords in the log files to pass through. That was pretty embarassing for Ubuntu, I can't say that people will forget about that any time soon.

My feeling about Ubuntu is that they are taking the opposite path of redhat. They are not really targeting themselves at businesses. But they are not targeting just newbs, either. Look at EdUbuntu, the educational version of the distro. I think Ubuntu sees itself becoming a free mac alternative. That is, they want to be the non-mac alternative to Windows inside people's homes, their schools, and their libraries. With names like Breezy Badger and Dapper Drake, they're not really making a huge effort to appeal to CEOs, are they? But names like this do appeal very much so to younger people who use their home PCs as their chief news/entertainment source.

Re:Here are five ways it is better

[angrykeyboarder]

"People keep bringing this up, but I never understand it. In what distro does one actually experience dependency hell these days? Using RPM on FC without using it through yum would be just as wise as using dpkg on Ubuntu without using it through apt. I don't know about Mandriva or Suse, but I'd be guessing that that's what urpmi and yast do. Portage certainly handles it well on Gentoo."

Right before I wrote this I attempted to install GNUStep in Debian Sid.

# apt-get install gnustep
Reading package lists... Done
Building dependency tree... Done
Some packages could not be installed. This may mean that you have
requested an impossible situation or if you are using the unstable
distribution that some required packages have not yet been created
or been moved out of Incoming.

Since you only requested a single operation it is extremely likely that
the package is simply not installable and a bug report against
that package should be filed.
The following information may help to resolve the situation:

The following packages have unmet dependencies.
gnustep: Depends: gnumail.app but it is not going to be installed
Depends: viewpdf.app but it is not going to be installed
E: Broken packages

That looks like dependency hell to me. No dpkg APT, as in apt-get.

I've had this kind of thing happen on Debian, Ubuntu and on SUSE (And on Fedora a few years back with YUM or APT).

Re:Here are five ways it is better

[Anonymous Coward]

My feeling about Ubuntu is that they are taking the opposite path of redhat. They are not really targeting themselves at businesses. But they are not targeting just newbs, either. Look at EdUbuntu, the educational version of the distro. I think Ubuntu sees itself becoming a free mac alternative. That is, they want to be the non-mac alternative to Windows inside people's homes, their schools, and their libraries. With names like Breezy Badger and Dapper Drake, they're not really making a huge effort to appeal to CEOs, are they? But names like this do appeal very much so to younger people who use their home PCs as their chief news/entertainment source.

They do actually seem to be targeting businesses with this upcoming release. It has been delayed to add polish since this is the first enterprise class release, also it is to be supported for 3 years on the desktop and 5 years as a server. Don't forget that the names they use are just codenames and aren't mentioned in the final release aside from /etc/apt/sources.list, so the CEOs needn't see these names unless they do a bit of research for themselves.

Re:Here are five ways it is better

[tbuskey]

1) Like Debian, has apt, there is so no dependency hell when you install new packages or upgrade

I call bullshit on this issue. It's FUD pure and simple. There are many reasons to like Debian vs Redhat but the packaging isn't it. It's the repositories and update managers that wrap the packages

Debian has .deb packages and apt to manage updates.
Mandriva has .rpm packages and rpmdrake.
Fedora has .rpm packages and yum.
Redhat has .rpm and didn't have anything until recently: up2date. That got abandoned for yum.
Solaris has SysV.4 packages and ummm... :-( (one reason to prefer linux to solaris)

If you stick to the official repositories, you don't get the dependency hell. If you start installing packages from elsewhere, you deserve what you get. And this will start happening with .deb based distros unless the packagers keep things in sync with the official repros.

This isn't a bash on debian. I have Ubuntu on my laptop and desktop after using Fedora (3 & 4), Mandrake, RedHat, Slackware, SLS and Solaris in the past. rpmdrake and yum are great tools that give similar function to apt. And while I have had dependency hell, it was always when I tried other repositories and didn't have something like apt or yum or rpmdrake managing it.

Re:Here are five ways it is better

[Knuckles]

I attempted to install GNUStep in Debian Sid.

Um, Sid is called "unstable" exactly for the reason that its packages are in flux and dependency issues might occur. Try the stable version.

Re:Here are five ways it is better

[ZephyrXero]

If you installed from one of the "flight" releases (aka development snapshot), then yes...it will attempt to download the latest packages for things during installation, but if you install from a final release CD it will not download anything during the install (or at least that's how it's worked for all the prior versions). I'm pretty sure that if you were not connected to the net during installation that it would have just went with the versions found on the disc. So no, the net is not required.

Re:Here are five ways it is better

[thedletterman]

"As for the free CD, it's definitely cool, but I for one would rather download an ISO image in less than an hour than wait for two weeks for that package to arrive from South Africa (that's about as long as it took the two times I've tried it)."

