Looking Forward, Ubuntu Linux 6.06

SilentBob4 writes to tell us that Mad Penguin has an interesting look at the upcoming version of Ubuntu. From the article: "All in all, Ubuntu 6.06 is gearing up to be quite an impressive release. Granted, I saw some bugs during my stay on the distribution, but can I really complain? It's not a full release, so it deserves some breathing room. Considering some of the horribly authored software I've looked at over the years, I feel that Ubuntu in pre-release form is more stable than other distros when they reach final release status. It's not quite in the league of Slackware and Red Hat/Fedora in that respect yet, but it's surely getting there in a hurry. As I said before, it smoked Fedora Core 5 performance-wise, so in that department it's solidly ahead."

Comments

*Really* Mad Penguin

[Anonymous Coward]

digged and slashdotted on the same day.

Re:*Really* Mad Penguin

[something_wicked_thi]

Tell me about it. I tried to read this on Digg earlier but it was dead. I just got the first page, but it was dead again before I got to the second page. At least the Coral Cache seems to be working now.

Re:*Really* Mad Penguin

[EnsilZah]

Wouldn't 'dugg' be a more appropriate word?

"smoked"

[The AtomicPunk]

Sure, you said it - but where are the benchmarks?

Re:"smoked"

[subStance]

Agreed ... I tried first Fedora Core 5 and then Dapper Drake flight 6 on the same hardware not a week ago, and after 2 or 3 hours of Ubuntu gladly switched back to Fedora. There was no appreciable speed difference at all, and if anything the poorer driver auto-detection (rumours of it being better were why I tried it in the first place) and x86_64 package availability was enough to send me back to Fedora.

I guess for every "in the wild" example there's a counter-example ...

Re:"smoked"

[icydog]

TFA also mentioned that Ubuntu "beat the shit out of Fedora" in terms of the package management GUI. Unless the package manager in Ubuntu does some really cool things that Fedora's stock yum frontends can't do (install, remove, groups, dependencies...), how can it beat really beat the shit out of anything?

He also said Ubuntu looks very professional while the latest Fedora looks like a circus act. Come on, now. Based on screenshots, Ubuntu and Fedora look very similar. I don't see how either looks more or less professional than the other at all. Surprise, surprise! They both use recent versions of Gnome! The only major, obvious difference is that Ubuntu defaults to orange while Fedora defaults to blue. Big deal.

By the way, I admit that I use Fedora daily, so I might (cough) be a little biased.

Re:"smoked"

[a.d.trick]

I have a problem with news articles like this. The only information the give is either obvious or highly circumstantial. They might be ok if all computers were ever used for is to install operating system; however, some people actually like to operate the systems and do real work on them.

Betas are great, their fun to try out and see what's comming up (most of the desktop software on my computer is in the unstable '~x86' branch, and some of it is even masked). But you shouldn't don't try to draw far reaching generalizations about the distros of whatever from this.

Re:"smoked"

[norton_I]

Well, I use both fedora and debian (but not yet Ubuntu) and I can say that while yum has made great strides since FC1 (when it was essentially unusable), debian kicks the shit out of fedora in this respect. Primarily this is the advantage of having what amounts to a HUGE core -- almost any free package I ever looked for was available from the standard debian repositories. Even counting extras fedora has a relatively small base of pakcages, and they have consistently abandonded older packages that some of us still use. Thus a fedora user must add a number of alternate repositories, which can frequently have package name conflicts with each other and from one release of core to the next.

Even within core+extras I have had to manually resolve conflicts with rpm when upgrading from one release to the next. It has been a long time since I have come up against an upgrade that couldn't be resolved by apt with no help, or at most using "dist-upgrade" instead of "upgrade".

Again, I haven't used Ubuntu, so I don't know how much of this applies to that comparison, but I would say it is definately possible to soundly beat fedora on package management.

Also, apt-get continues to be way faster and use way less memory. When I recently upgraded a system to FC5 and upgraded 100+ packages from extras the transaction check thrashed the machine to death (with 512 MB RAM) and still took over and hour after upgrading to 1 GB RAM (On a dual Athlon MP). apt-get has never done than even on much less powerful systems.

Re:"smoked"

[Anonymous Coward]

this was my experience exactly. kubuntu couldn't figure out a working X config, so i had a cli login greeting me after install. and a text based installer in 2006? anyway, fc5 recognized everything right off the bat and was a joy(!) to install.

Re:"smoked"

[ObsessiveMathsFreak]

Unless the package manager in Ubuntu does some really cool things that Fedora's stock yum frontends can't do (install, remove, groups, dependencies...), how can it beat really beat the shit out of anything?

Well, considering that Fedora's stock yum frontends can't do anything at this current time, that shouldn't be a problem.

Yum is an ongoing disaster. Inferior to apt in every single facet of its conception and design. It can't even do dist upgrades. It's also a huge resource hog. Up2date regularly hangs and crashes, so it would be easy for any apt frontend to surpass all this.

I've used Fedora since FC2 and I have to say that my biggest complaint throughout has been the woeful package management system. Quite frankly, just using plain rpms is often faster than trying to coax yum to work. If fact, the workaround for a lack of a dist-upgrade option is to use rpms.

Like a stubborn mule, Fedora won't let go of yum, lest they use apt and become "another debian os". Consequently, Fedora is a great distro, with a lousy package management system. It's a real achilles heel on an otherwise great workstation OS.

Re:"smoked"

[icydog]

Well, considering that Fedora's stock yum frontends can't do anything at this current time, that shouldn't be a problem.

What? Pirut, Pup, Yumex, and something else whose name I forgot (Smart?) all work just fine. I have no idea where you got this notion that they don't do anything.

Yum is an ongoing disaster. Inferior to apt in every single facet of its conception and design. It can't even do dist upgrades. It's also a huge resource hog. Up2date regularly hangs and crashes, so it would be easy for any apt frontend to surpass all this.

Yum can do dist upgrades, but is unsupported. You install the fedora-release rpm and then do yum upgrade. I've never tried it but have heard reports that it works and that it doesn't. God forbid you might have to actually stick in a CD and click next a couple of times for a painless upgrade! Really, 40 minutes of downtime is not that bad, especially because Fedora isn't designed for use in production servers anyways. Also, you do realize that up2date doesn't exist for FC5, right?

I've used Fedora since FC2 and I have to say that my biggest complaint throughout has been the woeful package management system. Quite frankly, just using plain rpms is often faster than trying to coax yum to work. If fact, the workaround for a lack of a dist-upgrade option is to use rpms.

Yum wasn't so great until about FC4, I think. I didn't really start using Fedora since around August last year, and by that time FC4 had been out for a while. I haven't had any yum problems since then, and yes I've used it plenty of times -- I only use Fedora. For usual tasks, what can really go wrong? yum search something, yum install somepackage, and yum update every once in a while. I've never had a problem with those.

Like a stubborn mule, Fedora won't let go of yum, lest they use apt and become "another debian os". Consequently, Fedora is a great distro, with a lousy package management system. It's a real achilles heel on an otherwise great workstation OS.

Ironically, I have always thought that yum was one of the strengths of Fedora. Oh well.

Last Ubantu install went fine....

[BugDoomBug]

...I just wonder if this one will finally auto-detect the POS onboard video card in the old Gateway tower that now acts as the in house file server.

Still stuck in 640 x 480 when I actually have to plug around on it directly.

Re:Last Ubantu install went fine....

[hotair]

It's a file server. Just put a serial console on it, and stop worrying about plugging anything into it. PS: this is my first ever self-diagnosed, deliberately obnoxious slashdot post. Enjoy....

Re:Last Ubantu install went fine....

[BugDoomBug]

Tonight's typos are brought to you by the letter "A" and the alcohol "Apple Bacardi"

and the long delay is brought to you by /. flood control

Re:Last Ubantu install went fine....

[Anonymous Coward]

are you sure it's the driver? you probably just need to add the correct HorizSync and VertRefresh rates to the monitor section of your /etc/X11/xorg.conf file (manually, or by sudo dpkg-reconfigure xserver-xorg)

Re:Last Ubantu install went fine....

[Technician]

...I just wonder if this one will finally auto-detect the POS onboard video card in the old Gateway tower that now acts as the in house file server.
Still stuck in 640 x 480 when I actually have to plug around on it directly.


Instead of Ask Slashdot, download the live CD and try it risk free.

Most of my past Linux experiance has been silent because it had a hard time finding the various embeded on the motherboard sound cards. I tried the Live CD on several old machines I had and it found everything except the win-modem. I was impressed. It even runs on some of my old laptops and set the LCD for the proper resolution. I was on the net with no troble at all.

Even the fn key worked for switching monitors, hibernating, and setting contrast & brightness.

Simultaneous: Diggdot? Slashigg?

[mashade]

Alright, well the site is down within a few moments of posting up to Slashdot and Digg simultaneously. Coral Cache anyone?

Re:Simultaneous: Diggdot? Slashigg?

[Anonymous Coward]

Maybe you should just get the slashdotter extension for FF and then you would have the CC link automatically and not need to ask for the link.

Re:Simultaneous: Diggdot? Slashigg?

[larry bagina]

There's like 20 greasemonkey scripts that do that too. Why would anyone install a closed-source extension instead?

Re:What the name?

[Anonymous Coward]

Dapper Drake

Features - GCC 4?

[SillySnake]

Features

        * Linux kernel 2.6.15-18 PREEMPT
        * X.org 7.0
        * gcc 4.0.3/glibc 2.3.6
        * GNOME 2.13.94
        * Firefox 1.5.0.1 web browser
        * Evolution 2.5.92 email/groupware client
        * OpenOffice 2.0.2 productivity suite
        * Gaim 1.5.0 instant messenger
        * Gimp 2.2.10 image editor

I haven't been keeping up with the 4.0 branch of GCC, but is 4.0.3 really stable enough for the average home user?

Re:Features - GCC 4?

[ivan kk]

Since when does the average home user need to compile anything?

Re:Features - GCC 4?

[aluser]

debian etch is on 4.0.3. Ok it's not "stable" debian but it's not that cutting-edge either. I do a fair amount of coding and haven't noticed a problem.

Re:Features - GCC 4?

[Bronster]

Ubuntu Breezy (5.10) was compiled almost exclusively on gcc-4.0 (with the notable, and annoying, exception of the kernel)

It's really been very stable - I've had no trouble compiling quite a bit of C and C++ software with gcc-4.0 on both Breezy and Dapper (6.04^H6).

Re:Features - GCC 4?

[owlman17]

For the average home user, or the weekend coder even, who won't need to recompile glibc, or other shared libraries, the gcc4 branch is ok.

Re:Features - GCC 4?

[Tylerious]

Question is: is the average home user going to need GCC?

Re:Features - GCC 4?

[zerocool^]

-bash-3.00$ yum info gcc
Repository updates-released is listed more than once in the configuration
Repository base is listed more than once in the configuration
Setting up repositories
Reading repository metadata in from local files
Installed Packages
Name : gcc
Arch : i386
Version: 4.0.2
Release: 8.fc4
Size : 5.1 M
Repo : installed
Summary: The GNU cc and gcc C compilers.
 
Description:
  The gcc package includes the cc and gcc GNU compilers for compiling C
code.
 
-bash-3.00$

That's from Fedora Core 4. It's a year old now...

Re:Features - GCC 4?

[mikesd81]

Is any linux user an "average" home user?

There are alot of packages I compile, because some packages are only in .tgz format.

Unless you mean by average home user (this isn't meant to be sarcastic I'm sorry if it sounds like it is) a person who dabbles in linux or just learning or just a hobbyist?

Re:Features - GCC 4?

[xenocide2]

I'm running gcc4 on the current unbuntu stable. If you really need the older versions for compatibility reasons, they're also available. For example, nachOS by default doesn't compile on gcc4 (or gcc3.4), but 3.3 is available for my shitty needs.

Re:Features - GCC 4?

[drgonzo59]

Since when is the "average" user compiling with gcc and why do they care? The "average" Ubuntu user wants to browse the web, read email, write office documents. If those application have been tested and work fine, why should they care if it is gcc 3.x.x or gcc 99.x.x. As a developer you can probably figure out a way to get the latest/or alternatively older more stable version of gcc if you want.

Re:Features - GCC 4?

[AbRASiON]

Well here's one right here,.. me.

I can't get WPA / IPW2200 working correctly on 5.04 or 5.10 without serious cocking about with HOW-TO's etc and compiling new drivers etc.

Re:Features - GCC 4?

[!conventional]

In Linux? All the time!

Re:Features - GCC 4?

[zopf]

Let me tell you a story. When I first installed Ubuntu on my laptop, I was thrilled... everything worked so well! Of course, then I found out that the switch to turn my wireless card on or off was controlled by firmware that would be erased upon hard restart, and that I needed to download and compile the acerhk driver setup to control it from linux. No problem, I thought. I downloaded the files, opened up a terminal, and typed "make". "Command not found" etc. What?!?! That makes no sense. I understand that maybe the whole GNU compiling system makes some extra bloat on the install, but I can't imagine never having to compile anything, especially on a system that is updated so often. Worse for me, I could not connect to the internet to download the build-essentials package that I needed to get the wireless working because, well, that was the entire problem: the wireless wasn't working.

The average home user may not need to compile their own custom-written software or kernel mods, but they'll probably need to build a software package using make at some point to keep things working. Keeping an updated compiler system would not significantly hurt the average home user, and could prove a lifesaver for support later on.

Re:Features - GCC 4?

[ceeam]

Only on /. ....

GCC for "average home user"?!?! Man... do you sniff it or do you smoke it?

Re:Features - GCC 4?

[ChrisDolan]

MacOSX 10.4 was released almost a year ago with GCC 4.x as the default. I'd say that means it's stable enough. :-)

Re:Features - GCC 4?

[Anonymous Coward]

I hope FF is upgraded to 1.5.0.2 in the final release, considering the number of exploits the new version patches.

Re:Features - GCC 4?

[Anonymous Coward]

That's from Fedora Core 4. It's a year old now...

But Fedora Core isn't intended to be a "stable" distribution, it's Red Hat's beta testing distribution where they test things before they put it into Enterprise Linux. So, the fact that it's had GCC 4.0.2 in it for a year now isn't really that heartening since it could be unstable as all fuck for all we know.

Re:Features - GCC 4?

[CastrTroy]

I had this problem once with Mandrake. I had a smaller hard drive, so I opted out of installing the development packages, because I was a newbie and didn't realize what that really meant. So, first time I go to compile something, I run into the same problem. Here's the thing. It's not easy to install the "Development" stuff after the initial install. At that point, you pretty much had to figure out which 77 packages you needed and install those. Major pain in the butt. Anyway, I learned never to do that again. It's actually becoming less common now that I have to compile anything, as you add the PLF and Contrib to your sources, and you have just about everything available. But still, I don't think that any linux system should come without the development packages, especially in the days of 300 GB harddrives. I wonder if there's a way to run a configure script that will tell you what you're missing to build, and then try to install that from RPM if available. That was always my biggest problem with building from source, You'd go off on this endless trail of installing dependancies, only to get to the point where it can't find the thing you just installed.

Re:Features - GCC 4?

[somersault]

it wouldnt hurt the user, and I have in the past installed a distro where I wanted a compiler, but there was none, I assume for security purposes (think it was Turbolinux). It will make it harder for someone to compromise your system if there are no preinstalled compilers - but users should be given an option to install a compiler with Ubuntu by default (maybe there is such an option).

I just connect my PC to my wireless router with a long LAN cable, it's a bit of a stupid way to do it, but I had it lying around, and I couldnt be assed faffing around trying to get the ndiswan wrapper/whatever to work. Use the wireless for my XP laptop, but for a desktop then I'm happy to wait til someone writes drivers for my wireless card.. think it's a netgear wg311.. maybe they have already done so.

Re:Features - GCC 4?

[The Warlock]

Me neither.

On Dapper, however, it works out of the box.

Re:What the name?

[Anonymous Coward]

It's Dapper Drake. (translation: Good-looking male duck.)

User guide to linux?

[Anonymous Coward]

Is there a nice, really easy to follow user guide for newbies for linux?

I've tried installing ubuntu and knopppix a few times, but just ended up frustrated as I couldn't get sound drivers installed (I would think realtek AC97 would be popular enough) and well, couldn't really do anything without spending a massive amount of time. Now, I only gave it a couple hours each time, but this should be enough to get the gist of things (got the gist of OSX within a few minutes, and originally learned windows in about thirty minutes, not counting getting used to the mouse).

Re:User guide to linux?

[Cruian]

I found this book helpful: Linux Desktop Pocket Guide
It covers Ubuntu, Fedora Core, Gentoo, SuSe, and Madriva. It should have enough information to get what you need done.

Have you tried searching the Ubuntu forums?

Re:User guide to linux?

[smash]

Erm...

File a bug report?

Ubuntu picked up my AC97 audio automatically, both version 5.04 and 5.10.

smash.

Re:User guide to linux?

[Criterion]

You sound like you need to get laid more often.

Re:User guide to linux?

[MooUK]

In that case, if it's that easy to do, you should be able to write me a step-by-step guide to get audio working perfectly on, say, a thinkpad 390. Go on. I'm waiting.

Re:User guide to linux?

[Poppler]

This is exactly why Linux is a pile of fucking shit and everyone who uses it needs to have the goddamn dependencies manifested into physical form, then rammed up their anus till it bleeds.

Umm. If you had ever used Ubuntu (or Debian) you would know that there is no "Dependency Hell" in these distros. And I fail to see how a few people being hostile in online forums makes Linux a "pile of fucking shit". I could see how it would discourage new users, but that has nothing to do with the quality of the kernel.
Goddamn troll... why are you reading the Linux section anyway? WTF do you care about Ubuntu?

Re:User guide to linux?

[MooUK]

What makes you think I haven't tried, on and off, for the past... what, twelve or so months?

You seemed to think it was so easy; surely if it was that easy it would have taken as long to write that response.

Re:User guide to linux?

[Mad_Rain]

I know the guide is beginning to get a bit dated, but I still go back to Unofficial Ubuntu Guide now and then for some quick fixes. There's also the Ubuntu Wiki which has some more up-to-date information. I'm surprised that the sound didn't work out of the box.

Re:User guide to linux?

[spiritraveller]

Ubuntu picked up my AC97 audio automatically, both version 5.04 and 5.10.

Same here. Ditto for the Dapper Drake prerelease. Didn't have to "install" anything as far as drivers.

Re:User guide to linux?

[Anonymous Coward]

Nice troll there, Cocknozzle. But while you can barely round up a few neurons to rub together to manage an insult to the original poster, you're certainly not smart enough to be able to offer a solution, or even suggest where to start.

Re:User guide to linux?

[Anne Honime]

That's an easy one :

1. Know your hardware - there's plenty of help with google to learn what's inside your computer.
2. Stop hardware autodetection (not linux fault if the computer falsely report a sound chipset which is not the one in use).
3. Edit your modules.conf with vi to setup the correct kernel module for your sound chipset.
4. (optional) if your distro is too dumb to respect your choices, protect your modules configuration file with the +i(mmutable) attribute (again not a linux problem, but a packager's one).

Thinkpads are especialy tricky to work with, but at least they generaly behave absolutely perfectly under linux once setup correctly. I had a 390 until recently, and I managed to get *all* the functions work as under windows (including apm suspend to disk, battery report, sound etc.). Mine had no internal modem, so I didn't try to setup this. Otherwise, it was just perfect. I changed for a HP/compaq NX9005, and I found the hard way that most functions are not usable by linux - it's working "good enough", though, but if I could I'd revert to a thinkpad anyday for linux use.

Re:User guide to linux?

[Grey Ninja]

Here's the new link. :)

Re:User guide to linux?

[Anne Honime]

What makes you think I haven't tried, on and off, for the past... what, twelve or so months?

because you didn't found this ?

Re:User guide to linux?

[Anonymous Coward]

You sound like you need to get laid more often

Sounds like he'd settle for being able to poop more than once a year.

Re:User guide to linux?

[Mad_Rain]

Nice. I'll have to remember to use that in the future.

Re:User guide to linux?

[electr01nik]

I'll also suggest using /etc/modprobe.d/blacklist to prevent certain modules from loading, say for example your computer insists on loading the OHCI USB subsystem when it actually needs the UHCI subsystem. May not solve your sound problem, but could prevent a myriad of other headaches if you insist on using hardware autodetection and your computer insists on being a stubborn ass.

Re:User guide to linux?

