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Ubuntu 6.06 Reviewed
Mark writes "This year has been a huge step forward for Desktop Linux users. First, Fedora Core 5 was released and featured the new Gnome 2.14. Then SUSE 10.1 showed us how well applications could be integrated to make a desktop look great. Now it was time for Ubuntu to release their latest version: 'Dapper Drake.'" Oh yeah, the inital review is good, too. Worth checking out for desktop Linux users.
Wow...I made a simple change to my sources.list file and ran sudo apt-get dist-upgrade and 15 minutes later I went from Breezy to Dapper. No reboot required. Bravo to the Ubuntu team!
XGL?
This year has been a huge step forward for Desktop Linux users.
I know that people here frequently complain about things like duplication of effort and forking as things that dilute the impact of Linux and free/open source software on the world. I tend to be of the opposite opinion. You want something geared at the business desktop with good integration and commercial support? Get SuSE. You want something that carries the name of a recognized brand? Get Fedora (yes it is still in many places considered the standard, just look at how many hosting providers provide is as the primary or only platform). You want something different that has a reputation for rock solid stability? Get Debian. You want a user-friendly Debian? Get Ubutnu.
The point is that the diversity is what makes these things possible. None of those things would be done nearly as effectivly under a "one size fits all" approach.
I havnt looked at Ubuntu in a while until this...
I ran the live CD and right away had a few problems (that were, easily enough, fixed). I have a dual monitor setup (NV 7800 GS) and with both monitors plugged in, the screen was jumbled. Once I unplugged the 2nd monitor everything went smoothly. Even the bootup screens, etc, etc look very nice. I could see this "scaring" people a lot less than other linux distros.
I was about to install it right away on my "Windows Box" right then and there, but forgot I'd have to dig up my RAID controller drivers. Oh well.
The ISO come in 3 flavours, desktop and server are obvious - what is Alternate? All three types are available in a range of architectures. Couldn't find a simple answer. Will be trying this out on my new laptop (an HP) as according to the Ubuntu website there is an HP customized version of ubuntu - which hopefully will now have the native broadcom wireless drivers.
... boot the Live CD properly. Guess the reviewers were more lucky than me.
-2 days :)
It's not ready for grandma to use, and as such, it's not an XP replacement. It still takes many keystrokes to get MP3 and video codec support. Want a binary nvidia driver? Due to ideological reasons, you'll need to manually enable universe and install it. And exotic wifi protocol support is still spotty (but better). Try explaining all that to someone who is computer illiterate. All they know is that this stuff works automatically in XP or OSX.
Not that I'm ragging on Dapper Drake; I installed it the first day it came out. But it is being touted as an XP replacement when it isn't. I think it is only a marginal improvement over the last version in terms of ease of use for people who aren't already savvy. The improved theme certainly looks good, but that only goes so far when you are looking to replace XP for normal users. I think the Ubuntu team really needs to rethink leaving out MP3 decoders and regular codec support. Microsoft doesn't seem to have 'licensing issues' when they ship XP with those features, and neither does Apple.
In a nutshell:
So overall, I'd say, "excellent" on the visuals, apps choices, functionality (so long as wireless networking or network printers are not needed).
IMO, desktop users will be happy. Notebook users will be less than happy.
I'm sorry, but you cannot review a whole operating system in two days. Sure, you can get the immediate "ease of use" and an idea of the speed of things. But it's only when you start using it properly every day for at least a month or more, you can appreciate whether an Operating System is good for you, or not.
Saying that, Ubuntu already won me over at Breezy. With the new Gnome 2.14, Dapper is much faster again.
I have been checking on Kubuntu for about a year now. I always said Kubuntu is not yet but has great potential. That was mainly because of the work that has already been done and the resources FOSS makes available. Add to that the a rich guy and you get the great potential. I used to throw away the CD I burnt but yesterday was the first time I was not disappointed with it and I even went ahead and installed on one of the desktops I have. Draper Drake is a milestone to Ubuntu and Linux. Great distro over all. It is clean, fast, reliable and robust. I think it will be the envy of many including MS.
Did you look, it's on-line. Got it last night. It's nice.