Not everyone in the world has broadband internet access and can download an iso in less than an hour. i've only got a 264k line here in the middle east, and they probably miled me the cd faster than I could download it. Just because it's not the best option to mail for some people, doesn't mean the option should not be available to anyone. I wouldn't have switched to a linux desktop if it hadn't been for Ubuntu's free cd offer.. and neither would 2 people I know. They sent me 20 CDs, and got 3 new users. That's not a bad marketing return if you ask me.

Some words on the installer and Easy (K)Ubuntu

[ickeicke]

Kubuntu (and i am pretty sure Ubuntu too) will have a graphical installer for the live cd; Espresso It will even include a GUI tool to resize and edit partitions and the default option is no longer to format the entire harddisc.

And when Automatix is concerned, EasyUbuntu has the advantage of being able to install ATI drivers (or at least they claim so) and it works for Edubuntu and Kubuntu too (though unsupported).

But you to get it to work on Kubuntu, you need some Gnome packages, so you might want to take a look at Easy Kubuntu :) .

And lastly, some explanation about all these install-apps by (one of) the maker(s) of Easy Ubuntu:

keyes
11-15-2005, 04:10 PM

If you use Kubuntu please use Easy Kubuntu (created by Olwin and Anbreizh from Ubuntu-fr in collaboration with me, they help me creating Easy Ubuntu and I help them to create Easy Kubuntu, source code is very similar). Automatix is a fork of Easy Ubuntu written by arnieboy (from ubuntuforums). Automatix is more complicated but have more features than Easy Ubuntu, it's the good choice for advanced users. Begginers must use Easy Ubuntu, it's a very easy way to set up correctly Multimedia, web and other needed things. Easy Ubuntu is very safe and don't change the default applications and behaviors of Ubuntu.

Yea.... I tried that

[RoboSpork]

My Bro's laptop has a hard drive die, so I replace and put ubuntu on with automatix, walk him through it, load him up with all the software he thought he might like initially, and away I go. The next day he tries to start it up and do some web browsing, gets stuck, and hasnt touched it since, despite my chiding. Non-computer people simply dont want to change. They are too used to windows and any change is percieved as too much hassle for not enough benefit. Heck, I even warmed him up with FireFox on his desktop windows machine before doing the switch, he uses firefox, but he just isnt interested in "learning" linux, despite me telling him repetadly there is practically nothing to learn.

Not just for the beginners

[krazikamikaze]

I downloaded Automatix and used it to install a few things, but I didn't use their GUI. I just went through the script and manually executed the commands that installed the components I wanted. I heard a lot of things about how Automatix can screw up your system, but this way I knew exactly what it was doing, and it really didn't take that much more effort than the GUI.

I think the best part of Automatix is it's basically an aggregation of procedures to install the most popular non-standard components. Instead of making a google search and spending 15 minutes copying commands from a howto, I can just copy a whole block from the Automatix script. I highly recommend it even if you're experienced with linux. Just give the script a once-over to make sure you're ok with what it's executing.

Re:Not just for the beginners

[Anonymous Coward]

The use of --force basicly ruins this package. Use Easy Ubuntu or Easy Breezy!

Junkware Unite!

[jonadab]

According to the article, it installs, among other fine jewels, Flash (just in case you *like* gratuitous blinky flashy animations), "several file sharing programs" (no doubt along the lines of KaZaA and its ilk, just in case your computer was previously performing too responsively for your tastes), RealPlayer (my vote for Most Heinous User Interface Design Ever, and that's in addition to its undisputed status as nagware of the most persistent kind), and, umm, "more". At the rate the list was going so far as it was stated, I can only assume that "more" is largely composed of utterly superfluous dross.

It does also install a couple of potentially useful things, such as Java. Also, Opera, which comes in handy if you create any web pages and want to test them out in multiple browsers, since Opera uses a different rendering engine than anything else and so is always good to include in such test batteries.

Then there's "an ftp client". I'm quite sure that Ubuntu comes with several of those right out of the box, so maybe they just had to pad the list out a bit. I'd be curious to know which ftp client it installs, and whether it's decently usable.

Eh. All that borderline-malware is a pretty heavy price to pay just to get Java and Opera, when you could just get those things on their own and have done.

The idea of automatically installing a bunch of stuff is a good idea, but I don't much care for their list of stuff.

Re:Junkware Unite!

[chiskop]

You do, of course, have the choice of which of the jewels you would like to install. Nobody is forcing Realplayer on you. I don't remember seeing KaaZaa on the list of options.

The ftp client is gftp. It is reasonably usable.M

As others in the thread have said, if you know what you're doing there are maybe better ways of doing it. If you're new to ubuntu, and linux in general, then automatix can be invaluable for enabling mp3 and various firefox plugins.