[TheJorge]

Hey, I was in the same boat for a while. I never had the solid block of time to learn all of Linux, so I weaned myself in rather successfully by doing the following:

1) start by using win32 versions of some popular OSS for your daily or occasional tasks. You probably already use Firefox, but OpenOffice and the GIMP are good ones to put on a windows machine. Perhaps the best lessons for me at this stage were installing Apache, MySQL, and PHP, but go with whatever you use.

2) use them. Go through an upgrade or reconfiguration, and use them for your day-to-day tasks. Linux becomes a really quick thing to pick up if you're already comfortable with all the apps you'll be using. Seriously, if you have experience with all your apps, then it's just a matter of getting stuff installed and set up, and you're at near 100% productivity instead of having to learn how to format paragraphs in your word processor.

3) make your first install on a computer other than your main computer. If absolutely necessary, dual-boot your main computer, but getting set up on a secondary computer is useful for two reasons-- if something's not working correctly or you're in the middle figuring something out, it doesn't stop your day-to-day computing. Also, while you're working on one, you can be browsing the web for guides and tips on the other.

4) don't try to install every package you might possibly need at once. start with a basic setup, then add and configure apps as you have a need for them. all the big distributions have strong app-adding capabilities, so don't worry about not being able to add X after you get the box up and running.

5) three tools you should make sure you have and get familiar with-- google, man, and a text editor.

hope this helps

Re:User guide to linux?

[Anonymous Coward]

uhhh,,, I'm not sure if you have tried the latest Ubuntu distro, but I have found excellent support for hardware a given with any version. If you have so many problems installing/running Ubuntu, and cannot find answers you seek in their wiki, then please, do not try another distro. Give up, burn your CD's and throw your computer in the nearst trash can. You are beyond all hope. Before some think this is too harse, and I am just bashing a newbie, think of the problems you have had/fixed for people with other distro's. Ubuntu is miles ahead in terms of usability compared to ANY other disto. Those who can't make it work will probably never make any OS work.

Re:User guide to linux?

[wanorris]

Even better -- install it into VMWare Player and try it out running on top of Windows. You can download ready-to-go images of Ubuntu and a bunch of other distros at VMWare and try them out without messing around with installation procedures, partitioning, or anything else.

Heck, if you install Xming or Cygwin/X, you can even run Linux apps inside your Windows environment until you're ready to cut over for good.

Re:User guide to linux?

[styrotech]

My advice?

Forget about getting a perfectly working desktop system, and just concentrate on learning Linux. Don't treat the project as a plug and play Windows or Mac replacement so much as a side project learning a new (and very different) system. Linux is a rewarding and fun system with the right expectations, and the willingness to take your time learning stuff.

If you are new to *nix altogether - I would even say forget about the GUI altogether and learn Linux from the ground up with the command line (on an old surplus PC) and maybe some stuff like Apache etc. IMO learning Linux is easier from the bottom up rather than the top down. Starting with a nearly fully configured desktop is just too much complexity to take in at first.

Installing non detected drivers requires a level of skill that is much higher than that needed to just use Linux. You will struggle if you decide to tackle that as your first lesson. Start with simpler goals and you will soon find that over time you can tackle trickier problems much easier as the info you find on the web starts making more and more sense.

Learn Linux because you want to learn Linux, not so you can just replace something else.

Ubuntu was a good choice - I'd recommend just forgetting about trying to get the sound working for now. If Ubuntu doesn't autodetect it, it will probably be a 'hard' problem for you at this stage. Just start learning and playing with the stuff that does work, and worry about the sound drivers much later on.

Re:User guide to linux?

[Anonymous Coward]

I had a heck of a time figuring out what the problem was with sound on my Thinkpad 390X in OpenBSD. I know it's probably not the same in Linux, but maybe it'll point you in the right direction:

Sound on a Thinkpad in OpenBSD

Re:User guide to linux?

[mattyrobinson69]

sudo alsaconf

Re:User guide to linux?

[natrius]

Other sibling posts in this thread have mentioned the unofficial Ubuntu Guide, but you should probably look at the official documentation since the unofficial guide has been known to do harmful things to your computer. All of the official documentation, including a sanitized version of the unofficial guide, can be found at help.ubuntu.com.

Re:User guide to linux?

[Anonymous Coward]

As far as AC97 support goes, AC97 is the codec the sound chipset uses, not the chipset itself, there are various chipsets using the AC97, though I believe the Realtek 8*0 are the most common, the majority of motherboards I looked at when I last upgraded had the 850, though one or two had the 870, which is generally regarded as giving better sound quality. Therefore while many chipsets utilizing AC97 may have kernel support in the default kernel that comes with Ubuntu/Knoppix, others may not.

Re:User guide to linux?

[smash]

5.10 also picked up my Audigy2 card automatically as well (recently upgraded).

smash.

Re:Ubuntu

[Imexius]

You do know that Ubuntu _does_ support other desktop enviroment like XFCE, KDE, windowmaker ect ect?

Ubuntu's There

[Quirk]

I tried a number of Linux installs on a new athlon/Asus A8v box I built. I installed FC4 and a few others but the slickest install was Ubuntu 5.10. Ubuntu was also the most stable overall. Although I'm now playing around with Openbsd on said box, Ubuntu will be installed on the Athlon box I'm now building.

"I feel that Ubuntu in pre-release form is more stable than other distros when they reach final release status. It's not quite in the league of Slackware and Red Hat/Fedora in that respect yet, but it's surely getting there in a hurry."

Isn't FC intended as a test distro for new Red Hat stuff? I'm not a seasoned FC user but I've always thought FC releases were not first and foremost stable so much as innovative.

Re:Ubuntu's There

[DeadMeat (TM)]

Isn't FC intended as a test distro for new Red Hat stuff? I'm not a seasoned FC user but I've always thought FC releases were not first and foremost stable so much as innovative.

The article is about Ubuntu 6.06, which is still in alpha. I'm using it right now on my home PC, and its alpha status shows at times: every once in a while, they'll release an update that'll suddenly break a program. You probably installed Ubuntu 5.10, which like RHEL is "stable" in the sense that they rarely release updates that add new features: almost all the updates are for security patching and bug-fixing. (As a result, it's also stable in the other sense, since they generally won't push out updates that haven't been tested thoroughly.)

Fedora Core tends to walk a thin line between the two styles of releases, in that they'll frequently update packages to add new features, but they also test them at least a little before sending them out to the general public. I've been using Fedora Core on my work PC since FC3, and generally it's been rock-solid, despite the frequent updates. But some people seem to have had bad experiences with it, so YMMV.

Re:Ubuntu's There

[nine-times]

Fedora isn't meant to be a "test version" for RedHat so much as the "community driven" source from which RedHat can build an "enterprise" product.

What's the difference? The people making Fedora intend for it to be stable. It's just driven more by the needs/desires of a community of users. RedHat can then cherry-pick the changes that they like to build a standardized business product.

Re:Ubuntu's There

[spevack]

Isn't FC intended as a test distro for new Red Hat stuff? I'm not a seasoned FC user but I've always thought FC releases were not first and foremost stable so much as innovative.

No, Fedora is not a test distro for Red Hat. Fedora is meant to be a robust and stable operating system. *Part* of what Fedora includes is some more "cutting edge" technology that will eventually become more mainstream, but it's incorrect to characterize Fedora as a "perpetual beta of RHEL" or anything like that.

Rawhide is a perpetual Beta. Fedora has high standards for stability and functionality.

Re:Ubuntu's There

[drsmithy]

I tried a number of Linux installs on a new athlon/Asus A8v box I built. I installed FC4 and a few others but the slickest install was Ubuntu 5.10.

For the life of me I cannot understand why people rave about Ubuntu's installation procedure. The vast majority of it is no different to any other distro's text-based install and the disk partitioning section is, IMHO, relatively very difficult, unintuitive and confusing.

Re:Ubuntu's There

[Fallingcow]

For the life of me I cannot understand why people rave about Ubuntu's installation procedure.

It installs with very reasonable default settings and exactly one of every type of program that most desktop users are used to having. One can get the default installation by doing little more than saying "OK" at 3 or 4 installation dialogues.

The vast majority of it is no different to any other distro's text-based install and the disk partitioning section is, IMHO, relatively very difficult, unintuitive and confusing.

The partitioning's not any more unintuitive or confusing than XP's. If the user isn't dual booting, they can just tell it to do that step automatically, and if they are dual booting... well, I wouldn't ask my grandma to set up a dual-booting system with any other two OS's, as it's simply beyond her. Why would I ask her to do it with Linux?

Re:Ubuntu's There

[Hes Nikke]

I wouldn't ask my grandma to set up a dual-booting system with any other two OS's, as it's simply beyond her.

I'll betcha that she can do a Mac OS X/Windows XP dual boot config - assuming she can RTFM - it's only 14 pages long, and written in newbie terms.

Re:Ubuntu's There

[JungleBoy]

FC is a great distro, Ubuntu (and Gentoo) users like to lay on the FUD about it being a 'test' distro. Even though it's an upstream distro from RHEL, it's still great. I run several FC3 and FC4 production servers. The Fedora Legacy project makes this nice and easy, they support all the way back to RH7.3 if that's your thing.

I am rather disapointed with Ubuntu's (Breezy Badger) install options. The only network install option appears to be a PXE boot network install. I've fallen in love with FC/RHEL Network/Kickstart installs. I even made a custom ISO that will kickstart (or manually) install FC4, FC5, RHEL3, & RHEL4 for both i386 and x86_64 over the network (and it runs memtest of course). I'm working on a multi distro kickstart USB stick as well, but I don't have nearly enough hardware that boots off of USB.

Re:Ubuntu's There

[Breakfast Pants]

"It installs with very reasonable default settings and exactly one of every type of program that most desktop users are used to having." I think most desktop users are used to having something to play mp3s with (not to mention DVDs).

Re:Ubuntu's There

[ClamIAm]

I agree. I've been tracking Dapper for a few weeks on both my laptop and desktop and it's been far more stable than any version of Fedora I ever used (1, 2, and 3). My feeling is that Red Hat realizes they kinda have to put something out for Fedora, so they do a decent job, but it's not engineered to the same level of consistency as other distros.

Re:Ubuntu's There

[glarbl_blarbl]

Automatix takes the pain out of installing a lot of those non-free goodies: Sun's Java, many video codecs, etc.

http://www.ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=13840 5&highlight=automatix

Re:Ubuntu's There

[LoveTheIRS]

Fedora Core is as innovative as a cork screw.

Re:Ubuntu's There

[Knuckles]

it's only 14 pages long

You are joking, right? Right?

Re:Ubuntu's There

[quintesse]

What kind of "instability" are you talking about? For me instability means kernel oopses or applications that crash inexplicably and I have never seen that on any of my Redhat and Fedora systems since I started using RedHat 8 on a multitude of systems (which includes things from desktop systms and "pizza boxes" to PVR systems on mini-ITX using alpha quality kernel modules).

Does that mean I have never had problems? Sure, and lots of them, but nothing that could aver be attributed to general and overall "system instability". I wonder why your experience is so different?

Re:Ubuntu's There

[cloudmaster]

What? Are you comparing PXE and Kickstart like they're similar in any way? Lemme see if I can help clear up some of your confusion...

PXE is a standardized boot environment for network booting. Your network card and TFTP + DHCP servers work together to set that up. Most modern NICs support PXE as their netboot option. It's OS neutral.

Kickstart is a file format that describes what packages to install, where to get them, and what installer options to use. It's redHat's format, but Ubuntu supports Kickstart files. On Debian-based distros, though, better than that is FAI (Fully Automatic Installer). It not only specifies the installer options, package sources, and packages to install, it lets you pre-configure the packages in lots of cases, and it's easy to build from an installed system. Kickstart lets you run scripts at differnet times, sure, but so does FAI. The RHEL installer builds a kickstart file based on your install settings, but that doesn't packages installed later - you can build an FAI file from a running system's current configuration at any time.

Anyway, to network install a RedHat-based distro, you have to network boot the installer. Same thing as with Ubuntu or any other distro. Both support PXE, and AFAIK that's it for netboot. Unless you count EFI, which I'm sure Ubuntu supports, and I assume FC does since RHEL does. Both also support making bootable images for CDs that have setup options. But, like RPM, RedHat's option is "ok" but still lacking some nice features compared to other systems.

Also interesting to note about Ubuntu is the presence of http://packages.ubuntulinux.org/dapper/misc/initrd -netboot-tools and http://packages.ubuntulinux.org/dapper/misc/kernel -image-netbootable - as long as we're talking about network booting...

Re:Ubuntu's There

[krewemaynard]

Fedora has high standards for stability and functionality.

So did the Titanic.

I still remember when they said they would take the best elements from Fedora and put them into the next RHEL. I left the RedHat family after they dropped support for RH9, and now they want me to be a beta tester for RHEL? Thanks, but no. I'll stick with a distro that I use, not one that uses me (what is this, Soviet Russia?).

Re:Ubuntu's There

[krewemaynard]

Ditto for Easy Ubuntu. And it seems to do a better job of installing the media codecs, especially for the browser. But, Automatix is good too, and it was there when I needed it. :)

Re:Ubuntu's There

[ClamIAm]

Um, perhaps "more stable" was the wrong term to use. A more correct term would be "less broken".

Re:Two Things

[Imexius]

OS X's skin reminds me of Fisher Prices "My First Computer"

My personal experience

[agendi]

On the long weekend I spent some time testing it and was rather impressed. As a fairly solid user of the previous two versions I can testify that the speed improvements were very obvious in practical ways (boot times in particular were alot faster). I tested it on a computer that was two years older than my current desktop (running breezy) and even with the older hardware it was feeling just as snappy. I haven't run any compiling tests or done any serious poking around improvements in networking etc but I can say that I noticed the difference in general desktop related usage.

Thanks (u|k|x|edu)buntu devs.

Re:My personal experience

[stony3k]

Thanks (u|k|x|edu)buntu devs.

With all the different flavors of Ubuntu, how soon before we have to start refering to them as *buntu?

Re:My personal experience

[agendi]

I almost referred to them exactly as that but I didn't feel that they had reached that venerable age yet to get the "*".

I have (and still do) use both ubuntu and kubuntu on different machines and while I felt there was a difference in the early kubuntu days (it started out much rougher and buggy than ubuntu) these days they are in step enough that I don't think they necessarily need a different designation from a technical standpoint (however it is necessary from a legal/cultural/identity point of view).

I personally like the idea of keeping a single CD install with the desktop flavour being a primary reason for choosing which CD you are going to torrent. I've found that supporting it using this scheme is generally easier (for example - which distro are you running? Kubuntu - well I can make a fairly safe assumption that they are running KDE etc.) Some distro's imply a desktop (eg. mandriva or suse etc) while others don't.

anyway back to work..

Re:My personal experience

[Breakfast Pants]

Given that the language generated by *buntu is infinite, we will have to do that at a point an infinity away from us in the future. Unless you figured out some way to perform a supertask?

Re:My personal experience

[noamsml]

That's (ku|xu|u|edu)buntu, (k|x||ed)ubuntu, or *ubuntu.

Very buggy video drivers

[distantbody]

Have they fixed that problem with the screensaver menu yet? When i scroll thru the screensaver menu (just for fun) the desktop goes hypercolour-screen-of-death.

Re:Very buggy video drivers

[Technician]

Have they fixed that problem with the screensaver menu yet?

I have never seen that problem. Maybe it is related to your specific video card. I enjoy the screen savers. I have been using Breezy Badger and loving it. I think it's nice the screen saver uses the logon password instead of using a seprate screen saver password. Nice.

Re:Very buggy video drivers

[ABoerma]

Do you, by any chance, have an nVidia card? My box will refuse to go graphic when I use the nVidia drivers and go hypercolour-SOD when I use the nv drivers. Switching to another tty and back solves the problem for about five minutes. When I use an ATI card everything's fine, so if you have one of those lying around...

I dislike Ubuntu

[scenestar]

It's a great OS, but i really hate the people behind the community.

The project treats it's users as if they were complete idiots, and I've been noticing that since the hoary release they have been continiously dumbing down the distro.

Not only that, but the people on the freenode channels are complete nazis when it comes to "Politically correctness" and "being helpfull".

It used to be a great alternative to debian, but now it is just becoming the linux equivalent of safty scissors.

Don't mod me down as flamebait right away. It is a great distro, but I would hate to see it turn into another linspire.

Re:I dislike Ubuntu

[danielk1982]

To turn it around, I noticed growing trend of smug and arrogant attitudes towards Ubuntu and its user base..or rather its *perceived* user base.

Re:I dislike Ubuntu

[ImTheDarkcyde]

but what about rookies like me who NEED a dumbed down version? I see it as a good way to get into linux, now if only it would work with my soundcard...

Re:I dislike Ubuntu

[QuantumG]

"treat like idiots" == don't assume you know how to use the command prompt and offer you help. Geeks get mad at anyone who doesn't treat them like a God by default.

Re:I dislike Ubuntu

[Kesh]

Sounds like it's "Linux for the rest of us," actually.

'bout damn time, I say.

Re:I dislike Ubuntu

[scenestar]

If I need to provide tech support to someone over IM it's way easier to tell them open a terminal and cut and paste the commands I give them.

As for the god part, I just dislike being looked down upon because I prefer a quick su over endless sudos.

I once actually got banned on freenode for advising a newbie to use su. Apperently it was a violation of the "ubuntu philosphy".

Re:I dislike Ubuntu

[Anonymous Coward]

... but now it is just becoming the linux equivalent of safty scissors.

5.10 is Breezy Badger.

6.06 is Dapper Drake.

7.00 will be Safety Scissors.

Re:I dislike Ubuntu

[Gadgetfreak]

Safety scissors, perhaps, but it's the first Linux distribution I'm willing to try right now. I'm a Mechanical Engineer by degree and profession, and while I built my own computer and maintain it, I don't have the computer capabilities that most Slashdotters have. I have a spare computer I've pieced together with extra parts from various places, so I figured I'd try Linux. I have an Ubuntu disc ready to go for tomorrow, the first time I'll ever have tried anything Linux on my own computer. To date, it's been all Windows boxes.

I'm not a programmer. I don't develop software, and I don't really write code. I'm just not hardcore in that regard. But I'm willing to try new stuff, and I'm going to go with the easy option right now. That's why Ubuntu appeals to me. From what I continually read on Slashdot, this is exactly the kind of thing that Linux and Open Source software needs to gain more widespread use... getting people with an interest to bridge the gap without a big effort.

Re:I dislike Ubuntu

[Chanc_Gorkon]

I applaud them for this and this is soemthing that's been needed. Look I want to work on my program, my server, my web server or some other thing. I don't want to have to dick with things like getting the frickin hardware to work. Ubuntu has made great strides in this arena. Also, they are absolutley correct in saying the IRC help channel should be absolutely helpful. Telling someone to RTFM or to just google it isn't a solution.

Re:I dislike Ubuntu

[QuantumG]

hate to tell you this, but wankers who sit on irc != "the people behind ubuntu".

Re:I dislike Ubuntu

[Mad_Rain]

Don't mod me down as flamebait right away.

Then don't go and Godwin yourself right off the bat by saying "the people on the freenode channels are complete nazis when it comes to "Politically correctness" and "being helpfull"."

The vast majority of Ubuntu people seem to really stick with that "Linux for Human Beings" thing they have plastered on their website. And good for them.

On a slightly different note: when did observing and calling someone out for rude or dumb behavior start getting derided for being bad?
Person A: "L0lz, I have this linux problem 'foo', where 'bar' doesn't work and that's teh ghey!"
Person B: "Hey, that calling that remark 'gay' wasn't necessary, and wasn't polite. Fix 'bar' by doing 'bleh', and 'foo' should work."
Person A:"OMG, STFU, political correctness!"

Re:I dislike Ubuntu

[JanneM]

I'm not a programmer. I don't develop software, and I don't really write code.

I _am_ a programmer. I _do_ develop software, and I write code all the time. And I love Ubuntu, for precisely the reason the OP seems to dislike it. If it's simple for the beginner, it mostly means it's simple for the experienced user as well.

I'm not interesting in using a desktop. My interest is in doing my job or pursuing my hobbies, and a desktop should just get out of the way and make it as easy and transparent as possible for me to do so. And of course, whenever I need a shell, it's still right there for me to use (and while I do use the shell a lot, it's still less than it used to be).

Re:I dislike Ubuntu

[gcranston]

I've noticed this "dumbening" (is that how you spell it?) as well. I've been on Ubuntu since 4.10 and little by little, I realised things were creeping into it that made it fluffier, softer, and weaker. Along these lines, though I realise it happened before Warty, what the hell was wrong with cd's and flash drives mounting in 'mnt'?!?! Doesn't that make sense? You mount things in mount! Perfectly logical to me. But nope, now they go to media.