"Enjoy what you're doing! If it becomes drudgery, you're doing it wrong!" - Jim Butterfield
While Ubuntu is, IMO, the best Linux distribution out there, it still has issues. For example, I noticed that, in that default installation, there is a boot option for "Recovery Console," which simply gives anyone who starts it root access to the computer without a password. While it can be disabled by editing a configuration file, something like that should never have been added in the first place.
Also, after installing Dapper on my computer in one location and then moving to another network, my ability to use DHCP suddenly disappeared! I'm sure I can get it back, by Mac OS X and XP didn't give me any trouble. (Though, to give credit where credit is due, XP died completely, because of a hardware upgrade, which, didn't affect Dapper at all.)
All in all, though, not to be overly negative, I recently set up Dapper on a school development computer and got Apache, PHP, PostgreSQL, and SSH working in a matter of minutes, so, to the developers of Ubuntu, kudos.
Probably the two biggest issues that many have with Ubuntu are that it takes extra work to install MP3 support - not to mention every other codec or player.
MEPIS has recently confirmed the fears of some that Ubuntu is turning into a platform, displacing Debian itself...MEPIS is/was a KDE desktop based on Debian. The founder's concern with the stability and reliability of the Debian base recently led him to base his distro on Ubuntu sources instead.
So now with MEPIS, you get Ubuntu, except that it's KDE default, and it comes with every player (Real, Quicktime) and codec plugin for Kaffeine that can be found. Plus, the general layout of menus and the installer have won good reviews all around.
They're currently a week into beta4 on the new version based on the Dapper base and will likely have an RC1 out by mid-June.
I'm a Windows user who's been looking at Ubuntu for awhile. I had tried Fedora and Mandrake in the past, but I just wasn't impressed enough to switch.
All I have to say is: wow! I burned the 'Desktop' CD, booted it up on my Thinkpad R52, and was able to play around in the OS to get familiar with the environment. Once I was satisfied that everything was running smooth (it saw all of my devices, including wireless, with no problem) all I had to do was click on the 'Install' icon on the desktop.
The installer itself was excellent. Like I said having installed other distros in the past this graphical install *in a desktop environment* was excellent. The part that I had dreaded the most was setting up dual boot (I already had XP installed). The installer saw the XP partition (NTFS) and allowed me to resize it and install Ubuntu in the newly freed space (and automatically installed GRUB). This was absolutely beautiful functionality, and I think it will really make a great transitional tool for migrating us lame Windows users over to Linux.
I am a [very] long term Windows user and Windows Admin for a large corporation witl 100,000+ desktops. I love Windows. It is a superb operating system for a corporate environment. Sure it can be a pain in the arse because of updates but its ability to be centrally managed, etc is awesome. There is nothing else that can compete with it on an enterprise level, not even the stunning OS X 10.4. However Ubuntu 6.06 is an incredible operating system. While I am a Windows user I have a lot of respect for a lot of other operating systems. Linux being one of them. Ubuntu is probably the most professional release I have ever used. It installed without a hitch on my 6 months old IBM test workstation. I am very very impressed and I take my hat off to the Ubuntu team. The delay was worth it. Easily. They [the Ubuntu team] have done an incredible job and you have to respect that. I could easily give a Ubuntu system to a new computer user and they be able to learn how to use it for general tasks just as fast as a Windows system. You only have to go to the terminal as much as you need to go to the registry in Windows so it isn't really a battle on ease of use anymore. Ubuntu has brought Linux on par with Windows in that regard. Ubuntu just need to push on hardware support so that if it fails it fails gracfully. X server critical errors need to be replaced with a more graceful drop down to 800x600z256 colours similar to what Windows does. Also the most important thing to get working (other than the graphical interface) is the network. Once you have the network up and running you can get any other driver you need to. Ubuntu worked fine with my network card but I know that it isn't perfect from reports I have read online. I hope that this is fixed in the next release (7.01?). In a nutshell. SUPERB.
On May 29th, two days before release, an ATI bug was introduced via the xorg driver that makes Dapper unstable on certain ATI based systems. In my own case this means that my G4 is now unusable. Just as a reminder, if you think you might be affected, don't upgrade.