Re:Junkware Unite!

[jonadab]

> You do, of course, have the choice of which of the jewels you would like to install.

Ah. Well, that's good.

Re:MOD PARENT UP (more)

[Anonymous Coward]

Looking at that thread, I've got to say that's a pretty shitty attitude you had. But let's forget that for a minute, and look at this:

When Linux users actually *see what it's like* from a newcomer's perspectives, maybe they'll "get it".

Are you under the impression that there aren't any Linux users who started out as "newcomers"? I suppose you've been a goddamn computer genius since the first day you touched a Windows computer? Or does that not count since you had to learn about it so long ago?

growing???

[globaljustin]

from the article summary:

"With the growing amount of talk on the usability of Linux for beginners"

What??? Isn't that the biggest argument against using Linux, etc. since techies first started showing others Linux?

I know every thread I've seen involving 'why isn't linux used more' the argument usually focuses on the difficulty for non-hobbyists to get started adn use programs they are familiar with.

Also, from personal experience, when my friend first showed me his Linux machine, the first thing i thought was, "Who has time to learn all this new software when the benefits aren't worth the effort?"

Just the fact that someone thinks that the 'usability' issue is new/growing proves that techies are way out of touch with what day to day end users are thinking.

Re:growing???

[Anonymous Coward]

-1 Meaningless Anecdote/Utter Incoherency

Why modded funny? Basically true...

[cyxxon]

...that is what I really think about Ubuntu as well, and I have both Debian (my machine) and Ubuntu (girlfriends machine) here in our flat. The packaga manager is just different than Debians, the installer is the same, and well, the preselection of apps was a little more thorough than in sid. But I also had to install a lot of extras (what is now done by Automatix), so I also do not see what the real fuzz is, especially compared to recent SuSE offerings for example (running on machine of my girlfriends mum).

Better Options for Ubuntu Than Automatix

[Geekrob]

There are a couple of other options that have worked for me, I had some issues with Automatix.

If you are using Breezy try out Easy Ubuntu http://www.ubuntuforums.org/forumdisplay.php?f=86/ . Installed on about 5 machines with almost no problems.

If you are using Dapper try out BUMPS http://www.ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=13888 9&highlight=bumps/. I have a lot of success with this. The author (Ian Alexander) is always soliciting suggestions and has nade quite a few updates in just the last couple of weeks.

Re:Better Options for Ubuntu Than Automatix

[nuzak]

It's also worth noting that the authors of these respective applications have far and away more maturity, professionalism, and just plain clue than the author of Automatix.

http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=122797

See for yourself.

Re:Better Options for Ubuntu Than Automatix

[beerorkid]

if you have followed the progress of automatix you will know that many attacks have fallen on the creator of the script. Some for justifiable reasons, some just plain mean. As with any script it has continuisly grown and adapted. We all know peaceful constructive critisim is the best way to solve issues. Acceptance of acusations and humility helps the process as well. Most if not all concerns have been adressed and fixed. The other offerings that are the focus of this thread are very good as well. They have taken some hints from automatix. Remember that arnieboy has contributed to the community that encompases the spirit of ubuntu. It almost seems a shame that he tries to help peeps, yet gets blasted for doing so.

Re:Better Options for Ubuntu Than Automatix

[cerberusss]

more maturity, professionalism, and just plain clue than the author of Automatix.

That may be true but let's not forget he does his best and is among the few that made a nice contribution to the community.

Re:Better Options for Ubuntu Than Automatix

[Anonymous Coward]

If you are using Dapper try out BUMPS. I have a lot of success with this. The author (Ian Alexander) is always soliciting suggestions and has nade quite a few updates in just the last couple of weeks.

Ian Alexander here. I'm really flattered that you recommend me so highly. Thanks!

It's also worth noting that the authors of these respective applications have far and away more maturity, professionalism, and just plain clue than the author of Automatix. http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=122797 [ubuntuforums.org]

Well, Arnieboy's come under fire for decisions he's made regarding licensing, and he tends to get a lot of flack for his temper, which I've seen to be pretty short at times, so I think he's got reason for being just a wee bit paranoid when it comes to Automatix. But I have a lot of respect for Arnie regarding his script and his dedication to maintaining it, as well as his neverending efforts to bring some pretty fun and useful tweaks to Ubuntu. Cheers, and many thanks for Automatix, Arnie!

Re:MOD PARENT UP (more)

[19thNervousBreakdown]

So yeah, I just read that forum thread, and although nobody was successful in solving your problem, the main thing that I got out of it is that you're a douchebag. It's OK, but you're not wanted here. We don't lose anything if you go away, so just ... go. Dell will suck your dick to get your money, go play with them. You seem to enjoy being abusive to people trying to help you, and they have people that get paid to take it and fired if they bite back. It's really the best thing for all of us.