But back to it. Today I was checking out the screenshots of dapper - trying to decide exactly what to put on my new box due friday - and noticed something horrifying; something so terrifying I stopped dead. Screenshot #6 is particularly ominous. I'm not sure what will be going on this new box of mine, but in light of recent evidence, I'd say that Dapper is not the forgone conclusion it once was.

Re:I dislike Ubuntu

[TrekkieGod]

I once actually got banned on freenode for advising a newbie to use su.

That seems pretty bad. Unless they politely said that su was a bad idea, and you tried insisting that it's not in front of the newbie. That just brings up confusion, and somebody needs to pull rank.

I'll explain to you why sudo is the way to go. With my school research, we were using some software that required linux, and I set up a few computers with it for some other students. They didn't know much of anything about linux at the time, and I explained to them how to work the basics. For installing software and for doing something else in particular, you needed root privileges, and I showed them how to use su. Now, you have to understand. These people come from a Windows environment. They don't like having to switch to an adminstrator account, they want to be the administrator. So, now that they knew the root password, it wasn't long before they were just logged on as root the entire time so as to not go through the bother of typing 'su' and a password. I know that's a bad idea, you know that's a bad idea, they didn't, regardless of how I explained to them. Regardless of the fact that the default wallpaper for the root user on KDE was a big red thing that said, "DON'T LOG IN AS ROOT." It's just much safer for newbies to use sudo, and not even be aware of a root account, and ubuntu is a distribution for newbies. That was always its purpose

The thing about ubuntu. It was made to be the safety scissors of linux. It's linux "for the rest of us." Linux for people who don't know a thing about computers, don't want to learn a thing about computers, but just want to use it for their day-to-day activities. It's the distribution I tell anyone new to linux to try out. If you want something more expert-like, you still have plenty of choices. What's wrong with Debian? It's essentially the same thing, and you can configure it the way you want.

Re:I dislike Ubuntu

[scenestar]

The project treats it's users as if they were complete idiots

---
It's linux "for the rest of us." Linux for people who don't know a thing about computers

Thank you for proving my point.

Re:I dislike Ubuntu

[smithtodda]

Well, you're in for a real treat. Enjoy! There are many really cool things about Ubuntu. But even more important, you are now embarking on your first Linux installation, and I suspect that within a year or less, you'll have installations of several different Linux distros under your belt. It's contagious, I tell you, trying out different distros. Anyway, like I said... Enjoy!

Re:I dislike Ubuntu

[tres3]

I once actually got banned on freenode for advising a newbie to use su. Apperently it was a violation of the "ubuntu philosphy".

You should say you were banned from #ubuntu as freenode has no such policy. And come on over to #gentoo; we let people recommend su all the time. :)

Re:I dislike Ubuntu

[Anonymous Coward]

You might find it difficult to switch to using a new kernel without a reboot of either the machine itself or the virtual machine Ubuntu is running on.

Re:I dislike Ubuntu

[rdoger6424]

7.00 will be Safety Scissors.

Wrong, it is impossible to have a 7.00. The Ubuntu version numbers go as the following:
X.YY where x=current year-2000, any Y=month. so 5.10 was released October of '05, while 6.06 will be released in june of this year.

Re:I dislike Ubuntu

[diitante]

reboot is only reccomended here (i.e. #6) when a kernel update has taken place. Its not what you fear. You cant have the benefits of the kernel update without a reboot. M

Re:I dislike Ubuntu

[B5_geek]

Before you run away let me easy some of your concerns.

I've been using Ubuntu since Hoary was first available. (Debian Sid before that) Up untill a week ago I was running Dapper too.

That screenshot was _VERY LIKELY_ caused by the "apt-get dist-upgrade" style command.

The only time I have ever seen a "please reboot now" was after a new kernel version was downloaded.

I am back on Hoary now, but only because I was having other problems.

Re:I dislike Ubuntu

[opkool]

Ubuntu?

Try some other Linux distro, end-user oriented, easy workstation-oriented.

Ubuntu, in all its glory, felt to me like one of those older Mandrakes (8.something): works and all, but if feels old... and Mandrake 8.2 is from 2001 or something like that.

Yes, for a Debian user, Ubuntu is an enormous leap forward in easyness and usability (as a desktop). But there are other distros that have invested years in desktop Linux.

Then, if you do not need to use a Debian-based distro and can live without the perceived 1337-ness of using a "real distro like Debian", please do youself a favour and try, say, Mandriva One.

It is a live version of Mandriva that you can easily install. I belileve is going to be realeased *any moment now*.

Sure, Ubuntu is nice and works pretty much OK, like any other Linux distro. But then, only hype and "Debian-ness" has managed to turn a mediocre desktop distro into the dearest love of all technical sites.

Do you want to run Linux on your desktop? Then try a desktop Linux, a distro with years of experience in desktop Linux, usability, etc. Don't fall for hype.

Try Linspire, PCLinuxOS (a Mandriva-derived), Mandriva...

Peace

Re:I dislike Ubuntu

[Anonymous Coward]

> I once actually got banned on freenode for advising a newbie to use su.

What good would it do a newbie to try to "su" to root when they won't know the root password?

If they *really* need a root shell for something on Ubuntu "sudo bash" will do.

Re:I dislike Ubuntu

[electr01nik]

Breezy had such notifications after a kernel update as well. And if I recall correctly (it has been a while) Hoary had them too.

Dapper just makes them look pertier.

This is certainly nothing new.

I've been running Dapper since about a week before the release of Flight 6 and so far I've been very impressed. The upgrade was very easy from breezy to dapper, only changing the relative entries in my sources.list and running apt-get dist-upgrade. The only problems I didn't forsee was the entries that automatix put in there were not compatible, such as a Breezy backport for KDE 3.5 (Dapper comes with KDE 3.5), so that had to be taken out. (Note to self: If ubuntu-desktop is not installed, X may not start on the next boot, due too a missing font server (my interpretation), so if you get headaches after your dist-upgrade, check that first). Other issues I had were a borked /etc/network/interfaces, the auto $IFACE entry was either nuked or duplicated, resulting in the interface not coming up on the next boot.

Other than those issues, my experience with Dapper has been great. I was using KDE 3.5 for the longest time, but ended up going back too Gnome 2.14. Can't tell you why really, KDE 3.5 was really sluggish on my TNT2 but now that I got the Radeon 7500 (shush!) working, maybe it should be snappier.

Re:I dislike Ubuntu

[Anonymous Coward]

wow, are you a fucktard.

Re:I dislike Ubuntu

[eddeye]

The thing about ubuntu. It was made to be the safety scissors of linux. It's linux "for the rest of us." Linux for people who don't know a thing about computers, don't want to learn a thing about computers, but just want to use it for their day-to-day activities.

Except it's not just for novices. I've been on linux since 97 and migrated from debian to ubuntu last year. It's a god send. Just because I know how to recompile the kernel and setup runlevels by hand doesn't mean I want to. Ubuntu makes typical things easy. I can customize beyond that to suit my needs, but I never have to just to make things work. It's a much better use of my time.

Re:I dislike Ubuntu

[camh]

what the hell was wrong with cd's and flash drives mounting in 'mnt'?!?! Doesn't that make sense? You mount things in mount! Perfectly logical to me. But nope, now they go to media.

/mnt has always been a single temporary mount point according to the Filesystem Hierarchy Standard. The practice of creating subdirectories under /mnt has only been a defacto stardard by some distros, but not debian (on which ubuntu is based). FHS introduced /media as the base mountpoint for removable media. Ubuntu tries to adhere to the FHS, so that is where it puts flash disks and the like.

Re:I dislike Ubuntu

[xenocide2]

Well, the mount thing is actually pretty nice. The /media directory has the distinction of containing removable media, on behalf of users via pmount and hal. The benefits are twofold: you can't accidently kill off another predefined mount in /mnt, and if you're looking to create a list of available media sort of like My Computer, you've got an directory containing em. I suppose it can be confusing for people most comfortable with the command line, but I always liked puzzles ;)

Screenshot 6 is just another member of the "lets ditch the 70s terminal concept where possible" parade. I'm sure you know that reboots are required to get a new kernel running. This is all that is. It's been around since at least breezy, and its as equally as non threatening as the reminders in the console to "run lilo before you reboot, and by the way, reboot soon!"

Personally, I'm much more scared of the Orangification. I better remember to save the current theme in case the new one is too painful!

Re:I dislike Ubuntu

[Anonymous Coward]

Seriously, give it some time. Given the user reports you see here, and if it were me, I'd wait a couple of weeks.

(proviso)
Ubuntu is a great distro, and I've used previous versions a lot, but I went back to Debian (for compiling; I know about build-essentials).

My point is really that you probably do not want to have a bad experience with Linux first time out. Granted with the newer crop of distros this is less of a problem than in the past, but it still occurs, and believe me, you'll be more than preoccupied with other things in your Linux install than wanting to troubleshoot it.

Re:I dislike Ubuntu

[Technician]

if only it would work with my soundcard...

Did you try it with your sound card? Try the live CD. Ubuntu is one that has worked with my sound card when other's would not.

Re:I dislike Ubuntu

[schmu_20mol]

up until now the message you refer to goes something like this:

User interaction required.

This whole reboot message only indicates, that you have to reboot to get the benefits of the upgraded kernel.

Re:I dislike Ubuntu

[TrekkieGod]

The project treats its users as if they were complete idiots

---
It's linux "for the rest of us." Linux for people who don't know a thing about computers

Thank you for proving my point.

Well...you just proved why there's a need for a distribution like that. People like you think that because someone doesn't know and doesn't want to know anything more about computers than what they need to accomplish their daily tasks are "idiots." So Linux has always been "too hard" for the average user to migrate to because people like you expect everyone else to just put up with it and learn. Well, they don't want to.

And why should they have to? My mother doesn't want to learn how to configure networking. She just wants to browse, send e-mail, organize her pictures in some sort of photo software. I've set her up with Ubuntu, and she's happy with it. What do you want me to do? Have her pay for a windows license? Pirate windows? Tell her that she can't use the computer unless she learns how to do certain basic things that have nothing to do with what she wants to do with it?

Oh wait...people like you might answer 'yes' to that last one. If you do, I'll classify you as the idiot. If not, then you should understand my point.

Seriously, people who want more freedom and less of a safety net have plenty of choices in the linux world. Why are you so against having some choices available for the people who will be more comfortable with the safety net?

Re:I dislike Ubuntu

[Anonymous Coward]

I think you'll find that in general, the idiots who whine about Linux being "dumbed down" are generally not developers. They're the "My e-penis is bigger than yours" type fanboy who likes to think they're special or clever because they can open a shell and know a handful of commands. They tend to hang out on IRC and "help" newbies. They feel threatened by the idea that Joe user may be able to pick up Linux and use it without the need to wave Joes e-penis around, because it makes their e-penis all the more tiny.

Re:I dislike Ubuntu

[gcranston]

I may have been a little upset when I wrote that. The tone of that notification window sounded so much like MS "You need to restart your computer for the updates to take effect" window which harrasses you, popping up ontop of whatever you're doing every five minutes because maybe, just maybe, you want to finish a letter before restarting to complete the install of the latest outlook express update patch. It had happened to me that day and hit particularly close to the nerve. I'm sure I'll only see it on kernel upgrades, maybe nvidia drivers (but you have to kill x anyway) and dist-upgrade. Thanks for the clarification guys. I'm probably going to give dapper a whirl, but I'm still going to look at a few others first.

Re:I dislike Ubuntu

[TrekkieGod]

Yeah, I agree with you. I run ubuntu on my laptop because I don't want to do anything with my laptop other than "just have it work." The parent poster just seems to dislike the fact that they try to make things easy for those who are novices, as well as secure by default. He mentioned he doesn't want it to be another linspire, but the problem with linspire is that it's not good for novices. It teaches them bad practices, like logging on as root by default. With no password. So Ubuntu set up sudo to make sure that the environment is a bit more secure by default, without the user having to know anything about security, and it doesn't require the user to remember two passwords.

In my opinion, and probably yours since you like Ubuntu, that's a Good Thing (TM).

Re:I dislike Ubuntu

[ImTheDarkcyde]

i skip live-CDs and go straight to install, it's really not ubuntus fault though, i had to bugger through five hours of trials to get the dang card to work with windows (a windows patch/auto restart short circuited my embedded chip, bought the card, installed, didn't work, go into bios, force embedded sound, and then it uses the soundcard... effin geniuses at compaq.)

Re:I dislike Ubuntu

[Anonymous Coward]

heh heh. yes. the nasty 'you should reboot' - note...it doesnt say 'you MUST reboot' and it certainly doesnt automatically do that for you either!

with certain package updates you HAVE to reboot to get the new code into memory....times when this is truly essential is when the kernel itself, or a couple of the lowest libraries eg glibc, have been updated. ESPECIALLY when they've been updated for security reasons. anyone boasting of > 60 days uptime either doesnt USE their machine and has no software apps installed, doesnt visit the internet and has the best firewall ever invented, or the machine isnt on the net ;-)

there could be 'minimal' ways of getting around this sort of issue....quickbooting into a new kernel via something like 'kexec' might be useful....but how many bugs would that then launch (think how many are abundant just through ACPI/APM driver issues!

on a lighter note...I've been running the Alpha-flight Ubuntu 'Dapper' for some time now as my main 'play desktop' at home....and its slwly taken me off my serious workstations...it just works. (i'd moved from Debian because of the aged packages that they had on their latest release). taken into context....I plugged in a USB memory card reader ..and I'd never even used USB on thix box since Dapper was installed...and not only did it 'just work' but the 512Mb SDCard already in the USB memory reader was automatically mounted in /media/HP707 - last year it took EFFORT and WORK to get a FC3 box to operate in such fashion. I really should plug the digital camera straight in for full affect...but I've self programmed myself to remove such layers when dealing with Linux ..perhaps its time to change that view.

Re:I dislike Ubuntu

[Anonymous Coward]

Well, because "mount" is not a concept that is in the vocabulary of Ubuntu's target market (the majority of Human Beings).

Re:I dislike Ubuntu

[Technician]

I do the live CD to see if there is any major hang-ups with hardware detection. If there are none, then I go ahead and install. One nice feature with the Ubuntu and Edubuntu live CD's is they are also an install cd. After boot, one of the desktop icons is there to start an install.

Re:I dislike Ubuntu

[rdoger6424]

I have nothing to say.

This is got to be...

[Anonymous Coward]

This is got to be the Linux Distribution of the Beast... well almost.

KDE / Kubuntu developers are complaining!

[billybob2]

...can I really complain?

Well, the German Kubuntu team have closed their website in protest to what they claim is Canonical's disregard for KDE. Here are some of their concerns:

1) Canonical sponsors many more gnome developers than KDE developers -- just look how many more gnome-related commits appear in the Dapper commit log.
2) Edubuntu, whose education-specific programs come almost exclusively from the KDE Education Suite, runs on gnome instead of KDE. Canonical has never sponsored a KDE Education Suite developer, even though Edubuntu simply wouldn't exist without their work.
3) Canonical does not financially support the team that creates Kubuntu-LiveCDs, so they have to pay all the expenses from their own pockets.
4) Kubuntu doesn't accept community contributions (ie. contributions by anyone beside Jonathan Riddell and Andreas Mueller). A lot of volunteers wanted to contribute, but they can't because they have no access.
5) The name of the version featuring gnome is called Ubuntu, while the version featuring KDE has a K added to the front. This makes it sound like gnome is the default, standard, and KDE is some sort of offshoot. It would be more equitable to name them Ubuntu-KDE and Ubuntu-GNOME, or Kubuntu and Gubuntu.

Jonathan Riddell, Kubuntu's main developer has tried to calm fears that Mark Shuttleworth is backing down on his commitment to KDE as a premier desktop system.

Re:KDE / Kubuntu developers are complaining!

[Criterion]

Ubuntu needs to stay the course with Gnome. Let the whiners whine. Ubuntu needs to stay focused onto what it is, a highly polished Gnome desktop distribution.

If everybody that whines gets the attention they want, Ubuntu will become as bloated as any other general purpose distro.

"1) Canonical sponsors many more gnome developers than KDE developers -- just look how many more gnome-related commits appear in the Dapper commit log."

Duh. Ubuntu is a distro built around Gnome.

"2) Edubuntu, whose education-specific programs come almost exclusively from the KDE Education Suite, runs on gnome instead of KDE. Canonical has never sponsored a KDE Education Suite developer, even though Edubuntu simply wouldn't exist without their work."

And the KDE Education Suite developer would still be doing what they were doing if there were no Ubuntu. Sounds like they are starting to get a bit eager for some of the pie, even though they volunteer to do what they do.

"3) Canonical does not financially support the team that creates Kubuntu-LiveCDs, so they have to pay all the expenses from their own pockets."

Did Canonical say they would finacially support the team creating the Kubuntu-Live cds? If not, hey, it's a vounteer operation just like most other distros. Suck it up. You chose the job.

"4) Kubuntu doesn't accept community contributions (ie. contributions by anyone beside Jonathan Riddell and Andreas Mueller). A lot of volunteers wanted to contribute, but they can't because they have no access."

Don't know anything about this situation, so I'll give it a big "So what? The people that run Kubuntu can do whatever they want to do. It's their baby.".

"5) The name of the version featuring gnome is called Ubuntu, while the version featuring KDE has a K added to the front. This makes it sound like gnome is the default, standard, and KDE is some sort of offshoot. It would be more equitable to name them Ubuntu-KDE and Ubuntu-GNOME, or Kubuntu and Gubuntu.
"

Oh boo-fucking-hoo. Cry me a river. Maybe because Gnome *IS* the default standard for Ubuntu, and KDE is an offshoot?

Re:KDE / Kubuntu developers are complaining!

[JanneM]

Most people are working on things that benefit all of Ubuntu, not just one desktop. And since Ubuntu started specifically as a polished Gnome desktop - and since that was a major reson for the early enthusiasm - it is hardly strange that most employees and contributors are Gnome users and developers as well.

Same with the name - Gnome is the first and default desktop, with Kubuntu a later addition. And if there is any workers missing, it would be someone dedicated to polishing Edubuntu, not adding people to projects that alreade have staff working on it.

Further, it seems it's not actually the German Kubuntu people that are protesting, but some offshoot of the official group that (somewhat strangely) wants to both leave the commonality of Ubuntu behind and get paid for it by Canonical at the same time. They also seem to be asking for transfer of "officialdom" from that other KDE group. It looks more like some internal fight among the KDE people than anything else, with this offshoot angry that Gnome, not KDE, is the default desktop for Ubuntu.

Re:KDE / Kubuntu developers are complaining!

[Anonymous Coward]

Looks like Canonical sponsors GNOME related stuff, so find a similar sponsor for your KDE related stuff.

Re:KDE / Kubuntu developers are complaining!

[cHiphead]

I use Kubuntu but I'd like to offer the protesting 'developers' a nice big cup of SHUT THE FUCK UP.

Ubuntu is a GNOME based distro. Kubuntu is an offshoot KDE version.

Ubuntu with its default Gnome interface is polished and very 'usable'. My son learned to navigate it at 3 years old. KDE is no where near as simple to navigate, its a whored up MS Windows start menu + pretty OS X-ified effects. And I use KDE.

Cheers.

Re:KDE / Kubuntu developers are complaining!

[Anonymous Coward]

OK, let's follow the links.

Canonical -> GNOME.
GNOME -> Mono
Mono -> C#
C# -> Novell
Novell -> Microsoft

Canonical -> GNOME
GNOME -> No-Koneuqeror
No-Konq -> Mozilla
Mozilla -> Google (ads)
Google -> Microsoft

therefore, canonical is on the evil side. GNOME had
a lot of funding from the start.

Re:KDE / Kubuntu developers are complaining!

[Anonymous Coward]

KDE->Qt->Bloat->M$
          |
          V
    Trolltech (restrictive license)
          |
          V
    Microsoft

Re:KDE / Kubuntu developers are complaining!

[Anonymous Coward]

What's that? Penis bird?

Re:KDE / Kubuntu developers are complaining!

[WilliamSChips]

What do Google and Novell have to do with Microsoft? As far as I can tell, Microsoft wants to fucking kill Google and Google is not evil. And Novell is quite a strong supporter of Linux. Don't they also fund KDE? So, if your "Novell -> Microsoft" link is true, KDE goes to Microsoft much more quickly. Oh wait, you were spreading FUD. Nevermind.