Just for reference, the forum post and the bug report.
What if the entire Universe were a chrooted environment with everything symlinked from the host?
No matter how much Ubuntu wants to put in MP3 support, they can't! It's patented. That means they're not allowed to, without paying license fees. License fees for patents are usually based on how many people are using the product, but Ubuntu don't know about every deployment because they allow free distribution of the OS.
Of course Ubuntu would have support for MP3 if they were allowed to!
More importantly (for me), the first official release of Xubuntu (Xfce) is out.
Uttering logically derived and empirically supported truths to the disciples of the orthodox establishment.
Good try. "Ubuntu 6.06 Reviewed" is the title of this article. That was my own review of Ubuntu 6.06.
I had to setup a linux machine recently for someone who isn't very familiar with unix. He is however a very smart guy, and isn't afraid to poke around and try to figure things out. He needed to fix some ugly output from a gps device, so he learned a little awk to write an awk script to do it.
He couldn't use gnome. Even the simplest things are painfully awkward and obtuse. Just putting a link to a windows share on his desktop was a chore. We ran into stupid little problems like that over and over for 3 days. Then I installed KDE for him and switched him to that. All the things he had trouble with and needed me to help in gnome worked just fine for him on his own in KDE.
1. It automatically boots, meaning I don't have to worry about switching things in the BIOS in order for my usb keyboard to work w/ the installation program
2. Finally, my wireless network interface works out of the box! All I had to do was activate it and it was up and running.
I installed from a beta version of the dapper release about a week ago. The machine used has an atheros wireless card in it and no other networking. The install preview had me up and connected to the internet through my wireless router without asking me anything. The install to hard disk did the same with a few non-techy questions like what did I want to call my machine, etc.
The codecs and the rest of the "illegal in USA" things are quickly installed with Automatix. Also for KDE you could install Kubuntu.
Hi all,
I just bought an Acer 5670 Aspire laptop. I had to install the Dapper Drake beta initially as the ATI Radion X1400 high end card wasn't supported by Breezy Badger. The particular Broadcom ethernet wasn't supported either by Breezy Badger. But with the new version, everything works very well.
After hacking FreeBSD and other Linux distros for years I got into a mode where I "just wanted to use" a computer and not have to be continually fooling with it to get an OS and apps to work. Ubuntu has been the perfect solution for achieving that goal. A job very well done!
Thanks guys!
The fundamnetal problem is that MP3s are patented. As long as Ubuntu is dedicated to giving out free and liberated software, they'll be at odds with the patent holders who hold the right ensure that neither of those goals is possible. Recently there have been attempts to work within the patent holder's framework to provide something legal and acceptable, but the closest we have is Fluendo's licencing program, which explicitly doesn't allow for redistribution, one of the key things in the GPL's operation. For example, Ubuntu can mail you a 6.06 CD containing the mp3 plugin, but it's legally questionable for you to redistribute those CDs to your friends. And MEPIS would certainly be in trouble, unless they also secured such a contract. Ubuntu represents it's distro as a "people should be able to modify and share changes" aka a Free Software distro. This contract goes against this ideal, and if MEPIS isn't aware of this contract, and chooses to modify Ubuntu in other ways, then Ubuntu's exposed the people they told could modify the software, people like they guy behind MEPIS, to hidden legal liabilities.
I Browse at +4 Flamebait
Open Source Sysadmin
The odd thing is most of those were kde specific bugs.
:-(
I remember reading at the last minute that Ubuntu decided to add kde 3.5.1 and xorg7.1. Both are only a week or two old. Bad decision.
Ubuntu is much larger than kubuntu so they probably ignored the kde bugs as most of them used gnome.
I find it disturbing but sadly these days all the distro's have these bugs. I found the livecd less buggy then suse's or knoppix so far.
But I need XP for school this summer and I will wait until next fall to install Ubuntu with kde. By then it should be more baked with less bugs.
I have been lucky in seeing no bugs at all besides my touchpad being too sensitive. I am sure I can configure that in XOrg.conf when I eventual decide to install it later.
http://saveie6.com/
Anyone know if there has a business card/netinst ISO? I always liked how I didn't have to download a whole Debian ISO to install. I could just get the base install and the the rest over the net with apt-get. I never was much for selecting everything I want all at once. I like to install ONLY what I need, as I need it.