Re:MOD PARENT UP (more)

[fader]

Wow. I actually felt bad for you before I read the linked thread. There are very few people in the world who truly are jerks to the core of their being. I think you're one of them.

Better luck next time

[Enrique1218]

The second she mentioned command-line was when Automatix died as an easy to use tool for the average. My sister can't even configure networking in Windows or update her virus scan, yet she is suppose to bring up the command-line. Ok, I have been reading slashdot for years and Linux has been over-optimistically touted as the alternative to Windows year after year. Yet, we are in 2006 and Linux is still just a hacker OS. What is the hold up? Ease of use by itself won't bring users but Linux has to claim that before it even tries. Oh well, better luck next time

Linux/Apple for coorporate desktops

[ahave]

My experience is, that the main reason for switching to XP from 2000 is for the familiarity of the users. Apart from not being supported/updated at some point in the near future, there's really no good reasons for a switch to XP.

For that reason, I reject the coorporate focus on computer desktop OS's and the focus on what companies want on their computers. It's not a question of security, and if it was a question of compatibility and standards, everyone would be using Apple or Linux.

As I see the twist, the hole coorporative element evolves around what their employees are accustomed to. Whatever a SA wants to run as a server, doesn't depend on their desktop OS's.

Sure point and click works out great on MS server and even better on Apple's, but most SA's uses scripts anyway. So it really doesn't matter what the server OS is.

Ubuntu is a nice step for Linux desktops, and I've switched myself, without being fanatic about it. It just suits my needs better than any other OS's I've tried.

The switch was even easier, with the help of automatix, I could get my daily routines working out of the box, with allmost no prior experience. It's not there yet, but the new version Dapper Drake 6.04(6.06) is even more userfriendly. At the moment you can actually boot the live cd and make a complete installation, while surfing the web, writing emails or whatever you want to to from the live cd, then restart and have a fully working Ubuntu system, dualboot or not.

There's even a script that will install most of the necessary things to get you going called bumps available on ubuntuforums, since automatix doesn't support Dapper. Still got the -force option though.

My point is, if the majority make a switch, the coorporate system will aswell. Theres pro's and con's about everything. It doesn't matter what the OS would be. And I'm pretty sure desktop OS has nothing to do with the choice of any company. If their users don't feel at home using it, they will switch.

Xgl and compiz could be the beginning of a complete new era of graphics on our desktops, and MS/Apple can hardly be expected to keep up with this progress, since so many very skillfull people help maintaining Linux. I've tried Linux many times since 1996 in various distros, but I have never seen such a helpfull community as the ubuntuforums. And I've never seen such a fascinating desktop system, as the combination of Xgl and compiz.
/ahave

Gentoo

[Anonymous Coward]

True gentoo isnt fast because you compile everything from scratch. Gentoo is fast because you only compile and install what you need. And you configure the binaries to exclude ram costly elements you dont need. I had a built to task Gentoo terminal server loading into KDE at only 35mB of ram used for the first session and 20mb for additional

Don't Believe the Hype... says the great rap song.

[Quash]

First things first. Automatix is aggressively marketed and I'd be careful of the hype. But, in fairness, the person who does it is also very accessible and is quick to work out bugs, so he deserves credit on those fronts. Ubuntu Guide at EasyLinux I prefer the new Ubuntu Guide at http://easylinux.info/wiki/Ubuntu. It is a simple command-line driven guide that *anyone* can contribute to and which gives you all the same options, if you want to do the apt-get work yourself. Instructions are easy to follow and by the end of it, you know what you've installed, how you did it and, if you'e a newbie, will feel they've learned a lot without much effort. EASYUBUNTU If you prefer the "Just Works" approach and don't care about learning a little about Linux, Apt and the command line (nothing wrong with that, so ignore the Linux snobs that say criticize you) I'd suggest trying EasyUbuntu instead of Automatix at http://easyubuntu.freecontrib.org/. UBUNTU IS NOT THE MOST USER-FRIENDLY SYSTEM OR THE MOST REFINED LOOKING I use Ubuntu. I love Ubuntu. But, Ubuntu is no easier to install than Fedora or SuSE. In fact, I'd argue they are easier to install and more complete in their installation options. As well, they are slicker and more professional at the intallation level and on the desktop... by a longshot. They are far more refined. Anyone who disputes this is probably caught up in the Ubuntu hype a bit too much. It's the trendy distro of the moment. Don't underestimate how that clouds people's perception of it. But, I prefer Debian-based systems, so have gravitated to Ubuntu and left Fedora and SuSE, although both were better a recognizing and setting up my monitor and printer. And I say the above as someone who loves Ubuntu.