Re:KDE / Kubuntu developers are complaining!

[ElleyKitten]

Ubuntu needs to stay the course with Gnome. Let the whiners whine. Ubuntu needs to stay focused onto what it is, a highly polished Gnome desktop distribution.

I normally don't say things like this, but I think that Kubuntu should merge with Mepis. I've been using Mepis 3.4, and it's really a better Kubuntu than Kubuntu. Now that Mepis is changing to be based off Ubuntu, I'm not sure if there's a purpose left for Kubuntu. I agree with you that Ubuntu should stick to making a great Gnome distribution, but I think Ubuntu's KDE people would probably be better off making Mepis a great KDE distro.

Re:KDE / Kubuntu developers are complaining!

[arevos]

If everybody that whines gets the attention they want, Ubuntu will become as bloated as any other general purpose distro.

I'm curious to know your reasoning. No-one's talking about adding KDE packages to Ubuntu by default, so I'm afraid I can't understand why you think that developing KDE as an alternative to Gnome would add bloat to the distro.

Oh boo-fucking-hoo. Cry me a river. Maybe because Gnome *IS* the default standard for Ubuntu, and KDE is an offshoot?

Whilst I agree with you in principle, it's worth remembering that a lot of Ubuntu is desktop independant. The top layer (ubuntu-desktop, kubuntu-desktop, xubuntu-desktop, etc.) is modular and easily changed.

Because Ubuntu is so modular, there's little reason not to bring different desktops under the Ubuntu umbrella, assuming that one can find the volunteers to do so.

The fuss over Kubuntu is making a mountain out of a molehill, but it does have some valid roots. Late last year, Mark Shuttleworth announced that he wanted Kubuntu to become a first class distribution the equal of Ubuntu. Given this statement, a few developers are voicing complaints about the lack of attention Kubuntu's getting. These sorts of complaints are usual in any open source project, though, so it's nothing to get worked up about.

Like it or not, Ubuntu is branching out from Gnome. Apparently, Shuttleworth already uses Kubuntu as his desktop of choice.

Re:KDE / Kubuntu developers are complaining!

[The Warlock]

I'm curious to know your reasoning. No-one's talking about adding KDE packages to Ubuntu by default, so I'm afraid I can't understand why you think that developing KDE as an alternative to Gnome would add bloat to the distro.

Um.

It is developed as an alternative. It's called Kubuntu. I think you mentioned it earlier. You can even just apt-get install kubuntu-desktop.

Re:KDE / Kubuntu developers are complaining!

[hubie]

It would be more equitable to name them Ubuntu-KDE and Ubuntu-GNOME, or Kubuntu and Gubuntu.

Don't you mean GNU/Ubuntu-KDE and GNU/Ubuntu-GNOME?

:)

Re:KDE / Kubuntu developers are complaining!

[arevos]

That was my point. Since Kubuntu is developed as an alternative, it's not going to add bloat to vanilla Ubuntu, as the grandparent post originall asserted.

Re:KDE / Kubuntu developers are complaining!

[dodongo]

And I use KDE.

Snap! I just wanted to let you know you made me laugh. Hard.

Re:KDE / Kubuntu developers are complaining!

[Doctor Crumb]

Let me guess; neither you nor the gp have ever used Kubuntu or read the docs.

From TF FAQ:
------------
* What is Kubuntu?

Kubuntu is the first Ubuntu derived distribution. Our Kubuntu CDs are made up of Ubuntu's base plus KDE. You can get exactly the same effect by installing Ubuntu and adding the KDE packages (and removing the Gnome packages) from the Ubuntu archives.

* Is this a fork of Ubuntu?

  No, it is an official part of Ubuntu. All our packages are in the same archives.

----------

So of *course* most commits will be in ubuntu, as the *only* difference between kubuntu and ubuntu is the existence of the kubuntu-desktop package. Of *course* there are fewer kubuntu commits; the vast majority of the distro doesn't care what desktop you are using.

Comment removed

[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

Where are the downloads?

[Amiga Lover]

Wher eis 6.06 download to be from? I can't see from the link given in the article which is 5.10

Re:Where are the downloads?

[Poppler]

Get 6.06 here.

Re:Where are the downloads?

[Anonymous Coward]

Just go to one of the mirrors that has 5.10, take the "5.10" off the end of the URL, and you go up a directory to say http://mirror.mcs.anl.gov/pub/ubuntu-iso/CDs/relea ses/

Then just go into the 6.06 directory from there

But is it fixed?

[Prien715]

I am a developer on the Linux platform and have been using linux since 1999. About a week ago, I was ready to install a linux distro since my old HD bit the dust (on my new custom-built Asus SLI AMD64 box). After hearing all the press about Ubuntu, I burned a copy and tried it. I found the install slightly painful.

Installation:
On my first install, I tried partitioning a 300 GB Fat32 partition at the end of the drive for sharing cross-OS stuff (mp3s, etc. I'd tried a windows Ext2 driver previously, but it eventually corrupted the partition and I lost all my recent mp3s) and 2 GB swap and the rest for the OS. Ubuntu absolutely failed to format the one partition Fat32, gave me an error and choked. OK. How tbout ext2? Well, that choked too. Not caring about that partition, I decided to just bypass the step manually and have it copy the OS. I can always format the partition manually. It choked setting up apt (for reasons I don't understand). I decided that, despite manually partitioning every linux distro I've ever used, I'd let ubuntu choose for me. This seemed to "work".

Configuration:
The first thing any computer user wants to do is get on the internet. I've got a static IP where I live so I decided to set up the networking. Unfortunately, without a working hostname, there's literally no way to do this. On bootup, gnome suggested I manually edit my /etc/hosts file to include my hostname. After doing this, gnome allowed me to configure my network. (Why can't the installer do this?)

On the positive side all of my devices (audio/video) were configured correctly but on the downside, there doesn't seem to be any good way of upgrading packages (Firefox to 1.5 or my NVidia drivers) when the current version isn't in the repository (I'm probably missing something).

I'm hoping with the new release, Ubuntu can fix some of these usability issues while keeping their slick package management.

Re:But is it fixed?

[Deitheres]

You know, I've run in to similar problems with the two previous versions of ubuntu when it comes to hard drive partitioning/formatting during the install.

It seems the best way to fix it is to use something like boot&nuke, completely wipe the drive, and then start from scratch. Seems odd, but it fixed the problem for me.

Re:But is it fixed?

[Mad_Rain]

The first thing any computer user wants to do is get on the internet. I've got a static IP where I live so I decided to set up the networking. Unfortunately, without a working hostname, there's literally no way to do this. On bootup, gnome suggested I manually edit my /etc/hosts file to include my hostname. After doing this, gnome allowed me to configure my network. (Why can't the installer do this?)

I'm pretty sure the installer already did this... Yeah, right here, on this install guide it shows on the 5th screenshot setting the hostname. I don't think the installer from 5.04 to 5.10 changed at all. (I don't know if that's what you're talking about or if that helps at all at this point, but figured it wouldn't hurt to have the information there.)

Re:But is it fixed?

[ClamIAm]

I'm assuming that you used a recent version of Ubuntu. If this is true, your hostname problem sounds like you either weren't paying attention in the installer or are just trying to spread lies. Why? Well, Ubuntu uses the Debian installer, and this installer always prompts for hostname. At least, it has in the ~dozen times I've used it.

Re:But is it fixed?

[colmore]

1) Fat32 doesn't support partitions above a certain size. However, the installer should catch that.

2) reconfigure /etc/apt/sources.list

Re:But is it fixed?

[Anonymous Coward]

well there's your prob, you're trying to make a filesystem that's not meant to be bigger than 32 GB.

that's right, redmond's favorite filesystem for win9x cant go beyond 32 gb. so it isnt Ubuntu's fault, it's pebkac and a shitty fs.

also, the installer allows you to set your hostname.

you're either a shitty troll or a newbie with serious pebkac issues.

Re:But is it fixed?

[cow ninja]

Are you sure about the 32G limit? Win 2000 limit is 32G and Scandisk will choke at 124.55G but this shouldn't effect the Ubuntu installer.

The Microsoft site and the Wikipedia article both state that 2 terabytes is the limit.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fat32
http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=KB; en-us;q154997

Re:But is it fixed?

[Risen888]

on the downside, there doesn't seem to be any good way of upgrading packages (Firefox to 1.5 or my NVidia drivers) when the current version isn't in the repository (I'm probably missing something).

You're not missing anything. Part of having a 6 month release cycle means that the developers don't really focus on "non-critical" upgrades (of which your definition may vary). Bummer, certainly, but part of the price you pay for having a stable, yet still almost-cutting-edge distro every six month.

Re:But is it fixed?

[dockingman]

I found some issues with the upgrading of the packages in Ubuntu/Kubuntu, but after I've started to use Automatix http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=80295 everything got solved!

Re:Two Things

[Anonymous Coward]

You are so lame. "Fischer Price" has been the moniker of Window XP for a few years now and your "Fischer Price" never looked like OSX.

Re:Two Things

[Poppler]

1) No iTunes clone. amaroK - yeeeeech...

You can always apt-get banshee. Banshee allows you to manage your ipod, and the daapd plugin (which is also in the apt repositories) allows you access iTunes music shares, as well as share your own library with iTunes clients.

Re:yeah but

[dballanc]

No, all the REAL geeks have plenty of machines for several distros! Go Synergy2.sourceforge Ubuntu works better for my laptop, prefer gentoo for desktop. It's just a distro, no need for a holy war.

Actually in gentoos defense, I have far fewer dependency and break issues than with apt... portage is just really nice. The major benefits of gentoo are portage, documentation, and the forums. The compile time is the price, slightly offset by the optimization.

Re:Two Things

[Anonymous Coward]

"OS X's skin reminds me of Fisher Prices "My First Computer"'

Whoa, you just mad a fool of yourself on so many different levels all at once! WTG!

amaroK isn't that bad, but both desktops do need someone other than former/current Windows 98 programmers to bring both Linux desktops up to year 2006 standards. The only people who can stomach the current Linux desktops are people who ditched Windows back in 1999-2000 or so. The 'make it look and act like Win98 but with more features' 'strategy' for the Linux desktops was a silly design goal five years ago. It is an embarrassment in 2006.

Hopefully a large commercial company will pick up the slack and start funding competent UI engineers/artists and fix the mess that is the Linux desktop soon.

JTunes???

[EmbeddedJanitor]

Well if iTunes was portable (eg. written in Java) there'd be no problems. iTunes is the worst part of the whole iPod experience IMHO.

Re:JTunes???

[damiam]

Do you even have an iPod? The iTunes organization and syncing system is one of the few things that set the iPod apart from its competitors. And if you think you can write an app that does as many low-level things as iTunes does in pure Java, you're in for a surprise.

Re:JTunes???

[Anonymous Coward]

And what exactly is it iTunes does on thse low level parts? I see it's starting several services and background processes on Windows. Seems like spyware to me.

Re:JTunes???

[Anonymous Coward]

The iTunes syncing system sucks asshole. I and everyone I know with an iPod uses Anapod Explorer because iTunes just sucks that badly. Granted I haven't used iTunes in forever, but when I first got my iPod the only way I could find to get files onto the damn thing was to create a custom playlist and upload it. yuck

Woohoo! Screenshots!

[Anonymous Coward]

Transparency: check
Media player playing obscure band: check
Common software everybody knows: check
Installer: check

Is it me or screenshots of any modern distro looks about the same? Maybe with a diffrent theme, if you're lucky. Ok, GNOME looks pretty, I get it. Thank you!

Very impresses with Dapper Drake

[CaspianXI]

I've been using Ubuntu Dapper Drake (Ubuntu 6.06) Alpha 5 for about a month or so, and am very impressed with it. Of course, one can't expect the stability of a stabe release from an alpha, but ever since I installed it, I've been very surprised as to how stable it is for an alpha. This makes me look forward to the stable release even more -- if the alpha's like this... the stable release will be awesome! The best thing I like about Ubuntu (especially in Dapper) is its hardware support. I have hardware (such as a touchpad, etc.) that never worked correctly in other distros (it even had quirks in Windowze). Ubuntu had great drivers, but Dapper is awesome. Thanks, Ubuntu Devs!

Songbird is coming this summer!

[Anonymous Coward]

It started as an iTunes clone and is now much more. Check it out at: www.songbirdnest.com Right now, all that's available is a Windows 0.1.1b or something, but still damn impressive. The beta will be ported to Linux and Mac in a couple weeks. Version 1 is slated for sometime this Summer.

LiveCD didn't boot at all on my Thinkpad z60m

[lonesometrainer]

I discussed that on a user forum, but really didn't have the time to file a bug-report. Had several errors/detection failures in boot-sequence, X didn't start, machine froze. I've used the same CD for VMWare boots several times, so it should not be a defective CD.

The Thinkpad should have fairly standard hardware, was a bit strange to see it crash that ugly as I never had any problems with any of the Ubuntu LiveCDs.

Re:LiveCD didn't boot at all on my Thinkpad z60m

[LordMaxxon]

The Thinkpad should have fairly standard hardware, was a bit strange to see it crash that ugly as I never had any problems with any of the Ubuntu LiveCDs.

No problems on my Thinkpad A30. It's a bit on the older side, so it's slowly breaking, but all problems have been with broken hardware, not software.

Re:LiveCD didn't boot at all on my Thinkpad z60m

[vga_init]

I discussed that on a user forum, but really didn't have the time to file a bug-report.

Not to be nit-picky, but doesn't that statement seem a little contradicting? Or maybe you spent so much time on the forums that there was none left over for bug reports. :)

Re:LiveCD didn't boot at all on my Thinkpad z60m

[Anonymous Coward]

Unfortunately, Thinkpads are often a hell to configure under linux. I've had two of them, Thinkpad 720EL and Thinkpad 600e: the former had issues with screen, the latter had issues with USB2 over PCMCIA.

Dell makes more standard-compliant laptops than IBM.

Re:LiveCD didn't boot at all on my Thinkpad z60m

[skwalla]

Did you md5sum your download to check for corruption and did you verify the burn?

Slackware and Fedora!?!?!

[c0dyd]

"It's not quite in the league of Slackware and Red Hat/Fedora in that respect yet, but it's surely getting there in a hurry." Slackware and RedHat/Fedore are in the same "league"??? -Cody

Re:Ubuntu vs. FC5

[mashade]

Your milage will vary, as always, but I've noticed that FC* is one of *the* slowest distros to be published. I'm used to Slackware mainly, and putting Ubuntu up to Slack is like a cheetah racing your grandmother. I do agree with the assertion that Ubuntu is faster than FC, though.

IMHO, Ubuntu and Fedora are both rather sluggish.

Now, now, children, before you flame me for an 'ancient' machine, I'm running a modest but modern 2200+ with 1GB of RAM. No, neither Ubuntu nor FC are unusable, it's just that they lack the kind of snappiness to the UI I've grown accustomed to.

Is it as messed up as FC5?

[Anonymous Coward]

Is it as messed up as FC5? You know the distro that makes it IMPOSSIBLE to install the kernel headers / source during a GUI install? And don't get me started on the abortion that is Yum - on a default install of FC5 under VMWARE Yum can't as of today install updates because it fails with an evolution depend error - the first command I typed after installing was yum update.

How in the hell does something like that happen?

Re:Is it as messed up as FC5?

[Shawn is an Asshole]

What are you talking about? When FC5 was officially released I installed it (the 64-bit version) on my main workstation (AMD 64 3200+, 4GB RAM, ATI Radeon 9200). It installed the kernel headers for me after I selected it. Even with the stock kernel, I had OpenGL (I bought the 9200 specifically for the open source accellerated drives), and even VMWware Workstation's drivers compiled successfully after using the vmwware-any-any updates. yum update works flawlessly.

Since them I've done about a dozen test installs in VMWare and have deployed it to over two hundred computers, including PII's, PIII's, P4's, K6-2's, Athlons, Athlon XP's, and Athlon 64s with various ATI and nVidia cards (which are now accellerated). I have not had any problems like you describe.

Are you mixing incompatible repositores? Like RPMForge and Livna? I use these:

Dries
FreshRPMS
KDE-Redhat
Didier (Enlightenment)

Re:Is it as messed up as FC5?

[Anonymous Coward]

Do a default install of FC5.
Log in as root.
Run yum update.
yum will error out with a depend issue. This should never happen as nothing at all has been edited yet.

Perhaps the kernel headers issue was my fault, but that still doesn't explain how come yum errors out.

Re:Is it as messed up as FC5?

[layer3switch]

Most likely with your kernel-header issue, you must have skipped the kernel header install at Kernel Develop section of the package group installation. But for the most part, it's nothing serious enough to complain about. It's simple as `rpm -i /usr/src/redhat/RPMS/i386/kernel-devel-2.6.*.rpm` or `yum --disablerepo=\* --enablerepo=base install kernel-devel`

For your evolution issue;

for i in `rpm -qa | grep -e evolu* -e bonobo -e libgnome`; do rpm -q --requires $i; echo; done

Now you see why it farts with errors because of "dependancies"? If you aren't aware of which package is required to be installed for evolution to work, it's probably the most safest bet to install every Gnome packages under the sun. And by you mean, default installation, you should be using evolution packaged for the FC{ver} you have installed, not any other test or FC{some_other_ver} by hacking around undesirable yum repos.

Don't get me wrong. This isn't Gnome specific. This also can be seen with KDE base as well. If you are well aware of all those dependancies, it's only natural to simply "yum --disablerepo=\* --enablerepo=base --enablerepo=updates-released upgrade evolution" your distro in order to save time and fraustration.

(Although I'm using FC4+test, this should be close to your FC5 issue.)
Now this may return error with "Error: Missing Dependency: libpisock.so.8 is needed by package evolution" at the end saying the file is missing or the package providing the file is not installed. If that is the case, we troubleshoot. :)

`whereis libpisock`
This should return something like this;
"libpisock: /usr/lib/libpisock.so /usr/lib/libpisock.a"
Now we want to find out what package provides this with this command;
`rpm -qf /usr/lib/libpisock.so`
"pilot-link-0.12.0-0.pre4.0.fc4.2"
Ha! So there, the dependancy is now bit more clear. In my case, the pilot-link package has been updated so this is natural since I have more recent package than what is required (evolution seeking libpisock.so.8 when I have libpisock.so.9, you do the math). Simplest way for "MY" case is to backport and face the grim reality of trying to resolve even more dependancies (in this case `rpm -q --whatrequires pilot-link` results in "gnome-pilot-2.0.13-2" having dependancy and the rabbit holes goes deeper when `rpm -q --whatrequires gnome-pilot` returns "evolution"!). Now I can just install (not update!) previous version of pilot-link package that provides libpisock.so.8 AFTER removing pilot-link-0.12.0-0.pre4.0.fc4.2 package with `rpm --nodeps -e pilot-link pilot-link-devel` to rid of the dependancy of file /usr/lib/libpisock.so.9.0.0 (the .so and .9 is just symlinks). Take note that I take this route to remove the package without checking dependancies and install old version because pilot-link package doesn't seem to have any dependant packages that I care about.

rpm --test -e pilot-link pilot-link-devel
error: Failed dependencies:
libpisock.so.9 is needed by (installed) gnome-pilot-2.0.13-2.i386 (doesn't matter)
libpisock.so.9 is needed by (installed) evolution-2.2.3-2.fc4.i386 (doesn't matter)
libpisock.so.9 is needed by (installed) kdepim-3.5.1-0.1.fc4.i386 (doesn't matter)
libpisync.so.0 is needed by (installed) gnome-pilot-2.0.13-2.i386 (file from pilot-link package)
libpisync.so.0 is needed by (installed) evolution-2.2.3-2.fc4.i386 (file from pilot-link package)
pilot-link >= 1:0.11.4 is needed by (installed) gnome-pilot-2.0.13-2.i386 (another word, 0.12.0.0.pre2.0 old version is safe with th

Re:Is it as messed up as FC5?

[Anonymous Coward]

There was a human error in the updates pushed for FC4/FC5 update repository in the last night. Fedora's people are fixing it.

More information about it:
https://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-devel-list/ 2006-April/msg00898.html

Temporary fix:
yum update --exclude=\*evolution\*

Re:Is it as messed up as FC5?

[Anonymous Coward]

Yeah, you could do all that crap, or you could just run yumex and deselect evolution-* from the update list, waiting for Fedora people to re-release evolution.

Up to Flight6

[Anonymous Coward]

TFA reviews Flight5. Ubuntu is now testing Flight6. You can find the daily build here.