-matthew
"THERE IS NO JUSTICE, THERE IS ONLY ME." -Death
There is a bug in the installer. Using the live disk (i386), the installer crashes if you try to install on an existing ext3 partition (overwriting an old install, for example). If you choose to format the partition first, the installation works.
well, I've been running Ubuntu 5.10 on my ThinkPad T21 for a while now. My wireless card is PCMCIA 3Com 3CRWE6029B card. Under Ubuntu 5.10, it works flawlessly out of the box. However, under 6.06 I can't get cardctl to work with it at all. I can "see" the card, and I can even get it assigned to eth1, but all attempts at getting it to become live have met with no success.
I tried to install 5.10 and then upgrade to 6.06 to see if that helps since the properly configured conf files would already be there, but no dice. As soon as the upgrade to 6.06 finished, the card went kaput.
I think they need to make sure that they're maintaining their level of performance without breaking things before rolling new versions out.
[move
its not ubuntu specific. I tried suse 10.1, even kororaa, and openGL apps freeze computer.. (9600agp on intel945). ati says sth about disabling lock user pages if glxgears freezes, but on agp systems its already disabled. So I have to disable DRI altogether. Another bug is over- or underscanning in dual screen mode. Only half of video plays on the second display (tv). So I have to disable Xv overlay also, which makes video performance shaggy. Xinerama on Kubuntu -both 5.10 and 6.06 also sucks bigtime. It can't find where one sreen ends and when the other starts. May be it involves some command-line wizardry which I am not aware of.It works ok though on SuSE 10.1. Another issue is my CMI8738 sound card which is 7.1 on windows but only a mere double stereo on linux. You know, there is a time limit (weeks) one can devote to configure a linux computer just so his wife can watch movies on the tv while he browses on the monitor!! Esp, if he could have done that as early as 2002 on his XP!!
I am happy that your USB keyboard works now.
Sadly I can report that my PS/2 keyboard that has worked flawlessly with everything else now doesn't work with ubuntu 6.06 by default.
The fix was to go into the bios and enable USB legacy devices. No clue why, but that did the trick.
So it is one step forward and one step backwards.
There are times when you have a CD-ROM drive that simply would not co-operate. It does not matter what OS, you've downloaded the ISO, have it burnt, then put it inside the drive, change the BIOS setting to boot from the CD-ROM and simply reboot the machine.
But the darn thing would not boot.
I have this problem usually on older machines or just simply on an older CD-ROM drives (on relatively newer machines too).
My solution? Either changing CD-ROM drive and hope it works or a simpler alternative - Smart Boot Manager - http://btmgr.webframe.org/
Usually there's no problem in booting up from Floppy.. SBM floppy will boot up and present you with a menu asking where do you want to boot from. Just select CD-ROM and voila!
Well, it works for me. Even on machines whose BIOS does not even support booting from CD-ROM.
(Disclaimer - If it still doesn't work, chances are either the CD-ROM really needs replacement or it's an error between keyboard and the chair)
Peace all!
Will sys-admin for food
Sounds like you need to install restricted-modules for your kernel.
This guy is way out there
Finally!! For the first time my broadcom wireless networking card works with the open source driver! Follow this guide and it's easy: http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=185174
No more ndiswrapper, and now I can use the absolutely amazing knetworkmanager!
can you post the links please because I have a similar problem?
The 3COM problem is an annoying one -- especially as my 3COM card used to work under Hoary out of the box.
2 5&highlight=3com+dapper
/etc/modprobe.d/blacklist, and now the prism54 driver gets loaded correctly on boot, with eth1 being brought up automatically. As it used to under Hoary, Breezy, and earlier versions of Dapper.
Relevant discussion is:
http://www.ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=1560
[EDIT] It's still not fixed. I decided to add the islsm_pci driver to
The fix is to blacklist the islsm_pci driver which is loaded before the prism54 driver and assumes it can handle the 3COM card when it actually is unable to do so. This done -- the 3COM card works like before.