New User and Automatix

[kmansfield]

I just installed Ubuntu on an old box and I have been impressed by how easy it is to use versus Linux a few years ago. From what I could tell Automatix did not screw anything up. My biggest hassle was trying to get a Wifi card to work. All my hardware was recognized and worked out of the box except this card and it was a real hassle to get it working. Other than hardware not being recognized during the installations I don't see any big obstacles from non technical people using it. The Synaptic Package Manager makes installation of other software easy. I expect to have some learning curve switching to a new operating system. It is not like Windows installations always go smoothly. On my first XP install I had to unplug all of the USB devices and plug them in one at time to get them to work properly.

Re:MOD PARENT UP (more)

[Blain]

Sounds like they did you a favor to delete your more ranty stuff before the thread got slashdotted. You'd look like even more of a jerk.

I don't use Ubuntu -- I used debian-via-knoppix for about 18 months, and have recently switched to Xandros OCE and I'm reasonably happy with it.

From reading over the thread, it looks as though you had the expectation that the people who gave you the software for free were obliged to provide you with the answers to all of your demands for support sight unseen. This is the place where the problems in the thread came from.

Mind you, I know what it's like to ask a simple-sounding question and get a brief and obscure answer -- or a very ugly answer (like "back up your homedirs, format your hd, and do a fresh install with stable or testing" that I got on irc last month). It's frustrating. Part of where it comes from is not yet knowing enough to be able to ask the question which, when answered, will give you the information you need to fix the problem you've got. That's you, and that's me. I'm learning pieces as we go, and the learning curve isn't a lot of fun, but the nice thing about *nix stuff is that the things that you learn stay true (if not, always, relevant), as opposed to proprietary stuff, where the paradigms can change much more drastically and things you once knew have to be unlearned with annoying frequency.

However, when you're asking for free help, you need to remember that there isn't anybody there that has a stake in you fixing your problem. Not everybody who could answer your question chooses to hang around in those forums, and not everybody who does is going to give you the answer you want in the form you want to hear it. If you're not paying for their time, it is unreasonable to expect them to show a good customer service attitude. You're not a customer.

Now, some things you might have learned from this situation:

1) It's a smart idea to know where your Windows install CD is, especially when you're going to try something major with your system.

2) It's a smart idea to have a Knoppix CD on hand when you try something major with your system.

3) Having more than one physical HD in a system makes it a little non-standard, and standard answers might need a little tweaking to work right. The person who wrote the manual may not have taken the details of your situation into account, so this is something to research prior to trying to set things up on it.

4) The Thumper Principle works really, really well when asking for free help from strangers who have no reason to like you or do anything nice for you: If you can't say something nice, don't say anything at all. That's hard to do when you're really frustrated. In the words of Eric to Corey, "Life's hard, little brother. Get a helmet." Or, if you prefer "Life is pain, princess. Anybody who says otherwise is selling something." That which doesn't kill you will make you stronger, and you're not dead yet. Being nice to people is just generally a better idea when you have nothing to offer them that they need in return.

Not sure which, if any, of those lessons you have or will learned, but those jump out to me. I hope you've worked through the problem somehow by now.

JRE update

[giorgosts]

When could they make a script that updates JRE regularly and removes the old version? There are so many things that depend on that, like Azureus, Firefox, Limewire, databases, etc. The February version of Automatix installs the _05 update while the new one released from sun 3 months ago is the _06. Sure you can install the script Sun provides but the computer doesn't always know the correct version...

Re:MOD PARENT UP (more)

[Anonymous Coward]

Wow, I meet a lot of people but I have to say that you are one of the most unpleasant people I have ever have the displeasure to encounter.

Removing apps installed by Ubuntu

[j3tt]

And for those who would like to remove the apps installed by Ubuntu ... these instructions will come in handy.

Re:Removing apps installed by Ubuntu

[j3tt]

argh .. that's what i get for not previewing. I meant "Removing apps installed by Automatix" :)

Seems like Tina's...

[Alias777]

Just blowing a lot of gas.

Automatix ... author beware!

[deek]

What's the bet on how long it takes Les Editions Albert René to take the author to court? They successfully did it to Mobilix, on the farcical premise that it sounds like Obelix.

Holy crud, but ain't you a whiney one...

[VendettaMF]

Just followed the links in this thread to your flames rants and generally displayed ignorant behaviour on ubuntuforums.

If you spoke like that to paramedics after being run over you'd be rolled to the gutter and left there.

Re:Holy crud, but ain't you a whiney one...

[greenrd]

You must be confusing me with someone else.

Re:Holy crud, but ain't you a whiney one...

[VendettaMF]

My apologies. I was indeed. My bad.

Re:MOD PARENT UP (more)

[killjoe]

Wow, you should not have posted that link. You are a first class asshole aren't you?