Remember, it's still alpha.

Re:Ubuntu's There - Linux stability

[Anonymous Coward]

As a longtime BSD person, I find it kind of odd that it is even sensible to talk about the relative stablity of Linux distributions. It is just silly to talk about stability in the BSD world. For all intents and purposes the BSDs just don't crash unless the hardware is flakey or incompatable. It is pretty hard to say one is more stable than the other without an incident to use as data =). Years ago, I used Debian, and I don't recall any stability issues there either. Have things changed?

A question for keen Linux users 'in the know':

Has Linux *really* reached a point where stability is an issue, or is this a red herring misleading those that don't use it? If indeed it does have stability issues, how often does it crash? What are the chances of losing a filesystem?

Very happy with Ubuntu 5.10

[MWales]

I'm eager to try out the new Ubuntu when it comes out. Will we be able to upgrade to 6, or will we need to do a complete reinstall? I used to have FC4 x86_64 on my system, and have since then put Ubuntu on it. I think I like Ubuntu more. I was dissapointed/annoyed that so much of the stuff built into FC were missing in Ubuntu, but I've pretty much added back everything I wanted (using synaptic, which is best package manager I've played with yet). The big thing I was missing was the stuff to compile stuff by hand, but it looks like after RTFA, that will be easy to fix (apt-get install build-essentials). I also wish the Ubuntu repository was a little more up to date, because I've had to install some stuff by hand. But the big pros have been the great package manager. Wine, Firefox, and whatnot work good in my chroot, better than I got them to work in FC4. X was leaking memory on my system in FC4, but with Ubuntu it doesn't. Overall, I liked both alot, but I think I like Ubuntu a little bit better.

Re:Very happy with Ubuntu 5.10

[Mad_Rain]

I'm eager to try out the new Ubuntu when it comes out. Will we be able to upgrade to 6, or will we need to do a complete reinstall?

You know that wonderful "apt-get" program you like so much in Ubuntu?

apt-get has you covered:

1. Back up your "/etc/apt/sources.list" file. 2. Edit it with your text-editor of choice, changing all the spots where it says "breezy" to "dapper". 3. Update by typing "sudo apt-get update" and 4. upgrade by typing "sudo apt-get dist-upgrade". Wait for downloads, and all should be good. 4 steps (5 if you count the waiting) to the upgrade process.

Re:Very happy with Ubuntu 5.10

[Markrian]

It's easier than that now. If you have the breezy-updates repository enabled (which it should already be, unless you installed Ubuntu from a development version). From the changelog of update-manager, which performs similar functions to the Windows Update applet in the system tray:

update-manager (0.42.2ubuntu12~breezy1) breezy-updates; urgency=low

* backported to breezy
* this update allows upgrades to the dapper version of ubuntu

-- Michael Vogt <michael.vogt@ubuntu.com> Mon, 27 Mar 2006 16:45:40 +0200

There'll be a GUI to initiate the upgrade to dapper once it's released. That means no more editing of /etc/apt/sources.list.

Re:Very happy with Ubuntu 5.10

[BenjyD]

Hopefully it will have been fixed by the final release, but I apt-get dist-upgraded to Flight 5 from Breezy and had some weird bugs which dissappeared when I did a clean install. Things like VMware not working or CUPS hanging and refusing to print.

Re:Ubuntu vs. FC5

[Procyon101]

Why is speed of a distro even an issue?? Turn off the crap you don't want if you want to go faster. You aren't going to get significant speed gains by switching distros. If you don't want to lose feature set, the MOST you can expect to gain by switching distros while retaining your current feature set is maybe 5%.

Compile your kernel.. you will get a bigger speed gain here by filtering out what you don't need and it's a WHOLE lot easier than switching distros. If you REALLY want the last 5-10% then compile and strip EVERYTHING yourself custom for YOUR processor. No distro is going to do that for you because they need to remain generic so that they run on "x86" instead of "Dual Proc Pentium 3 Coppermines only". If you want to do that, then get Gentoo, which exactly why Gentoo exists. Switching from one generic binary distro to another is just changing a few details about how certain peices of the OS fit together and what is on or off by default and has nothing to do with speed.

Re:Can it play MP3 out-of-the-box?

[Anonymous Coward]

All you need to do is install gstreamer-mad from either the universe or multiverse repositories. The package name should vary slighty from that, but those are the two key words, and a search in synaptic for "gstreamer" will bring it up. Once you've done that, you should be able to play mp3's just fine.

I Love Ubuntu

[Felius]

I'm a *nix user (various flavours) for over 10 years now, and have been running Linux on the desktop both at home and in the office for the past two and a half years. I'm a professional *nix sysadmin, with experience ranging from embedded systems to supercomputers.

I don't feel like Ubuntu is dumbed down at all. I feel like it's easy to use, with sensible defaults. I love that it's a distro that works out of the box, and yet it still allows me all the power of a Debian box (without the politics and glacial pace of change).

Next time my Mum needs her WinXP box "fixed" again, I'll be using Ubuntu to fix it. And yet I'll still be using it myself - two unix users from about as far apart on the spectrum as you can get, with their needs both met by the same distro. I like that.

Re:I Love Ubuntu

[scenestar]

yet it still allows me all the power of a Debian box

Sadly, that is exactly what is being killed off here.

Re:I Love Ubuntu

[Anonymous Coward]

Sadly, that is exactly what is being killed off here.

What power do you have with Debian that you don't with Ubuntu?

Re:I Love Ubuntu

[Felius]

Are you saying the power of Debian is being killed off? How?

If you're sick of typing sudo all the time, then type "sudo -s -H" to get a root shell. Or just set a password for the root user, if it bothers you.

If you'd prefer a different mail client, or web browser, or whatever, just install it. You've still got a huge selection of packages combined with the yumminess of apt - the only difference is that instead of installing five mail clients they've picked the one client they feel meets most people's requirements. The same with all other applications. There's absolutely nothing preventing you from installing anything you like.

If you're missing your compiler toolchain, start with "apt-get install build-essential" and add libraries from there depending on what you need. If you need server apps, install them.

If it's Gnome you don't like, try Kubuntu or Xubuntu. Why not install all three? ("apt-get install xubuntu-desktop", for example). Or just apt-get install your favourite window manager and go from there.

I'm completely serious when I say that I don't understand how Ubuntu is any less powerful than Debian.

Re:I Love Ubuntu

[MichaelSmith]

Next time my Mum needs her WinXP box "fixed" again, I'll be using Ubuntu to fix it. And yet I'll still be using it myself - two unix users from about as far apart on the spectrum as you can get, with their needs both met by the same distro. I like that.

My sister lives in a share house. Her PC is used by everybody and is on a DSL line 24*7. After a year or so of that Windows98 was rooted to the point of total unusability. Both from stuff which came off the internet and from various goes at fixing it.

Now she runs ubuntu. The machine quietly runs away. Exactly the same from one day to the next. Its only used for running Firefox and OO, as far as I can see. This is the kind of environment which needs something a little bit more robust than usual.

As long as your mothers requirements are modest: email, web browsing, some office apps, it will go well. If she is like my sister in law who wants an iPod, and the ability to run games she gets from the library, then you will have some trouble.

MP3 support is easy.

[Anonymous Coward]

Oh and before you suggest installing the codec's, checkout the ununtu forum. The how-to goes forever... and I am yet to see synaptic work even once!!!

They can't include it by default due to licensing problems. Here's how to do it:

1. Enable multiverse & universe repos
2. use apt or synaptic to install the gstreamer0.8-mad* package.
3. listen to mp3s

Done deal. As far as synaptic "not working", I've never had a problem with it, and I am running 6.06 which is still unstable. Maybe you just didn't have all the repositories enabled?

*DISCLAIMER: I am not a lawyer, I don't know about licensing issues, etc involved with this package - use your own discretion in installing packages on your system in accordance with local laws, etc

Windows

[Anonymous Coward]

It's not a full release, so it deserves some breathing room.

Full release or not, there's never a call for giving MS a breathing space when they're releasing a product. ;o)

Re:Windows

[nonlnear]

Do constantly delayed shipping dates qualify as "breathing room"? How about shipping late bug fixes as service packs - or as completely new retail versions? 98SE anyone?

Re:Windows

[chaoticgeek]

Ya, I really have to agree with you there, Microsoft may get lots of crap from people, but they do have so much breathing room. They are shipping delays on products, shipping new retails of old software, ME anyone?, and they constantly release patches. I know linux in general has patches, however a lot of the patches are for software and not for the OS itself. Where as with windows it is all wrapped up into one so you have to update all. If I only use gnome, I don't need the newest patch for KDE stuff, and if I don't use that comes standard with I don't need the update for that. However if I don't update IE I can still be at risk because if I get some peice of software that expolits the hole then well I'm screwed. So they do get a lot of breathing room.

Re:Windows

[pintomp3]

cuz MS has really bad breath

Re:Windows

[Alioth]

Well, Ubuntu is free and Windows costs money (and is made by a multibillion dollar company) so Windows better damn well be perfect.

Re:Two Things

[Anonymous Coward]

> Amateur/hideous UI toolkit for both major Linux desktops.

It really is stunning to see just how pathetic the basic UI elements of both desktop managers work in Linux.

Every-time I download the latest and greatest hot Linux distro and install it it's like a recurring nightmare. As far as I can tell it is due to the fact that the desktop is built upon these two crappy UI toolkits and now the two desktops are stuck with them. And basically all that can be done is keep coming up with flashier desktop backgrounds and other fluff.

I would love to have someone sit down and breakdown each and every OS X UI element into flowcharts and little animations that show:

1. Timings

2. Hot zones relative to the specific control laid out in a grid

3. Shading/shadowing/colour relative to other UI elements in the interface

4. Text - there could be an entire volume on just how OS X textfields work - and what is wrong with Linux text fields

And so on.

People instantly can tell the amount of work and detail that have gone into OS X when they sit down and use it even for the first time. It is time Linux desktop programmers go their shit together. The computing world is ready to make its leap to Linux and they are being held back by this amateur effort on the UI front.

Re:What the name?

[icydog]

So this is a better looking version of Mandrake?

Taste

[Craig Ringer]

The matter of the UI toolkit is partly a matter of taste. There are certainly areas where gtk+ and Qt are inferior to other implementations, but I don't think it's as drastic as you make out, nor do I think that cloning the Apple UI is the correct solution. I actually find getting around the Mac UI somewhat painful at times, and I think you'll find that a large part of the problem you're encountering stems from familiarity and taste (especially WRT appearance).

If there are specific instances where behaviour changes would improve usability, please submit suggestions to the gtk+ team and to TrollTech. Suggesting a wholesale "research and rip off" of the Mac OS X GUI is neither helpful, nor likely to ever happen.

Re:Taste

[Anonymous Coward]

I don't know if we should laugh or cry at that response.

God you suck.

Re:Two Things

[Vorondil28]

I recently tried to migrate my company's game development over to Ubuntu but we are back on our PPC Macs for the time being.

1) No iTunes clone

Waahh? Why the heck do your game devs need iTunes (or a clone thereof) at work? Tell those hippy iPodders to tweak their playlists at home! </tongueincheek>

Re:Apr. 17:Prostitute Schedule @MBOT in San Franci

[rdoger6424]

SHUT UP!

Re:Two Things

[jusdisgi]

If you're looking for an environment that behaves exactly like OSX....

Might I suggest...

OSX?

Seriously, if your measure of acceptability is "closer to Apple standard" and your problem with a desktop is that it doesn't behave identically to OSX, why are you thinking of switching to anything? OSX is obviously already perfect.

On the other hand, I'm personally never likely to use any environment that's much like OSX very often. Just not my cup of tea. A lot of us think that OSX isn't the holy grail of desktop computing. Sorry about that.

Re:Can it play MP3 out-of-the-box?

[CrunchyMunchy]

It's sort of too bad that Ubuntu ends up having to take this line, but it's not totally their fault. If you want to take the liability of distributing patent-encumbered software and just cross your fingers you don't get sued, be my guest.

Automatix can solve many of these problems anyway, but for 5.10 install gstreamer-mad, or 6.06 install gstreamer-ugly

arrogant ignoramus

[hinux]

I found this @ www.ubuntu.com

"Ubuntu" is an ancient African word, meaning "humanity to others". Ubuntu also means "I am what I am because of who we all are"

Your arrogant attitude towards newbies clearly reveals your ignorance.

Re:Two Things

[bebing]

1. Why switch? It sounds like you were happy with your PPC Macs?

2. Why do you need iTunes to develop games?

3. If you really want to switch to a linux system, use a distro/set-up that most closely meets your needs, and if needed tailor to your desires, but see #1 above.

Dapper Drakey Diablo

[Doc Ruby]

If they release it on the first Tuesday, the ISO will be hundreds of millions of binary numbers of the beast. With "Ubuntu" meaning "humanity", it will be the "number of a man", as crazy John the Revelator first announced the vaporware in the cold, damp Greek cave two millennia ago.

Re:Can it play MP3 out-of-the-box?

[istvaan]

-1 Troll

Re:I'm a Kubuntu user and I'M complaining!

[Anonymous Coward]

As you even said in your post, it's an alpha verison. I couldn't even install X.org on my system at around flight 4. If you're not prepared for major things to potentially break, don't run versions that are intended for testing.

Re:What the name?

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm just waiting for the Crazed Cock release, or maybe the Raving Rooster.

Re:Two Things

[shish]

Text - there could be an entire volume on just how OS X textfields work - and what is wrong with Linux text fields

Would you mind writing a couple of sentances then? I've not noticed much difference :-/ Also some backing up of your statements generally would be a good idea -- a lot of moaning "it sucks!" with no specifics or suggestions make you look like just another troll

funny

[selfdiscipline]

+1 informative. Hehehe....

Someone call the analogy police

[eviltypeguy]

The author of this "review" uses some of the worst analogies I have ever seen. Flee in terror after reading the following example:

Oh, I need to cover one more thing before I close. You need to know that before you do anything remotely close to building software packages, be wary that by default Ubuntu comes with nothing close to anything you'll need to do any form of compiling on the system. I mean, come on, shouldn't this be one of the more important things to include? Granted, the idea is to move away from hand compiling all of our applications, but let's not jump the gun here. We're not quite there yet. There's nothing worse than a bad case of premature ejaculation , and that's right where we are if we're expecting everything to work out of the box with prebuilt packages.

You may now proceed to mock my spelling and grammar in response. Nonetheless, I think that this article is a prime example of "juvenile journalism."

Re:Someone call the analogy police

[Fwonkas]

Wow, kids. Maybe I've been out of the Linux game too long.

"Granted, the idea is to move away from hand compiling all of our applications, but let's not jump the gun here."

What?

I ran Debian for years until way back when (2002? 2003?) and I only worried about compiling my own programs.

Either this is totally nuts or I completely missed something. Don't mind me.

Re:Someone call the analogy police

[koko775]

"apt-get install build-essential automake". Done.

Re:Someone call the analogy police

[Bazman]

Surely premature ejaculation *is* where everything works "out of the box". Sheesh, if you're going to be juvenile at least have a giggle at the word 'box'.

Re:Someone call the analogy police

[crhylove]

I can think of a few scenarios worse than premature ejaculation:

Celabacy,
Impotence,
Extreme size deviance,
Homosexuality (well, it's gonna be a problem if you're tryin' to impress a lady, whicn is the scenario I always envision with the phrase "premature ejaculation").
Blindness from Masterbation.

Well, that's just what cums off the top of my head, of what could go down worse and leave you high and dry, other than premature ejaculation.

rhY

Re:Someone call the analogy police

[christian.einfeldt]

The author of this "review" uses some of the worst analogies I have ever seen. Flee in terror after reading the following example:

People who write from glass houses should not throw stones. Flee in terror? If you are going to mock a guy for "juvenile journalism" you need to use better cliches yourself.

Re:Someone call the analogy police

[eviltypeguy]

As I said, feel free to mock my grammar and spelling. However, "flee in terror" is a colloquialism that I enjoy using in specific scenarios. Additionally, it doesn't really qualify as a "cliche," at least to me, since I very rarely hear it used.

Re:Ubuntu vs. FC5

[unoengborg]

FC5 is very snappy indeed. It's the most responsive Gnome desktop I have used so far. Much better than Ubuntu 5.04. If the article is right, and the new Ubuntu really smokes FC5 with respect to speed, I will be impressed. This really looks good for Linux.

Usability is getting better and better for each new release of Gnome.
It is now at a state where it leaves Windows XP in the dust, and is seriously starting to get to the same levels of usability as MacOS-X.

Vista will need to be very good to beat this, or perhaps even more pollished Linux distros, using Gnome 2.16 that probably will be available by the time Vista hits the market.

Re:Two Things

[Anonymous Coward]

Honestly, I wouldn't count on the wonderful UI you hope for. Fact of the matter is, all the current window managers are perfectly capable of displaying a few consoles, a session of gdb, a few copies of emacs (or vim), and xmms. Most people actually doing development are already satisfied. And guess who's doing all the development?

99% of open source developers do it in their spare time because it gives them something fun/cool to work on. Being a developer (though not necessarily open source), I'll give you a quick rundown on the fun/coolness scale of a few things (0-100):

• A compiler: 100
• Pretty GUI: 0-20 (low end for stuff like rearranging for usability, high end for adding new special effects)
• New interpretted language: 90
• Word processor: 5
• Obscure device driver for a device only you own: 85
• Accounting software: 1
• Operating system kernel: 95

To drive the point in, compare the number of popular open source window managers to the number of popular open source compilers/interpretters. Compare that to the number of open source accounting packages. People aren't going to volunteer their time and effort if they're not enjoying themselves, and most developers enjoy working on developer related stuff. (Shock!!) Which isn't to say open source eye candy guis, office suites, and accounting software won't get made, but the volunteer workforce for those projects is much (orders of magnitude?) smaller than the volunteer workforce for fun and cool projects.

As contrary as it is to what the tech news sites and technology pundits would like you to believe, I don't think most open source developers care how many people use their apps. With the exceptions of the ones with foundations and corporations based around them (MySQL, Mozilla, Apache), I usually get the impression "This is useful to me, if you find it useful, you can use it for free, if you find a bug please report it. If you don't like it or don't find it useful, don't use it and get over it." And what do you expect? They're spending their free time on it, then giving it away.

I definitely don't speak for any open source developers, and since I'm posting AC, I don't really speak for anyone, but that's my opinion.

Re:Two Things

[killjoe]

Whatever you do don't clone the finder. Not that I think anybody is actually considering cloning the mac gui but if you take a lot of acid and try to do so please don't clone the finder.

Thank you.

Re:Can it play MP3 out-of-the-box?

[Braino420]

It's not exactly the music companies. I think it has more to deal with mp3 and the like being proprietary formats that are illegal to use in the US unless you've payed the licensing fee. The article actually talks about Easy Ubuntu, which supposedly (haven't used it) gives you access to these formats. There are also other reasons for not including these formats; like having a completely free system (as in freedom).

As for the MPAA deal, I'm not quite sure where you were going with that. I told you about Easy Ubuntu, but if you had trouble using Synaptec, I don't think you'll make it that far.

XP isn't easier, it's different. I hope you'll change your mind and give learning Ubuntu another try ;)

I like it

[deadgoon42]

I installed the Dapper version of Kubuntu on my lappy yesterday. The install was quick and it automagically detected almost all my hardware. The only issue was with the wireless network. It would not work during the install, but it did detect my card and I was able to manually start the network after installation with a few commands. I still prefer KDE to Gnome, but I think I'll give Gnome another try once Dapper comes out. Like an idiot I failed to create a /home partition on my current install, so when Dapper is released, I'll just do a fresh install and try out Gnome. I use Kubuntu as my every day desktop. Windows partition was deleted yesterday. :)

Re:I like it

[xenocide2]

It really isn't nessecary to reformat, I don't think, although it could be instructive for you to walk through the install process again. Just install ubunutu-desktop and you've installed ubuntu. Removing KDE / kubuntu is a bit more tricky, since apt-get doesn't keep track of things in quite the right manner to detect orphaned packages automatically. A fairly reliable way is to remove kdelibs -- if you want some of the neater kde apps like k3b, you can get them back later, but this should catch a lot of the things that kubuntu installs that regular ubuntu doesn't.