Getting these services started, once installed, only takes seconds and configuration time could be minutes (up to hours) but securing these services could take over a day (if done correctly, including recompiling if needed). Don't worry about that recovery shell - you are being r00ted remotely!
Get your Unix fortune now!
I'm a happy user of Dapper, but I must confess the release process seems unfortunate, and suffers from common release process issues nowadays seen all over the place.
Notably:
-Release Candidate no longer seems to mean Release Candidate. Meaning RC releases have just become somewhat more conservative betas, instead of ultra conservative releases that at release time are thought to be release level quality, but tagged 'candidate' just in case. Likewise, the update process should be little more aggresive than post-release update. The fact that after any 'RC' release came and updates still numbered in the 50-70 packages a day means something was not quite right.
-The delay did nothing. When I saw the delay announcement, it held promise that they would be feature locked and do a proper six week or so bugfix phase. But functionality changed well into the delay. The delay became less about making what would have been 6.04 rock solid and more about tweaking features and functionality. Developers can't resist tweaking that stuff.
-Release Candidates never become releases. If RC process was strictly done right, you put out a RC that turns out to be acceptable, and it becomes a release (hence the promise of the word 'candidate'. The fact that you have a RC, then some changes, and then Release is not right. It should be RC, if changes needed, apply and do another RC, if no changes, release previous RC.
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve the problem, use more.
Apparently not.
argumentum ad fallacium: Fallacy of defining a fallacy which allows one to dismiss the argument in question.
I see a lot of people complaining about video drivers, MP3-support, various missing video-codecs and wireless.
Frankly, an installation of Windows XP requires that I know what video card I have, where to get the drivers, and how to install them (without messing the system up with that vendors bundled software). Windows XP has MP3-support built-in but getting all the video-codecs to work properly was a nightmare before I tried VLC. Also, I bet that if you asked a lot of regular users you'd find that most of them had someone help them to get wireless working.
After I'm done with the Windows XP installer I'm usually left with the following tasks: Minor tweaking of the UI and then installation of Adobe Flash, Adobe Reader, nVidia-drivers, Skype and Sun Java.
Installing those missing applications was very easy with EasyUbuntu. Also it installs Microsoft's fonts for you. It's almost perfect but if I could ask for two more features they would be:
1. Ability to download and double-click instead of having to resort to the command-line.
2. A Windows XP edition.
If you give someone a CD with Ubuntu and tell him/her about EasyUbuntu I'd say that installation is a draw compared with Windows XP.
My issues with Ubuntu:
1. About 1 in 10 times I have a working network when I login. The other 9 times I have to deactivate/activate eth1 using network-admin. Maybe DHCP doesn't get enough time to do its' thing during boot? This is on a wired network.
2. I chose Swedish during the installation (I used the live CD and double-clicked the Install-icon on the desktop). I only received partial Swedish. I had to use the language-support-thingie in the administration menu and select Swedish after installation was complete.
3. Without EasyUbuntu the ride wouldn't have been this smooth. There's something wrong when a lot of people need to download a third-party product to "complete" the installation.
Dapper is a major improvement over Breezy. Synaptic is still the top reason to go with Ubuntu. You can enable all the repositories in a minute, and they are very complete and up to date. They even have VMWare Player, so I don't have to download it manually. I'm also pleased that suspend-to-ram and suspend-to-disk work with nvidia, but not without a little hassle unfortunately. After I enabled the proprietary nvidia drivers, I enabled sleep in /etc/default/acpi-support and in gnome-power-manager through gconf, then erased the word "splash" in /boot/grub/menu.lst. It looks like the splash makes the ctrl+alt+Fn terminals not work. So I don't have a bootsplash, but that's not a big deal.
i ghlight=vpnc
Another problem is that network-manager-gnome (which I think should have been installed by default) doesn't detect vpnc without this fix: http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=184122&h
Hey, I made the same changes on my laptop, and when I finally did reboot, I didn't have X, sound, or wireless networking!
Thanks Ubuntu!
(I finally got X working, but I'm still figuring out what the deal is with the others)
I just upgraded from version 5.04 directly to 6.06 without rebooting or anything. Now my system has no network connection.