Re:MOD PARENT UP needs dd to work!

[Anonymous Coward]

You forgot one essential command when installing grub! at a root prompt you just type.... dd if=/dev/urandom of=/dev/hda1 or whatever hard drive or partition windows is on hda1,2,3.... hdb1,2,3..... This will prepare the Windows install for the correct boot of grub...without a corrected Windows boot sector Grub does not see your OS! I personally prefer slackware with lilo and a judicious use of cfdisk.

Re:You don't get it: CLI commands are easier than

[HermanAB]

Tripple click, middle click, enter

Sounds like tap dancing...

Re:MOD PARENT UP (more)

[HermanAB]

I call bull on that. No geek will ever call anyone 'you idiot'. They may call you any number of other derogatory things, but 'idiot'??? No - never - that word is simply not part of modern slang...

Kubuntu

[AutoTheme]

Dunno, didn't read, but as a linux user I have 2 modes, command line and when I use a GUI, I want something that works and supplies me with a rich pleasurable environment. To me Gnome is crap. Why use a GUI if you want simple with no frills, use the command line. I actually like Ubuntu and the premise/release cycle etc., but I prefer Kunbuntu and feel that it should be Ubuntu. For Linux to grow and make even more inroads into the Windows desktop/server environment, Linux must have a desktop distro that (at this point) is based on KDE, and a server distro that has a KDE lite (because it will be the same and familiar, low graphics that is consistent with the desktop but appeals to the server admin). -Shawn

EasyUbuntu for beginners, Automatix for pros

[mabhatter654]

Automatix really isn't for beginners. It's got too much "hard" stuff in it that most newbies don't need. It's an awsome attempt to take a really messy linux system and really make it simple to do really hard stuff like Riping and burning DVDs. Easy Ubuntu is better for just the basics. The scope is smaller so the script works a little better.

For all those newbies out there, try Easy Ubuntu first and save yourself some pain! Save Automatix after you have a little more experience. Trust me, I've installed Ubuntu on 6 boxes so far and Easy Ubuntu is a safer bet.

AMD64 anyone?

[dwater]

Automatix :
"It doesn't support Dapper, PPC, or AMD64..."

EasyUbuntu :
"...supporting all the three architectures Ubuntu supports - x86, PPC and AMD64."

Nuff said.

Re:You don't get it: CLI commands are easier than

[ArsonSmith]

Yea and my favorite way to have them do it is this:

--
command -kvl options

what ever you do don't type
rm -rf /
--
then just have them highlight the email and execute it. Works like a charm.

Featured on the Ubuntu Uncyclopedia Page

[Anonymous Coward]

Automatix, also featured on this Uncyclopedia page.

Ok, why isn't this default?

[invisik]

So, why isn't this type of setup default? It downloads all the plugins and installs everything for you. Sounds like Ubuntu needs two installations types, "Standard - Automatix with everything" and then "Detailed - advanced users"....

-m

"All modern Linux distros"

[shadow_slicer]

I agree, Linux sure is easy these days.
Why just last week I was upgrading Xorg on my Gentoo box, and only had to recompile my entire system (including kernel) and copy /usr/share/fonts/misc from a working X installation, and edit some config files.
Next week I may just see about upgrading gcc from 3.3 to 3.4.
Thank heavens I live in a modern era.

(Of course I actually like gentoo, and for most things it is simple to maintain, but some things are not quite...)

Re:"All modern Linux distros"

[HermanAB]

Well, nobody said that you *have* to upgrade X. You brought all that pleasure over yourself... :)

I don't get it...

[cursorx]

I'm a Linux newbie, and I fail to see the point of something like Automatix.

Caught up by the Ubuntu hype, I've recently set up a dual-boot machine running WinXP and Ubuntu. I had a brief experience with Mandrake a few years back, and ran into so many hardware issues that I decided to go back to Windows. My Linux virginity was lost, but I still longed for the sweet taste of Windows. I rarely boot Ubuntu (I'm just too comfy with Windows), but everything is running fine at the Ubuntu part of my HD. I've managed to install everything that I needed. By myself. Because it was so easy. As far as my needs go, everything is practically automated through apt/Synaptic. I'm still learning my way around Linux, but I'm very good at cutting and pasting and button-clicking.

That is why I fail to see the usefulness of Automatix. If you can't cut and paste a few lines or select from a menu and click a couple of buttons, you probably can't use Windows too. Hell, if you can install Automatix, you can install what Automatix installs...and if we're talking convenience here, I still don't see the point. Install things when you realize you need them...if you don't know how to do it, just Google and you'll be fine. But here's what really bothers me...