Re:I like it

[deadgoon42]

Actually, I started out with Ubuntu and installed the kubuntu-desktop package. So right now I get the best of both worlds. KDE just works better for me, although I know that is pretty subjective. It has better helper applications and little dock applets than Gnome. KDE also seems more stable, with a lot less weirdness. Sometimes Gnome just does random things for no reason (like docking my apps, at random, to the top of the screen instead of the the docking area). KDE also looks more polished. However, Gnome does have several advantages over KDE. Nautilus is a much better file manager than Konquerer. gFTP is the easiest FTP file manager out there. I also prefer the Gnome save dialog although I know many people don't. And of course with Ubuntu, Gnome is the default and has better support.

Re:I like it

[ChristTrekker]

I've found I like XFCE better than KDE or Gnome, so I installed xubuntu-desktop. I haven't quite figured out how to edit the menus yet, so I'm tolerating the default arrangement.

Re:Two Things

[Anonymous Coward]

If you want an iTunes clone try Madman

Flight 6

[Vidiot3k]

I went from 5.10 to Flight 6 tonight and everything seems ok, just need to get those media codecs installed so I can get back to listening to my pirated MP3's and watching my porn collection... ;)

Re:Two Things

[Anonymous Coward]

What a troll.

Don't try migrating anything from something to another. From your kind of comments I can see you're just a dev-wannabee, no real skills. You can't cut it.

Go play with your weiner, loser.

silly irony here

[maryjanecapri]

i am a newly converted fan of Ubuntu. i've been using red hat (now fedora) since Red Hat 4.2. after using an ibook and growing to dislike OS X i finally decided to take Kubuntu for ppc out for a drive...and wound up LOVING it!

but what i find interesting is that the author created a flash file to view the installation process but flash isn't supported on the ppc version of ubuntu. odd that. of course i have to wonder why flash isn't supported.

regardless - i find ubuntu a complete success. i totally get why it's becoming so popular. ease of installment (even though it's all text based) and zippy performance.

but dang it - get flash to work! ;-)

Re:silly irony here

[wed128]

Flash isn't supported because Macromedia only provides IA32 binaries for the linux flash plugin...and only slow crappy ones at that.

Ubuntu

[Council]

My boss spent two months getting a set of robotics cameras to work with Mandrake 10, recompiling a bunch of custom kernels, getting various gurus in, working every day from january through march, just to get the camera data read properly by the libraries and the libraries working properly with the system.

We were talking about distros, and I mentioned that he might want to check out Ubuntu.

An hour or two later I get this incredibly emotional call from him. He had installed Ubuntu on the robot, one-click-built the camera packages, compiled the vision libraries, and it worked. 30 minutes of system install plus literally 10 minutes of compiling and he had just done what took him two months on another distro. He is still in shock over this.

That having been said, I'm running Dapper as of yesterday, and I had to do crazy tricks to get it to actually print to my standard, detected printer.

Re:Ubuntu vs. FC5

[Braino420]

I just put FC5 on a system of mine this past weekend. I've got Ubuntu on a few boxes, and it was also on the FC5 box. I can't really replicate his "smoking" results, because he doesn't go into any detail on how arrived at this conclusion. I haven't put a heavy strain on the comp yet, but I also haven't noticed any slow downs. Definately nothing different between the two with just normal everyday use. Hate to say it, but it sounds like he's talking out of his ass on that one.

It's a little weird how he also compared it to Slackware after that too... Hmmm, old old old distro versus bleeding edge distro, it just sounds like he was playing favorites. Pretty unprofessional, like this quote "Much more so than the latest Fedora Core, which to me looks like it would be right at home in a three ring circus... center ring of course." I mean, was that neccessary? WTH does that mean?

The author just seemed a little full of himself, like when he complains that he got some "canned" reply from Ubuntu. I think they have better things to do than play kiss ass with random dude that wrote some review on the internet. Everyone that goes to Mad Pengiun knows about Ubuntu, he didn't do shit for them. His reaction was rediculous.

Beyond that, the article was pretty good, but I wouldn't go reading into any of his comments... You know, like they were actually based on something tangible.

Its a legal issue

[bunbuntheminilop]

The following is quoted from here

Below is the reason why Ubuntu lacks media support for closed codecs "out of the box."

A single example will be used- MP3's.

The group that holds the patent on MP3's demands that for each player with MP3 support a 75 cent fee must be paid:

http://www.mp3licensing.com/royalty/index.html

It might not seem like a lot, but when the distro is free then even such a small fee is too much. The only other option is to pay a large one time fee that could otherwise pay a developer to work on Ubuntu for a whole year! So it costs money to distribute software that pays MP3s.

If Ubuntu ignored this, it could be sued in nations like the U.S. where this patent is valid. Either Ubuntu would have to pay up or the developers could never set foot in a country with such patent laws ever again (not reasonable). So because it costs money, Ubuntu has no MP3 support.

Now take this situation, and multiply it times every type of restricted software out there (that isn't a free like OGG) and you see what the situation is. So in order to spend money on developers, not laywers, Ubuntu has to avoid touching these codecs. Even an easier way to install them such as "click here to install" would make Ubuntu an accessory to a crime in many nations.

This is why its important to support open codecs and standards. But Ubuntu can't provide restricted software, or make it any easier because of the law.

Re:Its a legal issue

[Anonymous Coward]

This is precisely the point. The MP3 is a patented technology. This is why you should switch to ogg or FLAC. Sadly not many players support ogg and FLAC. Audio quality wise, ogg is similar to MP3, both lossy codecs intended for armatures. Lossy means drop quality to achieve a smaller file size.

Btw, FLAC is a high-definition codec, if you are a audiophile, that's what you should use, not MP3. FLAC is a lossless codec.

If you really want to use MP3, use Tomahawk Desktop.

Re:What the name?

[Anonymous Coward]

I am waiting for the Portly Platypus release! Maybe Angry Aardvark.

Re:Two Things

[Hes Nikke]

Or if you DO clone the finder, clone the Mac OS 9 finder! That was a good finder!

Drivers for E-machines

[emooney]

I bought an emachine specifically for Ubuntu to play around with and get to know the OS. I couldn't get the Breezy 5.10 or the 6.X beta to recognize the onboard NIC, video or onboard audio. I want to get to know the OS. I don't want to have to know how to install or create a driver at this point. Maybe after I get my feet wet with the OS. I returned the emachine and put Ubuntu on the back burner. From what I was told, there just aren't any drivers written for alot of onboard components yet. =(

Re:Drivers for E-machines

[Brian Puccio]

I use the onbaord video, sound and network in my shuttle system and it works fine. Your best bet is not buying something and hoping it works, but looking up the component online and seeing if it is supported under linux.

Re:Drivers for E-machines

[Wylfing]

I bought an emachine specifically for Ubuntu to play around with and get to know the OS. I couldn't get the Breezy 5.10 or the 6.X beta to recognize the onboard NIC, video or onboard audio. I want to get to know the OS. I don't want to have to know how to install or create a driver at this point. Maybe after I get my feet wet with the OS. I returned the emachine and put Ubuntu on the back burner. From what I was told, there just aren't any drivers written for alot of onboard components yet. =(

No, that's not quite right. Drivers exist for an astonishingly HUGE amount of hardware. It's a rare day that I find hardware that's not autodetected. You just happened to pick one of those rarities.

Re:Drivers for E-machines

[jsoderba]

Looking at emachines.com it looks like their current machines use the Nvidia 6100 chipset. Because Nvidia is still comitted to making things as hard as possible for Linux users you should look to another manufacturer. Systems built around Intel or Via chipsets should work fine.

Re:Drivers for E-machines

[emooney]

Cool. Thanks for the heads up. But that's just for the video driver right? How about the network and audio component? Isn't this just 1/3 of the battle? Should I just avoid machines that have on board Nic, Video and audio? Please advise.

Re:Drivers for E-machines

[jsoderba]

No, in those systems graphics, network and audio are all in nvidia's chipset. Since Nvidia doesn't like realeasing specs for their hardware and nobody has reverse-engineered the 6100 model, you're out of luck. Intel's and Via's solutions, and even older Nvidia chipsets should be fine.

Screen resolution could use some help.

[jbn-o]

Adjusting the screen resolution is one problem I've consistently seen with Ubuntu GNU/Linux.

This review is too kind on the matter for the audience I talk to; suggesting that novices use "sudo dpkg-reconfigure xserver-xorg" and answer questions about their hardware is not something I'd recommend to novices. While other parts of Ubuntu GNU/Linux shine for the novice, this is not one of them. Fedora Core GNU/Linux has always been better at letting me use the GNOME screen resolution adjuster (and setting the default to the highest screen resolution at the highest refresh rate so I don't often have to adjust the screen resolution at all) and getting the desired results.

I hope Ubuntu's chosen resolution picks the native resolution for LCD screens. I mostly work with users who have older computers and CRTs but are planning to switch to LCDs real soon now.

Re:Screen resolution could use some help.

[Anonymous Coward]

"Tomahawk Desktop, a new distribution, this week released v1.1 of its first Linux desktop. The Tomahawk Desktop Standard "advanced multimedia-centric distribution" sets itself apart by touting compatibility with wide-screen monitors and flat panels with aspect ratios of 16:10 and 16:9, in addition to the popular 5:4 and 4:3 formats."

Read more: http://desktoplinux.com/news/NS7069459557.html

Re:Screen resolution could use some help.

[Chris Pimlott]

I have a 17" widescreen Dell laptop with an abnormal native resolution of 1920x1200 and Ubuntu set it correctly straight out of the box. I can't comment on how easy it is to change this, as I've never had to.

Re:Screen resolution could use some help.

[Breakfast Pants]

I have a dell 2001fpw (1680x1050), Ubuntu totally barfed on it.

Re:Screen resolution could use some help.

[ardor]

Mod me offtopic, but...
why all this GNU/Linux madness? Trying to be a GNU nazi? Its like the persons who always ensure that everything is gender-neutral. "His/her package will be delivered to his/her bank account." (In other languages like German or Spanish its even worse.) We are used to say "Ubuntu", or "Ubuntu Linux", thank you very much. In fact, if you want to split hairs, you should call it Ubuntu GNU/GNOME/Linux, shouldn't you? Or Ubuntu GNU/X11/GNOME/Linux?

Re:Screen resolution could use some help.

[Flamekebab]

I have a widescreen Acer laptop, running at 1280x800. It took quite a bit of fiddling with config files under Hoary (difficult back then as I was a total novice) to get it to work. I got there in the end, but the standard desktop resolution widget thing was no help whatsoever.

Re:Screen resolution could use some help.

[yarbo]

The G in GNOME stands for GNU.

Re:Ubuntu's There - Linux stability

[poopie]

Has Linux *really* reached a point where stability is an issue, or is this a red herring misleading those that don't use it? If indeed it does have stability issues, how often does it crash? What are the chances of losing a filesystem?

You know, all this talk about Linux stability is really more related to the advancement of bloated desktop environments and poorly tested features and new versions.

Every distro is constantly rebuilding the latest KDE and GNOME with $NEW_FEATURE and sometimes it doesn't work well or isn't well tested.

I believe that you could disable X (or run twm) and run just about any Linux distro as a rock-solid server.

But... as time goes on, Linux users evolve (or should I say devolve?) and more people consider Linux-the-desktop-experience to be Linux. If you run a bleeding edge Linux distro and try Beagle, it might well crash. Does that make Linux unstable? Depends on your audience...

Coral Cache of site

[Slashcrunch]

Site is ./'ed, use the coral cache http://madpenguin.org.nyud.net:8080/cms/index.php/ ?m=show&id=6699&page=1

Re:yeah but

[Imexius]

Its not _what_ distro you use, its _how_ you use it.

Re:Can it play MP3 out-of-the-box?

[xenocide2]

Well, as long as your prefered method of playing music on a computer is patented, you'll be subjected to the wiles of a patent holder lording over who can distribute programs and how much it will cost them. I can't help it the pirate scene saw an interesting opportunity and jumped in head first, and the tech scene followed them into muddy waters. Nor can Ubuntu, as long as they intend to disitribute Ubuntu at NO COST to its users then they'll be at odds with people who insist their ideas must cost people.

dapper and xfce

[timelady]

upgraded from breezy to dapper on my xubuntu laptop on weekend. lost all my xfce settings, dammit. oh well. now is all reconfigured and happy, fast and shiny:

It's quite obvious that ...

[chris_sawtell]

... the Ubuntu designers have never changed a baby's nappy/diaper!!!

It's time to change that absolutely ghastly default colour scheme.

Otherwise Ubuntu is beautiful.

Re:It's quite obvious that ...

[Eideewt]

I like the color scheme. I'm sick of the shiny blues and greens that all the other OSes and linux distros seem to favor. I find warm colors more relaxing. I don't actually use Ubuntu anymore, or even have much of a color scheme (thanks to the Ratpoison window manager), but Ubuntu's window decorations and widgets were definitely a high point when I was running it.

Re:Can it play MP3 out-of-the-box?

[y86]

uhhh yeah it totally can.

xmms is included........

in Xterm type...

bash$ xmms &

Re:Ubuntu vs. FC5

[zbyte64]

Your comment ommits the fact that some people don't want to invest allot of time to see performance benefits. Yes you can compile everything, but most people don't want to sit around for that. Don't get me wrong, I like gentoo as much as the next ricer, but I will admit the strengths of ubuntu/debian. And you as a gentoor (new word?) should appreciate not having to disable extra stuff, but rather enable the bloatware.

Re:Ubuntu's There - Linux stability

[JanneM]

Has Linux *really* reached a point where stability is an issue, or is this a red herring misleading those that don't use it? If indeed it does have stability issues, how often does it crash? What are the chances of losing a filesystem?

Stability is only an issue at the desktop level (Gnome, KDE, OOffice, Firefox and so on), and xBSD are running the same stuff as Linux at that level, and they're overall equally crash-prone no matter what platform.

On the kernel level, I haven't seen a crash for years - and that was when I was fiddling with a device driver, making it my own fault. I know the closed-source Nvidia drivers can apparently take down a machine, but then again, you'd have the same situation on BSD if you have the drivers.

On the file system level, the standard file systems seem very, very stable. I have never heard of disk corruption that wasn't hardware related. The more experimental stuff, like ReiserFS, seem anecdotally less stable; but then, they aren't used by default either. As usual, if you want to live on the bleeding edge, expect to cut yourself from time to time.

I don't know much about linux, I'll admit,...

[AbRASiON]

Ubuntu 5.10 made a change to (I think) the hotplug system or something and ditched or moved to something called "udev" (iirc)
It totally broke ipw2200 WPA support and the ability to monitor packets (war driving with kismet)

Why do they need to cock about with this kind of stuff without maintaining some kind of backwards compatibility or way of ensuring it works "out of the box"
The ipw2200 chipset is quite old now as is my Dell 8600 laptop (18 month old tech, maybe more)

Disapointing.

Re:I don't know much about linux, I'll admit,...

[SuperQ]

It's only half Ubuntu's fault.. most of the problems are with the ipw2200 driver. I've spent many hours fighting to get WPA working. The ipw2200 driver guys are great, but they release code quiet often, and Ubuntu can only do so much testing of single drivers. Every Ubuntu release so far I've had to keep a custom-built ipw2200 driver around.

As for udev/hotplug.. those have been in ubuntu since the beginning.. I don't know what specifics they changed with 5.10, because I havn't had the time to upgrade most of my machines from 5.04.

I hope things have settled down in ipw-land enough that Ubuntu can release a reasonable driver. I'm not worried about it right now, but I am worried that 6.06 will lack good support for the new pci express variant that the Core Duo laptops will have. (the driver is still being written)

Re:I don't know much about linux, I'll admit,...

[crimsun]

Let's clear up the misrepresentation.

Breezy (5.10) uses hotplug and udev. This is the nice, comfortable way with which most people using Linux 2.6 are probably at least vaguely familiar. Dapper (6.06) has ditched hotplug and uses udev. Why? Linux 2.6.15 and udev perform everything that the older 2.6.12 kernel, udev, and hotplug performed. Read more here [0].

Next, Dapper currently has v1.1.1 of the ipw2200 driver, and it supports "wardriving" just fine.

[0] https://lists.ubuntu.com/archives/ubuntu-devel-ann ounce/2005-December/000028.html

Re:I don't know much about linux, I'll admit,...

[AbRASiON]

Thanks for the response, it's much appreciated.

Re:I don't know much about linux, I'll admit,...

[Anonymous Coward]

Daper's ipw2200 driver on Dell Inspiron 8600 works perfectly.

Re:Ubuntu vs. FC5

[Procyon101]

I wasn't recommending compiling everything. Like I said, you can get maybe get another 5-10% that way and it's not worth it for most people. However, compiling a kernel (which is where any real distro differences in speed are going to be) is orders of magnitude simpler than reinstalling the entire OS.

The strengths of the OS's lie not in their speed differences, as Linux is going to run about as fast as Linux runs, and KDE/Gnome is also, no matter what distro you are on. The strengths of the distros lie in their package management, their ease of patching and upgrading, their helper utilities, the community and documentation, corporate support, etc.

Ricing is not choosing Gentoo over Fedora Core. Ricing is willing to switch your OS distribution because you heard that Fedora Core screams compared to Ubuntu, but maybe Slackware will kick it's ass and make it go even faster... when really the only difference in speed is probably in your KDE display settings.

Will Ubuntu break if I upgrade piecewise?

[KWTm]

I switched to Ubuntu from Mandrake v10.0o because I couldn't upgrade piecewise. Could someone tell me if I will encounter the same problem with Ubuntu?

I found that, often I would use SomeApplication v1.1, let's say, but then to upgrade to SomeApplication v1.2, I would need to upgrade SomeLibrary. This should automatically be done by the handy "urpmi" utility, Mandrake's answer to "yum", "apt" and "yast". But then it would spit out some error message. Turns out that upgrading the library from SomeLibrary v1.1.1.1 to v1.1.1.2 would break the rest of the applications.

And so, the only way to get the newer version of SomeApplication would be to install a newer version of Mandrake (now Mandriva). This was thrilling for the first three reinstalls (8.1 -> 9.0 -> 9.1 -> 10.0), but after while, I just wanted to get my work done and quit having to wipe partitions and reinstall. (Don't even get me started on the upgrading-from-install-CD farce.) So now my one computer is still using the ancient Mandrake 10.0, while my other runs (k)Ubuntu 5.10.

I'm hoping that Ubuntu won't be the same. In particular, I'm hoping that I can install Warty Warthog, which runs XFree86, and then upgrade everything except the X server (I have a ATI Rage Fury Pro card which doesn't work with Xorg). Is this going to work?

If not, then I would very well say that I, for one, will end up needing to compile from source.

Re:Will Ubuntu break if I upgrade piecewise?

[crimsun]

The X Window System is a huge component of the Ubuntu desktop. If you begin with Warty (4.10), the first official release, then attempt to grab Firefox from Dapper (6.06) using the current development release's updated package list, apt-get/aptitude/Synaptic/Adept will perform, essentially, a dist-upgrade for you, which means that you'll have XFree86 replaced by X.Org 7.0. In this example, no, there is no piecemeal upgrade possible in a simplistic and no-brainer manner.

Re:Will Ubuntu break if I upgrade piecewise?

[Afrosheen]

It depends. Most distros allow you to exclude packages when you upgrade, up to a certain point. If a ton of X apps are really depending on xorg to be there, and you're running XFree, you may still be alright. One of the mysteries of linux is how you can install things you'll never use, just for dependencies' sake. So in fact you could install xorg if your apps wanted it to be there, but continue to run XFree.

  Or you could suck it up and buy a supported card. Last time I checked, Nvidia Geforce and Geforce2 cards were practically free.

Re:Two Things

[proxima]

1) No iTunes clone. amaroK - yeeeeech...

On the contrary, the general reception amaroK gets in my experience, even (and especially) when compared to iTunes, is that amaroK is a vastly superior audio player. Now, I don't own an ipod (I own an iaudio X5, which uses simple a simple vfat mount point), so perhaps amaroK's ipod integration isn't as good as iTunes.

iTunes is fine for simple audio needs, but it just seemed too limited compared to the features I adore in amaroK. Of course, iTunes isn't really much of a contender in that I play FLAC and OGG files, and for quite some time the main iTunes OGG decoder crashed on OSX 10.4. Still, my wife reports that things like the track number don't work. I haven't tried to get any sort of FLAC support working in iTunes, but I seem to recall that it didn't exist in any convenient form.