The next 1-4 hours of my Saturday are going to be very not-fun. Don't be like me. Keep your system up-to-date.
A slashdotter who didn't build his own computer is like a Jedi who didn't build his own lightsaber.
A friend tried to install it but for some reason it just stopped in the middle of the procedure. the Livedisks runs find no problem so that has him scratching is head.
They cannot provide the codecs. The reason Microsoft can is that they do pay licensing fees for them (a pittance, due to volume, so it doesn't affect the 96% profit margin too much). This is made clear in many of the howtos etc -- you might be breaking the laws in your country when you get the codecs and use them. Some enterprising person might find a way to sell you a legal package fairly cheap, but for now, that part comes from fly-by-night sources that tend to appear and disappear from the web, to pop up under another name and isp later on. Sad, but true.
I'm telling you it doesn't even see the partitions. So I can't very well format them. I suppose if I was really determined, I could boot another linux, say Mandriva, and format the partitions and then try the installer again. Just the fact that it doesn't see the partitions makes me too nervous though. Like it might mangle my disk because it is "confused".
"He's lost in a 'floyd hole"
Lots of people complaining about X breaking, and I had the same problem (and a load of others) -- then I realised I ran "apt-get upgrade" instead of "apt-get dist-upgrade". Dist-upgrade worked, and fixed X (and several, but not all the other problems)
I mod down anyone who says "I will be modded down for this", regardless of the rest of their comment
To compare the latest Ubuntu and SUSE is interesting. I have used SuSE for years, but since SUSE came along, quality has gone down and 10,1 is truly dire. The first official "Most annoying bug" is "Applying security fixes via zen-updater might not work." In other words, the core software updater is broken (which makes getting an update for it tricky). No matter (you might think) since the venerable YaST is still there, but they have broken that too for 10.0! The second official most annoying bug is "Installing an RPM which is both on the install media and on the online update source will crash YaST." For a final release, this is a show-stopper to my mind, and signs of sevrely flawed quality control. I beta-tested Drake (which became 6.06) and had so few problems with it, I hardly filed any bugs. Ubuntu seems to have concentrated on reliability and quality while managing to include late versions. SUSE10.1 just seems pointless in comparison - broken and a Gnome version behind. A (Guess which distro is installed on the machine this post comes from ;-)
Time is life: speed saves it. LJK Setright
Oh, does your granny use emacs?
That reply is as annoying as the original whine.
Not everybody is a coder, much less for a product that is "shipping".
Install NetworkManager, and the NetworkManager Gnome applet.
:)
That'll help
WhiteWolf666 an exBush supporter. All you new-school,compassionate,save the children Republicans can rot in hell
I can build a reasonably good enough system (reusing my old drives and case and ram, etc, just doing a mobo/cpu upgrade)(or do it from some old pentium junker), AND load the OS and apps for what a copy of OSX or XP costs normal retail, and with OSX you are stuck running the hardware they pick out and choose for you, plus it is mostly non free software and a ton of the extra apps cost serious folding money.
I am right this second running Austrumi 1.20,(just DLed and burnt it today and booted it for a test drive) at only 50 megs under windows manager Enlightenment 17, runs entirely from RAM,meaning it is about as fast as stuff can run basically,plus it frees up the optical drive, I mean, nothing from mac or windows can touch it, either from a systems resources point of view or from a speed or functionality point of view at *50 megs total*, or from a cost in cash POV. Then you can go to any of the big name brand full sized linux distros of choice if you want to fit your machine of choice, at virtually any budget, ten bucks used at the thriftstore to ten million dollars custom high end hardware at acme advanced secret research, inc..
Theres really no comparison what you can do with Linux as opposed to whatever you can drag away from from Apple or MS. They make you fit their idea of computing, Linux lets the individual custom tailor what they want to do with computing. Except maybe for running a few niche or necessary/obscure applications, but for over-all generalised use...no comparison any longer. You can take the linux kernel and run on any sized low budget normal machine all the way up to multi node super computers with about any sort of application you can think of, all for minimal to zero initial software cost. Thats what is so cool about linux, eXtreme flexibility, and you got a choice from totally free in cost to pay for as much handholding as is necessary. *Choice*
- good integration and commercial support-you can go for free to whatever you want to spend with linux support, unlimited
- carries the name of a recognized brand-Linux is so far mainstream now, every single major media outlet has carried numerous articles for years, it needs no further introduction, its like saying, "welcome to the 21st century, we have cars now, check em out!"