From TFA:

Once running, Automatix got my permission to access Ubuntu repositories and check for some necessary packages in one window. Then, in another window, it showed me a list of all the packages it could install for me and what they contained. I selected the ones I wanted by clicking the check box next to them. I checked everything -- what the heck, Automatix was doing all the work for me, and if something gets messed up, it wasn't my fault!

I might be missing something here due to my newbieness, but...doesn't Synaptic do exactly that for most of the programs Automatix installs? Maybe I'll have to add a repository, but so what? In the end, Automatix might even make things harder for the newbies, because it doesn't need to exist and will make people dependent on a crutch when they already have a health leg.

the emphasis is wrong!

[DottoreNova]

...."With the growing amount of talk on the usability of Linux for beginners, there have been"... Maybe if we change this sentence to: With the growing amount of talk on the usability of Linux for people whome don't care about computers, there have been... we can do it right. People don't want to LEARN to use linux ... if you trick them into a not-so steep learning curve they jump out. We need to think about the following ... why would I choose linux if I don't care about computers? or better why would I choose a volvo instead of a mercedes? what is the advantage for people to choose linux? ... trust me "open source" means nothing to them. if there is a "but" in your answer it is wrong. greetings, il dottore

No Imagination Needed

[SpectreHiro]

Actually, the original Black&White did precisely that to me last week... And never once mentioned that it was "installing" DirectX.

Electronic Arts. Giving you reasons to swear since 1982!

arnieboy rocks

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm a linux newb -- installed xubuntu, xfce, and a host of other apps with automatix. Automatix will save you loads of time. Even if you are a seasoned linux user -- think of all the stuff you have to look up and load separately. It's great -- I owe Arnieboy big time. Ubuntu installed pretty easily and the disks are free.

I've always wondered about this...

[iogan]

... but as far as I can remember, MP3 playback and DVD stuff worked out of the box on Ubuntu for me. Or did I install additional repositories and just forgot about it? I'm not 100% on DVD, but I'm pretty much sure MP3 always used to "just work".

Or is it possible Ubuntu stick those things into distro's that are going outside of the US by default?

Anyway, I don't think getting the stuff automatix does manually is necessarily that hard, but I can't say that I didn't use it myself last time I set up a box...

Re:MOD PARENT UP (more)

[Jussi K. Kojootti]

LeonGeeste, "trying to help" is not the same thing as "being good at helping" or "succeeding at helping". That is not a difficult concept, and I think you actually do understand it but just want to argue... Those people truly tried, and used their time hoping it would benefit you. What did you do? You acted argumentatively and did not respect their work at all.

Look at the comments in this thread. Look at the moderations you're getting -- of course it's possible that all of these people are wrong, and you alone are right, but maybe you should consider the alternative too.

WiFi Advantage

[gadago]

I would agree that Ubuntu is not leaps and bounds ahead in a user-friendly way. The one real difference between Ubuntu and other distros I have tried (Fedora, Suse, Debian), is that it's the only one to have successfuly detected my Wirless card (belkin pcmcia) in my laptop during installation. It also configured all the (fn) shortcut keys such as backlight dimming and volume controls.

Uh, duh

[jgoemat]

(This is something that people often seem to get confused about - open source does NOT always mean its legal)

It doesn't mean illegal. Not even as much as closed source does. How many closed source products have you seen in trouble and how many open? The only open source thing I remember is SCO's lawsuit, which I think everyone agrees is ridiculous. Also Microsoft and Sun paid them millions of dollars in "license" fees (even though 95% should have probably gone to Novell). No one's talking about those liceses, maybe SCO found something in Windows and Solaris that infringed on the copyrights they believe they have? Also, didn't Microsoft have a couple of patent problems recently?

Synaptic isn't complete, is why...

[Benanov]

Synaptic doesn't have support for 'recommends'/'suggests' yet. Aptitude does but it's ncurses.

OFFTOPIC

[wed128]

Why take a pretty good artist, especially one as influential as Kurt Kobain, and focus on his vices instead of his art?

Three Points

[hahiss]

1. See, this is what I don't get: why is it that people think that you can make up facts about ``the average joe"? This is the kind of thing one is supposed to RESEARCH---you know, find out what people actually use. Oh, wait, I forgot: making shit up is a sport on slashdot. (My average joe ported Plan 9 to the Playstation 1 while in grammar school!)

2. If your average joe values his time and his data, he's likely better served by investing some time in learning a better OS. (Have him call my average joe, who'll help him out in a jiff.)

3. Most importantly, I wasn't addressing ``the average joe" (yours or mine)---there was a specific person asking a specific question: ``I'm interested in Linux, can I use it or is it as complicated as I thought." Would I offer this advice to everyone? No. (Your average joe can suck an egg for all I care, with his bratty rug rats, his SUV, and his crushing credit debt.) Anyway, lots of things count as rewards that people do not recognize (health, freedom, wisdom, etc.); that doesn't make them fail to be rewards.