Beyond that, amaroK has a bunch of features that iTunes either doesn't have, or requires some kind of add-on. For example, I use its wikipedia lookup on occasion. A big deal? Not really, but I probably wouldn't bother to find out what wp has to say on an artist if it weren't a simple tab.

iTunes has decent browsing by id3 tag, but amaroK's implementation makes much better use of the window real estate [note: those screenshots are getting old. amaroK development moves amazingly fast.]

amaroK's file browser is also very useful for media that's not in my established library. iTunes has no built-in equivalent (though you can use Finder/Explorer if iTunes is the default app for that media type). I could go on with other neat amaroK features I use with varying frequency.

I have encountered one area in which iTunes exceeds amaroK: podcast support. amaroK has the basics, but the interface is pretty simplistic and not as polished as that of iTunes. Of course, there is no music store/video store/etc, but not owning an ipod, I have little interest in those features.

So I end up listening to almost all of my music through amaroK in FC4, and listening to podcasts from my Mac Mini. It's the best of both apps, but if I had to choose one or the other, it would be amaroK hands down.

Re:Ubuntu vs. FC5

[ClamIAm]

If you REALLY want the last 5-10% then compile and strip EVERYTHING yourself custom for YOUR processor.

I don't buy it. Sure, some code will run 10 times faster when compiled with things like MMX or SSE. Sure, passing a bunch of flags to GCC will make code that's more suited to your system. But where are the numbers?

Frameworks

[wysiwia]

2) Amateur/hideous UI toolkit for both major Linux desktops. My own game editor's have better/closer to Apple standard GUI elements.

I agree the two default frameworks aren't that terrific but there's also wxWidgets (http://www.wxwidgets.org/) which even contains a MacOSX port and wyoGuide (http://wyoguide.sf.net/) tells you how to use it efficiently. But what do I tell you, if you really care for moving to Ubuntu you most probably would have known already.

O. Wyss

/media is a FHS convention

[LnxGuit]

I think you're over-reacting to the use of /media... it is there in compliance with the Filesystem Hierarchy Standard. And as for screenshot #6 - "Restart Required" - maybe rebooting after a kernel upgrade isn't the end of the world ;)

Re:Two Things

[Anonymous Coward]

Let me guess...you're one of these dorks:

"No wireless. Less space than a nomad. Lame.'

Printer?

[Tavor]

It wouldn't happen to be a Lexmark Z51, would it by any chance? I've always had problem with CUPS and the Z51, on a couple of Distros...

Re:Printer?

[Anonymous Coward]

hmm.. i have exactly the same problem with cups & lbp-660 driver.. figured that it was a non-standard printer.. atleast it works.. :)

Re:Ubuntu vs. FC5

[Procyon101]

The whole reason processor specific instructions exist is because they are faster than the stock x86 instructions. The difference will be miniscule however (5-10% is unnoticable for human interaction stuff, and hardly noticible in heavy server apps). In addition, different procs pipeline their instructions differently, and a stock x86 compile is hardly going to take pipelinine into account. There is no -fomgfast gcc compiler flag :) but you can expect a small (5-10%) gain overall for compiling for your proc. Remember that stock x86 builds are using ONLY the instructions from the 386 processor. Most distros are probably compiled with a 586 instruction set, but there are alot of advancements in instructions and pipelining between 586 and todays P4 and Athlons.

I highly doubt you will EVER get 10x (1000%) speed increases from compiling with mmx and friends... you realize that using a quake benchmark that would mean going from 10 FPS to 100 FPS just from a recompile... that's not going to happen. *MAYBE* 50% increase in speed on apps dealing expressly with graphics code, and even then probably not unless you give it permission with -ffast-math.

It's not worth it unless you either really need it (you are doing hardcore scientific work where 10% faster means days or weeks saved), you are doing it anyway for other reasons, so might as well add the optimizations (you use Gentoo and love portage) or you are just a ricer (You wish Gentoo would add support for the -fomgfast flag)

If you want faster, go buy a faster proc.

The only caveat is in the kernal. SMP and timer interupt settings can make a big difference in system performance or responsiveness (if you run a dual core chip and have SMP turned off for instance... that's just silly).

^mod down comment SPAM

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm getting sick of this crap. Enough spamming.

Kernel upgrades require reboots

[babbling]

You can't run a new kernel on any Linux distribution without booting the kernel again. The same goes for pretty much every operating system.

Re:OMFG (GNAA recuiting drive)

[Anonymous Coward]

Careful of that link, it spawns multiple "GNAA recuiting drive" emails. Why the hell did I (just 5 minutes ago!) set Evolution as the default mail client on this machine?

Funny tho :)

Re:Ubuntu's There - Linux stability

[Anonymous Coward]

Good answers fellas, thanks! I gather then that the term 'stability' is just being used very loosely, and they only mean the quality of the included default desktop environments and favourite applications -- which has nothing to do with Linux per se. Obviously as you point out, this experience is pretty much the same whatever the OS. Hell ... by that standard OpenBSD has numerous features that deliberately provoke badly written applications into crashing (not to mention moan loadly when compiling), so I guess it would suck from that point of view.

I personally consider an application's portability and stability on OpenBSD to be a fair indicator of the quality of that software. Too bad more developers do not test on this platform. If it runs correctly on OpenBSD, you can be fairly certain it will run very well on Linux!

Re:Can it play MP3 out-of-the-box?

[Technician]

MP3's are a propritory format. A royalty needs to be paid for each decoder. This is built into commercial applications. It is a pain in the *** for open source. To remain legal, most open source does not play MP3's out of the box. Get used to problems of software patents. It is a part of life. It keeps the developers out of hot water by not including it by default. It wasn't forgotten, it was left out for a reason. They didn't want to pay a fee for each copy they passed out for free.

Re:Ubuntu vs. FC5

[ClamIAm]

I highly doubt you will EVER get 10x (1000%) speed increases from compiling with mmx and friends

If you're doing something like hardcore video rendering, it might be plausible...

Re:Ubuntu

[Anonymous Coward]

What kind of comparison is this? Mandrake 10.0 is a product of 3 years ago (and apart this
was the first distro based on kernel 2.6). After that there were at least
3 Mandrake/Mandriva further newer releases (10.1, 10.2/2005LE and 2006).

Re:Two Things

[Anonymous Coward]

1) No iTunes clone. amaroK - yeeeeech...

Is that game development or game play?

2) Amateur/hideous UI toolkit for both major Linux desktops. My own game editor's have better/closer to Apple standard GUI elements.

Because cloning Apple pixel by pixel is the hallmark of professional interfaces...

it smoked Fedora Core 5 performance-wise???

[layer3switch]

If it wasn't a FUD or flame intended, I don't know what is.

With that type of strong statement, I would like to see the version to version, gcc build to gcc build, distro to distro, packages to packages, side by side comparison on what the hell was so "smoking" about the performance. Otherwise, that kind of statement just makes no sense. Until some solid benchmark and proof, this statement would be more fitting; "warm fuzzy feeling that things just magically pops up much faster on Ubuntu 6.06 than on FC5."

Re:it smoked Fedora Core 5 performance-wise???

[Kangburra]

I don't know about RC5 but with Ubuntu the add on script which installs Flash, Java libdvdcss2 etc also turns on DMA (does for Breezy assume it does for Dapper). This alone make all things optical work better.

Re:Ubuntu vs. FC5

[vga_init]

I recently switched from Ubuntu to Fedora Core 5. I loved Ubuntu; I left merely because I like to try new things, and I ran Fedora for a while before Ubuntu became a household name (of course, I'd known of its existence for quite a long time, but I tended to view it as immature, whether or not that view was justified (don't blame a user of stable systems to shy away from new things)).

Ubuntu was great: stable, fast, polished. No hassle whatsoever--and don't confuse ease with limitation; power and flexibility also abound, and nothing is held back from power users and administrators.

Moving to Fedora was a little awkward at first because it did certainly seem slower--the install process and updates took longer, and the system seemed to need a little bit of time to settle into its groove. After that, no appreciable speed difference. Linux is linux, I decided.

As for FC vs. Ubuntu. Well, they're just different. Debian vs. Red Hat? We're talking two fundamental pillars of the linux world--the vast majority of distros alive are based off of one or the other. Naysayers aside, both have withstood the test of time, let alone all the other tests.

I think package systems contribute to the perceived speed of distros. Honestly, I think dpkg is just plain faster in every way. RPM seems just as much stable and robust, but slightly more painful to work with and much more taxing on the system. Oh yeah, and I like yum. A lot. Sure, it's not aptitude, but it does more than you think.

I've used Ubuntu 5.04, liked it, but now I'm thinking about trying out Fedora Core 5. However, if the review is right and Ubuntu "smokes" FC5, it sounds like I should just wait until Dapper comes out.

I found myself in your shoes. I'm quite glad I gave Fedora a shot, and there's nothing to hold you back from switching. If I'm not totally comfy with Fedora, I'll just switch to Dapper when it's released! Have your cake and eat it too.

Re:Ubuntu

[Anonymous Coward]

Right... Mandrake 10 was released in 2003. Another fair comparison here.
Maybe you could try 2006 or Mandriva One, no ?

Re:Two Things

[Anonymous Coward]

Late and idiotic.

Congrats!

Re:Ubuntu

[16K Ram Pack]

I've just installed Ubuntu as a dual-boot because I was so overwhelmed at how well the live CD went.

I'm a reasonably technical guy, but I'm more of a high-level business-orientated developer than a hardcore hacker. It took me a few hours last week to install a dual-boot of 5.10 and have it receiving podcasts and browsing the web. I've still got a few more things to try, but I'm not expecting them to be too tricky.

back up your whole drive first!

[Anonymous Coward]

I've tried that (with debian stable) and it fucked stuff up completely (X broken, updates broken, I think even networking broken). Reinstall is the way to go, or better still make a dual boot until you're totally happy with the new distro.

dist-upgrade is risky business.

Re:back up your whole drive first!

[loom_weaver]

I have to agree with the above poster. I've been running debian stable servers for years now but I've yet to do a successful dist-upgrade.

The last one I tried didn't take into account the raid 1 configuration I had going. Couldn't boot either drive after that.

Reinstall is the way to go still.

Re:Two Things

[Anonymous Coward]

Short and devoid of information. You will need ALL CAPS in the next post to keep the level going further down, at least in the OP you weren't short...

FP's "My First Computer" is not serviceable

[m4c north]

by every fix-it place. Here's a shop that won't.

Does it run on MacIntels?

[egghat]

Since BootCamp came out, Linux on MacIntels should have become much easier.

Anybody knows if (K)Ubuntu runs out of the box on these machines?

Bye egghat.

Re:Ubuntu vs. FC5

[BenjyD]

When I rewrote a some image effects in KDE (blending, convert to B&W etc) using MMX/SSE a while back, the SIMD version was around 4x faster on an Athlon and 10x on a P4. Of course, that's only for one very small part of KDE and the overall performance increase was probably less than 1%.

Re:Can it play MP3 out-of-the-box?

[MichaelSmith]

If you want to take the liability of distributing patent-encumbered software and just cross your fingers you don't get sued, be my guest.

I can do that at home, but what about the internet cafe project I am working on? If I load it up with software for viewing media am I creating a legal liability for myself?

Re:Ubuntu

[ookaze]

My boss spent two months getting a set of robotics cameras to work with Mandrake 10, recompiling a bunch of custom kernels, getting various gurus in, working every day from january through march, just to get the camera data read properly by the libraries and the libraries working properly with the system

So now it works on Linux, OK.

We were talking about distros, and I mentioned that he might want to check out Ubuntu.
An hour or two later I get this incredibly emotional call from him. He had installed Ubuntu on the robot, one-click-built the camera packages, compiled the vision libraries, and it worked. 30 minutes of system install plus literally 10 minutes of compiling and he had just done what took him two months on another distro. He is still in shock over this.

He was still in shock because the library that worked on an at least 2 years older distro of Linux, worked on one of the lateste breed of Linux ?
Welcome to the world of FOSS and it's great compatibility. This would have been no shock to me.
Mandriva 10, despite being 2 years old, was already Linux 2.6, so it had big chances of working, especially if you have the source.

New Ubuntu Installer - not as good as Mandrake

[diwadm]

While Ubuntu is a great distro, it's installation is really intimidating and geekish especially for beginners. I don't see any major change on its installer. It still has a text-based interface. Mandrake's installer is light years away in terms of usability and design and it was implemented years ago.

Re:New Ubuntu Installer - not as good as Mandrake

[jejones]

You might want to look at this article about Espresso, the GUI installer that one runs from the Dapper Drake Ubuntu Live CD.

Re:New Ubuntu Installer - not as good as Mandrake

[Anonymous Coward]

Yeah those text based installers. Must be really hard for people who CAN'T READ. Seriously, the wording of those text-based installers is about as simplified as you can get; it is really annoying to continually hear all these people write off complete distributions due soley to the fact that they can't function without Anaconda or some other GUI installer. Hey wait, doesn't Windows have a text-based installer for the first half? Hmm...

Ubuntu strengths and weaknesses

[glas_gow]

While I agree with most of the comments posted about Ubuntu being a kind of shrink wrapped Debian, I've found some issues with it.

First of all I should say I'm using 5.10 powerpc, so maybe these issues only apply to the powerpc version.

For the last few days I've been trying to recreate an analysis of a pcap file from the Real Digital Forensics DVD using snort. I've been mucking about with snort.conf trying all sorts of configurations to trigger a IIS .printer alert. Because I'm dual booting with OS X, as a last resort I copied all the snort rules and snort.conf from my Ubuntu partition and tried running the same snort scan of the pcap file, and lo and behold it triggered the alert I'd been trying to reproduce for days at the first attempt. This was using the same conf, same rules, same version of snort and everything, and yet Ubuntu couldn't find it, despite the IIS .printer rule being enabled and the ethereal output showing the content in the form that should have triggered it.

And it doesn't stop with snort. Take sleuthkit for instance. It builts fine, no ./configure errors, no make errors, and all seems well, but try running fsstat on a linux_partition.dd and it wont give any output, and just keeps spitting out usage info. No libary errors, no segmentation faults, nothing. The very same version on OS X works perfectly.

The very reason I was dual booting linux was to take advantage of the plethora of linux-only forensics and network analysis tools which haven't been ported to OS X yet. And I rather liked Ubuntu's more responsive UI to OS X's bloat.

Which brings me to Ubuntu's strengths. The synaptic package manager is great for tracking down stray lib-devs when you don't know the exact name to put into apt-get install. And for ninety percent of my requirements it works fine. I like the fact it comes with a default install that is eminently usable without too much tweaking. And it looks good.

But if they are already pushing Dapper when even Breezy hasn't ironed out these issues yet, granted only when it comes to the kind of software that most Ubuntu users wont find strictly necessary, people should be aware of the limitations of the distro.

From memory I didn't find these same problems with Debian Powerpc, so I doubt its anything to do with powerpc kernel support within sleuthkit or snort. Still I'd recomend Ubuntu for anyone who doesn't require too much specialised software. But for anyone else I'd be careful. The troubling aspect of the snort problem was that it was triggering other alerts fine, so it took me a while to begin to suspect it might have something to do with the distro. I'm sure it could be fixed with a little bit of hammering, but then again, the whole point of installing Ubuntu in avoid that kind of hair-pulling?

Ubuntu AMD64 support

[laplace_man]

I'm now using Dapper for a month or so. It is already very stable.But there are still some things to be fixed. For example madwifi-ng that worked perfectly on my AMD64 Brezy, is not working on my netgear card any more. Then there are standard isues with plugins for firefox to make it fully functional as desktop on AMD64.And since Ubuntu is mostly desktop distribution there SHOULD be a way to make this goodies work! Otherwise why bother sending AMD64 install/live CD-s over shipit ?? People that need linux for servers download their CD anyway. At least what you could do is to make a script to install 32bit firefox and other 32bit programs. It took a long time for me to get all those forums and make it work on Brezzy.And I don't feel like doing all that again.Just too time consuming.

Gnome imperialism

[Elektroschock]

> Duh. Ubuntu is a distro built around Gnome.

This is a problem. Gnome is ugly in our eyes. But despite that it is our second choice. KDE offers a real innovative community desktop and in fact Linux on the desktop means KDE. In nations where Gnome rules Linux made no inroads on the desktop.

Unfortunately RedHat made the decision in favour of Gnome which was a huge mistake. Then they gave up their Desktop strategy. SuSE was a succesful KDE distribution and strong on the desktop in Europe. Mandrake chose KDE. Now we see Ximian "Novell" guys perverting SuSe into a Gnome desktop while we as users never wanted anything but KDE.

> Oh boo-fucking-hoo. Cry me a river. Maybe because Gnome *IS* the default standard for Ubuntu, and KDE is an offshoot?

KDE based environments get under pressure from Gnome embracement strategies which intend to move us away from KDE which is the desktop of our choice. I am in favour of letting the users decide.

I can accept Kubuntu but this is only an embracement strategy. I predict Gnome will be no success on the Desktop because I as a user do not want it. And I cannot stand the Gnome imperialism.

Re:Gnome imperialism

[ReinoutS]

Mandrake chose KDE.

Mandriva may use KDE as a default but offers a well-polished and stable GNOME environment (and a bunch of other desktops) as well, just a few mouseclicks away. They employ developers that work on both "big" desktops, too.

Re:Gnome imperialism

[teg]

Unfortunately RedHat made the decision in favour of Gnome which was a huge mistake.

A huge mistake? QT at the time was nowhere near free software. Even today, Gnome has a huge license advantange in that you don't need to pay a largish fee to Trolltech to develop anything except GPL software. Also, being C instead of C++-based is good for interoperability with other languages.

That aside, competition is good for both KDE and Gnome - these days, Gnome has the upper hand but the competition ensures that KDE will try even harder to up that bar.

SuSE was a succesful KDE distribution and strong on the desktop in Europe. Mandrake chose KDE. Now we see Ximian "Novell" guys perverting SuSe into a Gnome desktop while we as users never wanted anything but KDE.

"We as users" - don't speak on behalf of anyone but yourself, please. I for one much prefer Gnome. Earlier, because of language bindings and licensing, these days it looks and behaves better too. And while Mandrake was known as a KDE distro, all their own stuff seemed to be Gnome/gtk.

Re:Gnome imperialism

[hexix]

Did any of you people complaining about Ubuntu being Gnome-only stop to think that maybe that's why it's successful? I mean all the distros until now have either been both, or have favored KDE (Suse, Mandrake/Mandriva).

Along comes a distro that is very much in line with the Gnome philosophy of keeping things simple and clean. It gets popular and now you complain about it not using KDE?

KDE's philosophy seems to be giving the user as much configuration as possible. KDE is a very cool desktop with a lot of power, but it is going in a totally different direction than Ubuntu.

Let Ubuntu be Ubuntu. Stop trying to push your own preferences on to people.

Re:Gnome imperialism

[Anonymous Coward]

I predict Gnome will be no success on the Desktop because I as a user do not want it.

Hell yeah. So I predict KDE will be no success and will dead soon, cause I (as a user and programmer) do not want it. Yes?

Re:Gnome imperialism

[Criterion]

"we as users never wanted anything but KDE."

Who is this "we"? You got a mouse in your pocket or something because *I* as a user want nothing to do with KDE. I don't like it, I think it's ugly no matter what way you skin it.

The bliss of module-assistant

[vhogemann]

I really don't know how your boss did it, but debian-based distros really make it easy to add new modules to the current kernel!

* There are source packages for these extra modules
* The source packages point to their build dependencies (apt-get build-dep)
* A minimum build system is an apt-get install build-essentials away from you
* Nicely packaged kernel and kernel-header packages

AND, there is also module-assistant, a script that will make the whole process automatic to you! It checks if your system is ready to build modules, downloads and install the required packages, presents you an updated list of avaliable modules, downloads, compile, install and loads them for you!

I'll never touch a RPM based distro again! APT and DKPG really make my life easier =D

What still bugs me about Linux

[Qbertino]

I've been a long time Linux user (Debian) and it still is my favourite OS on custom built PCs. But what still bugs me about it - especially after using OS X for almost two years now - is that you need to be a computer expert to get it running. I know you have to be the same when installing Windows from scratch, but I've stopped taking Windows as the bar like 6 years ago.

I recently did an update on my debian box and again the german keyboard is gone and I've got wrong (english) characters everywhere. There goes half and hour of research and fixing again. When I go about and reinstall it (or Ubuntu or something else) I better be fully aware of all my hardware and it's chipsets or else I will have serious trouble getting Linux to work. When you run Linux you usually know your HW inside out but it's been nearly 3 years ago since I last did some larger setup and config. I write my HW specs on small stickers that I put everywhere on my cards and MB but thats quite a prospect - opening your box so you can prep for a fresh Linux install that will take 20hrs.+ before everything is where it was before.