- something different that has a reputation for rock solid stability-WAY more config diffs under linux then under mac or windows and stability is a non issue, its *there*, it is a major bragging point.
- user-friendly-pure command line for the fattest gray haired gurus all the way to very nice looking (this e17 is *nice*) and functional GUI, its the same deal realistically now, user friendly for most any user, and you have a LOT more choices with linux
And the most important part?? Freedom. You can look at any tiny detail and change it to whatever you want, total freedom. You aint getting that from apple or MS.....
Look at the one laptop per child project, arguably the largest planned technological rollout to the most people ever conceived, the goal is stick a laptop in the hands of every kid on earth eventually. This will be known in future history as a serious major turning point once it starts happening, and it looks pretty good it will. Now, they had to choose,the softare is a critical part of this ambitious undertaking, they looked at it, MS and Apple-not even in the running for a project of this grand a vision. Default resource hogs and no freedom at all knocked them out early in the considerations.
Then pay someone to fix them. Complaining solves nothing.
My other car is first.
I ran Kubuntu Breezy (5.10) on 5 home machines (2 servers and 3 workstations) for quite a few months.
In Breezy, the server came on the same CD as the GUI (kubuntu). The servers do not have any GUI on them (and I like that way). The workstations have no local data at all, and use NIS/autofs to mount the home directories from the server.
When the release candidate of Dapper came out, I updated my test server using an edit of the sources.list, two commands, and a reboot.
When Ubuntu 6.06 Dapper came out, I had a new server to replace the old one. This is an AMD 64, with A8V (stay away from A8V-MX by the way). So, I installed it using the amd64/x86_64 version of the server CD, and copied all my old server to it.
Today, I reinstalled one of the workstation (a Pentium II 450 with 768 MB) using Dapper. I tried the kubuntu desktop live CD twice from the GUI, and it would copy packages, but not complete, and have to be hard rebooted.
Then I used the alternate desktop CD, which has the old text based installer, and that worked fine.
All in all I am happy with it, but can't explain why the glitch with the GUI install. I still have 2 workstation to install/upgrade. We will see how those go.
2bits.com, Inc: Drupal, WordPress, and LAMP performance tuning.
>I can't help but think that Apple's Mac OS X meets all of these. Besides being proprietary, what exactly about Mac OS X is not "nearly as effectiv[e]" compared to these four Linux distributions?
The extremely obvious, and implied criterion:
- runs on standard hardware
[oops, i almost said
-runs on x86]
my password really is 'stinkypants'
Are you talking about the Dapper Live CD? I had exactly the same problems with the Live CD from either Hoary or Breezy, I forget which, when it used to come on two CDs, a Live CD and an install CD.
Also, I've had the same problem after installing Hoary and updating to Breezy w/o CD, just using apt-get. Upon reboot, everything starts up fine until Gnome, when the mouse pointer appears on a brown background, but no desktop.
Never really bothered to find out what was up. I have a Fujitsu-Siemens Amilo Pro laptop, but I don't really see what kind of hardware problem it would be..
my password really is 'stinkypants'
... sucks. I have an X800GT. It's not recognised in the setup (R423) and this I cant boot X. Now this would be ok as there are work arounds for it with an install, but I got the desktop CD to try it out without having to mess around with my partitions (I doubt it can read an XP dynamic disk array)... but with a live cd I dont want to have to reconfigure it *every time i boot*.
// Ubuntu -10.
the cd went in the bin.