Ubuntu n00b, not using Automatix

[Risen888]

Not that I have a problem with Arnieboy, or his work; power to him. But I didn't get into Linux to have some program "do it for me," sight unseen. If I wanted that, I've still got XP on my other partition..

I want to emphasize here that I have no issue with Automatix, per se. I don't like the idea of n00bs being dependent on it, though, and I really don't like how it seems to be the standard response to n00bs on the Ubuntu forums asking for install help. I mean, what happens when, six months down the road, somebody wants to install something that isn't on Arnieboy's list? They have no practical experience installing applications in Linux, and they're lost. Again.

To summarize: I don't want a goddamn fish. Teach me.

Re:You don't get it: CLI commands are easier than

[Anonymous Coward]

The GUI changes all the time

That is the fundamental problem, and why Linux will never be ready for the desktop.

Re:You don't get it: CLI commands are easier than

[Knuckles]

Agreed about the CLI, but in the GUI use Netmeeting or VNC for heaven's sake!

Start with Knoppix

[jesterzog]

If that's what you want, I'd honestly suggest starting with something like Knoppix. That way, you can even cut out step 2. It'll also give you a chance to decide if you want to use Linux in the longer term. Knoppix lets you install it on a HDD to avoid needing a boot CD if that's what you want, but if you're serious you might then decide to install something like Debian or Ubantu over the top.

Installation might be a hiccup, but you only have to do it once. (Never, if Linux came pre-installed.) Personally I think the post-install user experience is a much more significant thing than installation, simply because if it's good enough, PC distributors will do the installation for people.

Why I switched from Debian to Ubuntu

[�berhund]

What you say is true. However, Debian has in the past gone years without getting new packages in the stable branch. That's why I switched.

What? Just run the testing branch? And get loads of new package versions every time you update. And have no guarantee of security.

I just wanted something that (1) was up to date, (2) wasn't updating constantly (once every 6 months is nice), and (3) was Debian. Debian doesn't always do so well at (1) (though the new leadership is working hard on that). Ubuntu does all that. It's not revolutionary, but it's just right.

Ubuntu on ext2 survives pwr failures

[Anonymous Coward]

Consider yourself flamed. Now that that is out of the way. Ubuntu IS revolutionary in one verrrrry important way. I used the 'warty warthog' distro and loaded it onto a partition formated 'ext2'. These partitions are notorious for crashing, trashing and burning to a crisp whenever the hosting computer loses power suddenly for ANY reason. If they are not shut down right, bye bye install. Period! I tried to burn this installation, basically. I put it on a 'pooter' and we PROMPTLY had a gullywashing sky farting thunderstorm. Shut the power down like Grant took Richmond.
    Ubuntu came back!
  My puppy then had a go at it a couple of days later when he bit the line cord...ZZAAAAPPP...YIIIPPPPPPPE....SSSIIIZZZZZZLLL LZZZZLLLZZLLLLE! Cord zipped like the proverbial ring of fire all the way to the recep.....POPPP......BBAAANNNGGGG.......breaker blew! Ubuntu and the pooter were on the other end of the cord from the recep and 6 feet away from whimpering pup who later had to go to the vet and spent the night at base of bed on MY pillow that he stole out from under my head.
      Ubuntu came back! Again! And AGain! And
                                        Again. Never saw anything like it. It refused to die on ext2.
    It also does something that no other distro has done......ever. It found all the pooters on the local area network whether they are running windows or linux and was able to access and/or trade files with them. ALL the OTHER distros can do is bleat plaintive error messages stating that the 'samba daemon' needed to be started by the 'system administrator'. Of course the error message being the friendly sort it was, refused to name the filename of the 'samba daemon'. Since there are about over a hundred thousand files in one of my typical SuSE installs, this was thanks for NOTHING. Looks like I'll start using more Ubuntu and/or Debian or Red Flag now seeing as Novell has been busy crapping up my usual favorite, SuSE. But then Novell was always good at making a sow's ear out of a silk purse. What Novell should do is sell SuSE back to those that cared for and nurtured it and repatriate it to a freedom loving country, GERMANY!....or better yet France. The French have been good at putting down the DRM boys lately. Viva La France! Viva Ubuntu!

It sets up Radeon 8500s right

[rsilvergun]

that makes it more user friendly in my book. Slack, Vanilla Debian, Knoppix harddisk all choked on it. I didn't want the hassle of Fedora (custom packages and all that). I'm still a slackware user myself, but for my friends box, when he wanted linux, Unbuntu was the only thing that didn't screw up his 8500. And I'm talking about 2d accel (dvds and video clips), 3D wasn't even an issue.

Now if something can just be done about the mess that is multichannel audio in linux (and pcs in general frankly), I'll be one happy camper.