Obviously I'm getting old and gotta get real work done rather than fiddling with crummy x86 architectures, but admit it, I've got a point, no? Remember the C64? Unpack, plugin, works. That's how modern computers should work.

Re:What still bugs me about Linux

[Clansman]

"Remember the C64? Unpack, plugin, works. That's how modern computers should work."

Apples and oranges - that's how Macs work now and how any Dell/HP/whatever PC works. Get it home, unpack, works.

Gnu/Linux has to be installed. How many times have you tried to install OSX on a random machine, random chip makers etc?

Did you ever have to install windows? JUst the same as linux - works one time then can't find the drivers next time. Even when you have the cds that came with your mobo, you need to go to the website, get the latest ones downloaded and installed, yada yada

I find that on standard PC clones, Ubuntu has installed at least as easily as any other OS.

Re:What still bugs me about Linux

[delire]

You're talking about _Debian_ an OS which was never explictly designed for the desktop at all, ever.

I've been using Debian for many years, and in order to run a Debian desktop you pretty much need to run the Testing or Unstable branches, which as their names suggest, should not be relied upon. And you're right, there is a hell of alot of fiddling over the years to keep up with changes like those to libC, device file systems, X etc.

Along comes Ubuntu however, a Debian derivative bent on making a n00b proof desktop experience and install process. You simply don't need to be a computer expert to install and run Ubuntu, proven by absolutely non-power user students of mine - 3 of which recently switched from OSX. The popularity of the distro reflects this truth, it is reaching mainstream audiences. Installing Ubuntu and having a working desktop takes around an hour, bandwidth permitting. As usual it's always best to check that your hardware is supported. If not and you want to use a Linux OS regardless, then do as you have done with OSX and buy a preinstalled computer

You should be careful to generalise "Linux" as you do. Linux is a kernel, on top of which many different kinds of operating system can be built for many different purposes.

Re:What still bugs me about Linux

[Enrique1218]

I wonder if the problem that Linux is still like this in 2006 is because "free" developers place the GPL above the user. I personally don't see Ubuntu changing this mentality. It is a shame because they are all about choice but the non-technical user can't choose Linux over Windows.

xgl and compiz

[Danzigism]

I just installed Dapper Drake last night, and damn am I impressed now that I finally got xgl and compiz to work thanks to www.debians.org's howto.. I highly recommend it to anyone.. i think this is really going to take off.. they oughta work on implementing xgl with the release of 6.06.. make it standard.. everyone needs to be using this.. and man, it makes your friends who use Windows, want to cry..

Re:Two Things

[ObsessiveMathsFreak]

People instantly can tell the amount of work and detail that have gone into OS X when they sit down and use it even for the first time. It is time Linux desktop programmers go their shit together.

Neg. The Gnome UI teams for one have been shamelessly parrotting OSX for quite some time. Even going so far as to add the ridiculous extra panel at the top of the screen. The end result is a disaster as innovation is stifleed and an incompatable UI is bolted onto what was a very stable and usable interface.

Very little new UI has come out of Linux since OSX became "chique". I really wish people would wake up to this.

What a wanker.

[rynoski]

You're missing the friggin' point.
Ubuntu *is* a Gnome distro.

This is a problem. Gnome is ugly in our eyes.
Your problem, not mine. If you don't want Gnome, don't use ubuntu. It's that simple.

because I as a user do not want it.
But there are plenty out there who do. Your personal opinion is not going to decide if Gnome is successful on the desktop or not.

And I cannot stand the Gnome imperialism.
And I cannot stand the KDE imperialism.

Re:What a wanker.

[Anonymous Coward]

And I cannot stand the KDE imperialism^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^Hhigher quality interface.

There, fixed that for ya.

Re:What a wanker.

[WilliamSChips]

No, you just broke it. KDE is a supremely inferior interface to anything else, except Microsoft.

Re:Ubuntu vs. FC5

[kiddygrinder]

Considering gnome's releases are about every 6 months apart we will probably see 2.16 and 2.18 before we see vista ship (Vista, according to microsoft, being scheduled for late 2006/early 2007, taking into account minimal slippage).

Re:Ubuntu vs. FC5

[LnxAddct]

FC5 is the finest distro I've ever used, and as many reviews have noted, it has restored my faith in desktop linux. I've tried Ubuntu and I just don't like it, anything about it. For a few years I was nothing but a Debian user, later switched to Fedora, and after handling Fedora for a while I gave Ubuntu a shot, and personally it just doesn't compare. Fedora's integration and funtionality just blindingly surpasses it. Sure Fedora is a couple of CDs, but its a one time thing and I have no problem with that. Out of the many distros I've used for extended periods of time, I have yet to see one that compares to Fedora. This isn't a troll, just use it for a little bit and you'll see. It certainly has some issues, its not perfect, but damn it's close.
Regards,
Steve

Re:Ubuntu vs. FC5

[Anonymous Coward]

Turning off what you don't want can be a nightmare. Try stripping Nautilus out of a RedHat distribution, for example, and you'll significantly speed up the machine but rip a lot of other actually useful desirable tools with it that support Nautilus. So you h ave to actually know that you rename the nautilus binary to "nautilus.disabled" to avoid accidentally ripping important things out.

And don't get me started on the various useless language packages. Just how many "kde-i18n-my-brooklyn-neighborhood-dialect" packages do we need, anyway? And Kanji keyboard translators?

Re:Ubuntu vs. FC5

[Bralkein]

Switching from one generic binary distro to another is just changing a few details about how certain peices of the OS fit together and what is on or off by default and has nothing to do with speed.

This simply isn't true. If you switch from a binary distro using the hotplug init. scripts for hardware autodetection to another binary distro using udev (or other methods) for that task, you can generally expect the hardware autodetection stage of the boot process to be shortened by something in the region of 10s or so (well that was my value, anyway, certainly significant speedups can be expected).

That's just one example, I'm sure there are more.

Re:Ubuntu

[Anonymous Coward]

Printing has been messed up in Dapper for the past week or so. I even had problems setting up some HP printers of all things. However, Dapper _is_ still beta software so little things such as this should not come as a surprise. No doubt the printing issue will be resolved by the time Dapper is released.

Re:Ubuntu's There - Linux stability

[Anonymous Coward]

Stability matters. If it's going to run enterprise level services, or even desktop home services, we can't have the bleeding edge, rebuild your OS every week, we'll patch it later approach common to early Linux releases.

Of course, this has also been true since the first industrial uses of Linux. As a BSD developer, you simply may not have seen it in the froth of new products and designs constantly announced, as opposed to the exceptional stability (and lack of new products) for the BSD community. And to say that "BSD doesn't crash unless the hardware is flakey or incompatible" is disingenuous. Most modern hardware is not compatible with the various BSD releases, because the new hardware integration is so very slow in the BSD community. Where simply grabbing a new network card, video card, or RAID controller is pretty easy in Linux because they're usually supported in a recent kernel, you have to pick and choose very carefully for BSD, or write the drivers yourself.

I've seen the pain "stability" vs. "actually runs on this hardware" causes. It's an old conflict, and the results can be quite ugly when vendors change chipsets or components without notifying anyone to something the old kernel does not support. I've seen a hundred servers go down, hard, at kernel upgrade time because the vendor changed a component for which the new kernel did not have the driver.

Ubuntu vs Debian 3.1?

[walterbyrd]

Other than ease of installation, is there an advantage to using Ubuntu over straight-up Debian?

There are two things I really like about Debian. One is, what I consider, the best package management in the business.

The other is that I can download a 100mb package, and then set it up exactly as I want. I can have old and stable, or bleeding edge. I can use whatever WM/DE I want - or don't use any WM/DE or even x-window. I don't have to download, install, then uninstall a lot of apps, or other stuff, that I don't want.

Debian doesn't have the slickest installation. But, once it's installed, all you have to do is upgrade that installation as you go. You don't have to go out and buy the next version, or anything.

Still, if the performance is significally better, or something. I might consider switching.

Re:Ubuntu vs Debian 3.1?

[Straker Skunk]

I've asked myself that very same question recently. Some answers:

1. Ubuntu has proper AMD64 support, if you've got such a chip. Debian is coming along, and amd64 is gaining full "supported architecture" status, but when I tried installing etch around late February, a lot of stuff was broken. (I couldn't install X because some of the dependencies had "no installation candidate," etc.)

2. Newer, shinier stuff in general. (Kinda goes without saying, but still...)

3. The version of apt in sarge doesn't check signatures on Release files, which leaves you open to trojaned packages. You can install a newer apt from backports.org... but Ubuntu has the archive keys right on the CD.

For the most part, working with either distro is the same. The real difference is at the policy level---how the software repositories are set up, how often releases are made, etc.

Re:Ubuntu vs. FC5

[Anonymous Coward]

Uh, this doesn't address boot times (FC is slow as hell) or package management (again, all the FC utilities like yum are memory hogs and slow as hell; practically unusable on old hardware).

Ubuntu is better.

Why can't I keep multiple versions of a library?

[KWTm]

Thanks for the answer. Bear with me if this is starting to wander from the OP topic, but this is something I have long been trying to figure out.

As you mention, it would make sense for a Linux distro to have more than one version of a particular library. If OldButReliableApp v1.0 depended on SomeLibrary v1.0, but NewAndFancyApp v2.5 depended on SomeLibrary v3.5, then I'd want the two versions of the library to coexist.

For some reason, this wouldn't work on Mandrake 10.0o: the newer library displaced the old, at least when I managed it with the "urpmi" tool. I've never understood this. It seems that the name of the library is hardcoded into the application binary, so if OldButReliableApp needs "/usr/lib/SomeLibrary", heaven help you if you try to rename it to "/usr/lib/SomeLibrary_Old"! If the package manager installs NewAndFancyApp, which demands a newer version of "/usr/lib/SomeLibrary", then the old version gets wiped. Isn't this DLL Hell all over again? Why can't we do all this with symlinks instead? Or does Ubuntu allow multiple library versions?

In my case, I'm referring to XFree86 supporting the Video Out on my ATI Rage Fury Pro, whereas X.org is the newest and bestest. You ask, "Why not upgrade the hardware?" --which I could, although a good video card with TV out is a bit more than "practically free" --but I wanted Linux partly to escape the "upgrade trap" and run stuff on older hardware. If I have to stop using old hardware which had been working fine, such as my video card, just to run a new version of the software, I would be back in Windows hell where Microsoft dictates the demand for hardware.

I apologize for the somewhat tangential topic, but I imagine that I'm not the only one who might want this answered. Perhaps people in developing countries with less availability of hardware might be wondering the same thing.

Re:Ubuntu vs. FC5

[Spudds]

/clap

  Finally someone speaks some sense instead of the annoying fanboi canned FUD.
  Speed doesn't change drastically simply by changing distros. Any administrator could tell you this.

    The fact that slackware or debian simply has less turned on by default merely reflects a different mindset. I as a developer would *rather* have everything turned on and installed so that I can go back and turn things off as opposed to finding everything I want, installing it, and turning it on. Neither mindset is incorrect, it's merely preference.

    Also, the speed difference between FC4 and FC5 is quite drastic as well, which I believe is due to the improvements the gnome team have made. FC5 is quick and snappy as hell now. I'm loving it.

    And for the love of GOD. Please stop calling software/features that *you* don't like bloat. Just because you don't need/want it, doesn't make it bloat. Turn it off, uninstall it, and shut up already.

Re:Ubuntu's There - Linux stability

[Anonymous Coward]

Stability is only an issue at the desktop level (Gnome, KDE, OOffice, Firefox and so on), and xBSD are running the same stuff as Linux at that level, and they're overall equally crash-prone no matter what platform.

So are you saying that a specific crash scenario for say KDE on my Slackware box will take down my FreeBSD box in the exact same way? I think that's a pretty far reach you've made there.

Anecdote(s): I've had desktops crash on Linux, FreeBSD, and OpenBSD. In the case of Linux sometimes the OS takes a dive, but most of the time it just plops me at the command prompt. The point is that I've had desktop crashes that take out the kernel too. BSD has always (in my usage) reliably deposited me at the command prompt.

On the kernel level, I haven't seen a crash for years - and that was when I was fiddling with a device driver, making it my own fault. I know the closed-source Nvidia drivers can apparently take down a machine, but then again, you'd have the same situation on BSD if you have the drivers.

The original issue wasn't drivers, it was the desktop. I agree that drivers can screw the pooch on any OS.

Hostname dependencies

[Krellan]

It's a growing problem with many Linux software packages these days: they depend on having a valid hostname in order to function.

The GNOME desktop is especially notorious for this.

I'm sad to see the Ubuntu installer also having this flaw.

Many people are in situations like yours, where they don't have access to valid hostnames, but a perfectly good IP address to use.

It's gotten so bad in some situations that I've taken to setting up a "hostname wall", similar to a DNS wall: basically a huge table of dummy hostnames like ip-10-1-1-1 and ip-192-168-1-1, resolving to exactly what you'd expect. I'm seriously thinking of writing my own glibc libnss plugin to do this automatically. Has anybody else done this already? It would save me the trouble :)

Re:Can it play MP3 out-of-the-box?

[Anonymous Coward]

Automatix is extremely dangerous. Please use Easy Ubuntu instead.

Re:I'm a Kubuntu user and I'M complaining!

[ryanov]

There is no newer Firefox in backports anyway, keep in mind.

Re:Ubuntu vs. FC5

[towsonu2003]

Why is speed of a distro even an issue?? Turn off the crap you don't want if you want to go faster. You aren't going to get significant speed gains by switching distros. If you don't want to lose feature set, the MOST you can expect to gain by switching distros while retaining your current feature set is maybe 5%.

Unfortunately, speed is an issue for Ubuntu users. [Examples are the use of cairo and firefox 1.0.7 (famous for its slowness in the Ubuntu community)] And other (comparable) distros may show speed gains when compared to Ubuntu. What would you expect when your lsmod is 3 pages long?

I agree with your solution proposal (compile kernel), but the costumized boot scripts and some other problems make it difficult to have a stable and fully-functional (own compile) kernel in Ubuntu. Hence, for Linux newbies (Ubuntu's audience), to get speed means to try to switch to another distro.

not to mention the not-so-much known problem that Ubuntu -Breezy- starts slowing down (yes, like Windows) with time.

Re:Why can't I keep multiple versions of a library

[DuckDodgers]

Other people have had the same problem. This distribution:
http://gobolinux.org/index.php?page=faq
Is an attempt to address your concerns, although it is not particularly newbie friendly. I haven't tried it in a few years, so I can't give a review. But it may be the answer you want.

Re:Ubuntu vs. FC5

[Procyon101]

That's rewriting the algorithm to take advantage of the MMX. You aren't going to get that from adding --mmx -ffast-math to the gcc command line :)

YUM Does Dist Upgrades

[Illbay]

...[Yum] can't even do dist upgrades...

I'm sorry, but you're absolutely wrong in this respect. I have upgraded to the next distribution at last twice that I can recall, using Yum.

See HERE for the "secret recipe."

It was relatively painless.

As you can see from the site, it has been possible to upgrade distributions using Yum since FC1--so I'm not sure where you got your information.

I used to use APT with Fedora, until FC4 when Yum became facile enough to use on an ongoing basis. Since then, I've abandoned APT entirely. The fact that the Fedora project officially supports Yum, and that they have improved it dramatically over the past year, seals the deal for me.

Re:Ubuntu vs. FC5

[Procyon101]

Maybe I should switch to Redhat.. a Jersey speaking computer would be so cool :)

Re:Can it play MP3 out-of-the-box?

[Risen888]

Install the w32codecs package, in the Universe repositories. Two clicks, done. If that's too much for you, then you are lazy and just like to bitch, and XP is the OS for you.

Re:Why can't I keep multiple versions of a library

[AlbertEin]

Yes, you can have multiple versions of the same library at the same time.

In Linux the libs are in the format of libname.so.number.

Basically it's a problem of packagin, because the package libfoo.1.1.1 will always replace libfoo.1.2.1. The solution that the distros use is change the name of the package, for example in ubuntu you have glade and glade-2, so you can have both versions installed, the same goes with gstreamer, in my ubuntu machine i have installed gstreamer 0.8 and 0.10. This is used when the library brokes compability, so you can stay with your old version.

So, your problem may be a bad package in Mandrake (obviusly i'm not sure).

Greets

Re:Ubuntu vs. FC5

[torpedo20]

I noticed with FC5 that if you turn off SELinux completely the performance goes up by 20-35%

Re:Why can't I keep multiple versions of a library

[Afrosheen]

You hit the nail on the head. Mandrake was always really strict when it came to versioning, and it always bit people in the ass. KDE depended on nearly everything you installed; you couldn't remove kde-artwork without removing XFree! Mandrake created their own little dll hell by doing things this way. It still pains me to remember what I couldn't remove or upgrade on my old Mandrake system just because the dependencies were so far-reaching for every package.

Comparison

[forrie]

Are there some defined comparisons about performance with Ubuntu, versus other common distros? Identification of where and why, etc. Would be interesting reading.

Re:Ubuntu vs. FC5

[Topherbyte]

Thanks Mon! I just said Buh-Bye to XP Pro in favor of FC5 and the general sluggishness had me perplexed (on a Thinkpad T23 / 1.2 GHz P3-M / 1 GB RAM).

I'll see how things are without SELinux.

Cheers!

Re:yeah but

[Anonymous Coward]

If the mods actually had a clue what they were doing, maybe I'd give the same shit you do.

Instead, it seems some politically correct clueless teenager decided "fucking moron" = "troll" without really having been around to know what "troll" means. But it's okay, he can stab blindly at context like you do. "teh slashdots" - nice meme there, Adrian. Does it feel wonderful having no mind of your own?

As it stands now, it's like getting upset because your horoscope didn't have the word "serendipity" in it, or because the lottery numbers weren't all odd, or because the first car that you saw today was a green BMW instead of a black Lexus.

Re:Ubuntu vs. FC5

[Troglodyt]

I was under the impression that Gentoo existed to be flexible and allow you to do things the way you wanted to without the distro tools getting in the way.
Compiling everything and your uncle is not what helps you do what you want with your computer.
I don't think you'll get a 10% speed increase from compiling everything instead of using generic binaries.

Re:Ubuntu vs. FC5

[Procyon101]

Well, "main reason for existing" might be a little broad and open to interpretation. I don't know what other distro offers full controlled builds of your entire system other than Gentoo though, so that's a Gentoo advantage (or disadvantage, since portage is sorely lacking in binary packages.. depends on how you look at it).

I wouldn't be surprised with a 10% increase or more in something like ssh or libgmp using march=pentium4 over mcpu=i686, but those are rather specific cases. You're pulling in the proper timing tables AND opening up the newer processor specific instruction sets which are mostly targetted toward math functions. If your playing in KDE all day and surfing the web, you aren't going to see any difference at all because you are user-bound anyway.

I've seen benchmarks where there was as much as a 50% difference over generic libs... the problem though is that they were contrived benchmarks :) On a good note, you aren't ever going to see a decrease in performance with the righ arch specified.

The big advantage *I* see to gentoo is portage. It's slower to install new packages then apt-get, but when something goes awry, I have complete access to the build tree of the entire system. USE flags are very convienient ways to eliminate entire feature sets of some packages, and I have run into many cases where feature sets conflict. Another advantage is in upgrades. Notice that Gentoo doesn't version their distro... that's because any install that is maintained is always the latest version because of the way portage works. The fact that by using Gentoo I get proc specific binaries instead of generic ones is, IMHO a side benefit and not nearly as important.

I have had Gentoo distro tools get in my way though. I'd say, if you want a raw distro without tools getting in your way, Slackware is a better choice. Gentoo DEFINATELY has a philosophy of how a system should fit together and the tools do enforce that.

Re:Two Things

[Anonymous Coward]

two words: open source

osx isn't open source
it's not unreasonable to desire something that behaves like os x but is open source

6.06 rocks!

[JamesGecko]

I've been running Ubuntu Flight 6, and it really is pretty sweet. Unlike almost every other Linux distro I've tried, it automatically detected all the important stuff on my new laptop (Toshiba Satellite M55-S139). I don't have 3d acceleration, but it detected my ATi card, the correct resolution to use with my widescreen lcd monitor, my Wireless G wifi card, etc. It's freaking amazing.

Ok, so I've coming off running Debian stable + IceWM on a 450MHz pIII laptop, but still.

I haven't thought that I'd be able to say this until Vista came out, but this latest release of Ubuntu will raise the bar. Linux is not only ready for the desktop, it's actually easier to use then Windows. Out of the box.