Result:
XP64 0.1
, , , , , karma elon
Now say what you will. I have been playing with various flavours of linux for years but have always lost interest. Being it blowing up the machine, free beer, the 80's, recovering from the 80's, the 90's (if they really happened at all) and various and sundry things that can so often throw us off our path and: after months of frustration with trying to load up on my Walmart Basic A535 with the RAM maxed out at 512, nothing huge but we play with what we have. All the other distros and hours on google and half a pack of smokes, it was just no longer fun to play. With Ubuntu, bang, zoom, 99.94% of all my hardware was recognized (bear in mind 82.43143212334342232323_% of all statistics are made up on the spot). A quick search, couple of sudo commands and my wireless was working like a charm. I have had so much fun back playing with this. I am interested again. I am learning a ton in almost no time. The fact that my sound works, my cards work, my video was configured makes the experience so much more enjoyable. I really think that if 'new' people try this they will like this. It's nice to have converts regardless of the motivation. I make my living consulting and supporting m$ stuff and thats just the way it goes. But with a rocking home network and lots of boxes I can't wait to see what the playground becomes when this new toy joins the crew. If your new to linux, give this a try, have some fun. Nothing to lose and a wonderful new way of looking at all the things you pay to do anyway.
Installs perfectly in Parallels (release candidate 2) running on a MacBook. Use the x86 Desktop edition, choose a Linux > "Debian" environment.
Only trick is getting a network connection via a MacBook's AirPort card. For that, choose "Host Only Networking" in the Parallels parameter screen (this has to be done as it defaults to a Bridged Ethernet port and emulates a Realtek NIC, which would require a cable to be plugged in).
Then go to Mac OS X's System Preferences > Sharing > Internet.
Select "Share connection from: AirPort"
Select "To computers using: eth2" (should be a bottom of list)
Make sure Ubuntu is using DHCP in its Networking config (it does by default), and has its default Ethernet port active. Now you should be able to open Ubuntu's pre-installed Firefox and check you've got a connection.
Oops, sorry, I didn't mean to mod this OT... I'm new to this moderation stuff. (>)
An object at rest cannot be stopped.
Will someone please tell me why the standard install (on my nForce2 system) assumes that 1024 x 768 is the highest possible resolution my display can handle?
I mean, it's not like pretty much every computer made in the last 5 years or so can't handle substantially higher resolutions...
(And for all of those who are about to respond, "just edit the xorg.conf file" or whatever... why the fuck should that be necessary? Just because I can doesn't mean that I should need to...)
I doubt the Ubuntu team will be capable of fixing your granny's exploded head.
<syntaxnazi>
Reminds me of the time I dropped my watch in the river and it stopped running.
</syntaxnazi>
</jerk>
Women are like electronics: you don't know how damaged they are until you try to turn them on.
This past week I've install Ubuntu on my old gateway laptop, and help a friend set up (not install) XP on her
new HP laptop.
The Ubuntu install was suprisingly easy. I answered 3 or 4 questions, like my name and my time zone, and
do I want to install Ubuntu on the entire hard drive (I answered yes). After the install finished, my wireless was working
without a hitch, and I had a nice clean desktop to enjoy.
In comparison, the XP setup was mystifying, and it was *already* installed. During bootup, windows kept popping up,
sometimes several unrelated windows at once. First, a registration window came up. While we were trying to answer
the list of questions there, an Anti-Virus wizard popped up. Next a little window came up to tells use that XP had found
my wireless network, but strangely enough the registration app didn't know how to use it.
Next, a Recovery wizard popped up and recommended that we make recovery disks (using 1 double layer DVD, 2 single layer DVDs,
or 13! CDs). Another little window told use to install an XP update, so I completed that first. Then, we took the suggestion of
the Anti-Virus wizard to reboot, and we've never seen the Recovery wizard since. We even went searching the disk and the
help system - couldn't find it.
Wireless never came up by itself, we had to drill into the Control Panel to enable it.
When we were all done, we were greeted by a desktop festooned with icon/ads. There was an icon for Blockbuser,
AOL dialup, AOL broadband, MS Office 2003 60 day trial, etc.
Another point of comparison, when I inserted my USB key in the Ubuntu laptop, a folder appears with a list of files on the key. Nice. Under XP,
before I can even view the contents, I have to choose who to see it. It is a photo album? A slideshow? There were more choices than could
fit in the pop-window, one had to scroll down to see the Ubuntu equivalent option, view files.
In every way I preferred Ubuntu experience, and I'm sure my grey-haired Mom would feel the same.