The Business Model of Ubuntu

Andareed writes "Open-source software companies, such as Ubuntu (an open-source Linux distribution), are better able to respond to user request and bugs than traditional software companies, such as Microsoft. Simon Law, head of the Quality Assurance department at Ubuntu in a talk given to the UW Computer Science Club, explains why this is, and how Ubuntu is leveraging the open-source model. Simon explains how the QA department at Ubuntu differs from traditional QA departments, through its use of the open-source community at large. Most interesting is Simon's views on what motivates open-source developers to develop software, and how open-source oriented businesses (specifically Ubuntu) are making money."

Comments

QA at Ubuntu?

[asudhir]

If it is so good and responsive to user input, then maybe the next release will actually make wireless compatibility better instead of worse than the previous release?

Re:QA at Ubuntu?

[rolfpal]

Works for me out of the box. Intel iw2200 on a Dell laptop.

Maybe you just have unsupported hardware

Re:QA at Ubuntu?

[Anonymous Coward]

Maybe you just have unsupported hardware

Then maybe this supertastic QA department that is so much better because it's open source and what not should, you know, like, support it or something?

Re:QA at Ubuntu?

[asudhir]

You should check out the Ubuntu forums--there are tons of people with serious wifi issues, including those whose hardware worked perfectly in the earlier release but now doesn't. Also, WPA support shouldn't be THAT difficult to implement. Why require the end user to download and manually configure wpa_supplicant? Ubuntu is supposed to be easy to use and user-friendly to those new to open source operating systems, not tedious and complicated. Now I know Ubuntu is not very mature, so hopefully this will all be ironed out in the next release.

Re:QA at Ubuntu?

[andrewman327]

Is it just me or does Ubuntu not support WPA? Hell, even my Palm Lifedrive supports that!

Anyway, I am glad that people are realizing that this business model can work. Many current companies seem to be kept afloat through high prices and huge amounts of advirtising on every surface possible. Think of the money they could make if the back of every install CD package had a color ad for Bawls. Ubuntu deserves a big tip of the hat.

Re:QA at Ubuntu?

[Ewan]

I'm quite happily using wpa with my ubuntu laptop, what it's missing (along with almost every other linux distribution) is a decent configuration application which can cope with the various ways each linux wireless driver supports WPA and other less common features.

Only suse come close to this, but everyone else seems reticent to copy their approach.

Ewan

Re:QA at Ubuntu?

[GmAz]

Worked right out of the box for me. I have the Atheros chipset and it worked great. However, WPA is not native to Ubuntu and apparently the algorithm for WEP my router uses isn't compatible with Ubuntu either. So I decided to addon the WPA support. Not a big issue even for me, a somewhat Linux n00b. However, as soon as you add something such as video drivers and it removes the wifi drivers, it was a pain to get them back. Had to find a long cable to reach my router and took me a while to find a working repository to manually install madwifi. But, I got it working.

Re:QA at Ubuntu?

[Intangion]

my wireless is working fine, with wep, and there is a gui config for it (wep at least)

Re:QA at Ubuntu?

[rsidd]

Doesn't work for me. And did with Breezy. Your anecdotal evidence against mine.

Specifically, though, it's not wifi that's broken -- it's networkmanager. Which wasn't a default part of breezy so one can argue that nothing was really broken. I can no longer authenticate to a WEP network that requires a key, and that's with two different laptops, one using NDISwrapper and a Windows driver, one using a native Prism2 driver. On both, manually using iwconfig and dhclient works. I can live with that but it doesn't look good in a desktop OS. And it's not just me -- there are many bug reports (including mine).

Re:QA at Ubuntu?

[rsidd]

However, WPA is not native to Ubuntu and apparently the algorithm for WEP my router uses isn't compatible with Ubuntu either.

I'm interested by that statement. As I posted elsewhere, networkmanager worked for me in a WEP network under breezy, but not under dapper, and that's with two different laptops with different drivers -- one native, one NDIS. Perhaps, as you say, the problem is the router.

But the thing is iwconfig works for me. So why doesn't networkmanager work? I think it uses wpasupplicant, not iwconfig, but surely if iwconfig can do it right wpasupplicant can be fixed.

Re:QA at Ubuntu?

[plazman30]

Install Network Manager. Done. That's all I did.

Re:QA at Ubuntu?

[andrewman327]

That is the problem. WEP has a great gui, but WPA apparently takes some digging. WPA is easier to use on most of my electronic devices, and I wish it were that way on Ubuntu. It would be nice to use Linux for general web browsing in order to avoid spyware and such.

Re:QA at Ubuntu?

[Ewan]

For my card, it was straightforward enough, copying from this webpage

https://help.ubuntu.com/community/WifiDocs/RalinkR T2500Old

However, like I said it depends on your hardware, which is a bit of a pain. Hopefully someone will come up with an intelligent enough software tool to cope with this soon.

Re:QA at Ubuntu?

[Burz]

I can't even set a WEP/WPA key with it without manually putting iwconfig into rclocal.

What's with the general lack of security? On Xandros I've got what I need for laptop security: Private home folders by default, Encrypted home, firewall control, VPN client. On Ubuntu, its all "install/configure it yourself" and "use the HOWTOs n00b".

The display detection is about the worst I've seen from the current crop of distros. Heading into xorg.conf is almost a forgone conclusion even with mundane graphics cards.

(I wondered if the alpha had addressed any of these problems, so I installed edgy for a look: Default would not boot at all, and selecting "safe video" mode put me into a fully-accelerated hires desktop! So I will probably stay away from it until beta2.)

Ubuntu is elegant and uncluttered, but it isn't very functional beyond office apps and ethernet connectivity; Not if you take its GUI-centered mission seriously. Ubuntu is morphing into another distro/community that tries to whip desktop users into hackers.

Re:QA at Ubuntu?

[Kalinda]

You talking about (K?)NetworkManager?

For some reason I can't get it to work with WEP, never tried WPA; but I was overjoyed when I even got my wireless to work since it's a Broadcom card.

Suse has this thing called KInternet, which is sadly not avilable anywhere else.. and it seems like a nifty wireless hookup thing.. I'm not using Suse anymore, though.

Re:QA at Ubuntu?

[Burz]

Only suse come close to this, but everyone else seems reticent to copy their approach.

FYI, Xandros aced this back in version 3. Their wlan setup is excellent, even if the kernel suffers from some of the driver shortages that are common on Linux. At least you get ndiswrapper with it, unlike Suse.

With Xandros 4, you can monitor interface status, enable/disable and reconfigure right from the systray icon.

Re:QA at Ubuntu?

[babbling]

Ubuntu is morphing into another distro/community that tries to whip desktop users into hackers.

I don't think that's the case. I think they'd take these bugs seriously if you can file a detailed bug report. It's not as though every single problem that occurs for you also occurs for the Ubuntu developers. Help them out. File bug reports.

Re:QA at Ubuntu?

[babbling]

They want to, but can't. Hardware manufacturers aren't cooperating by releasing hardware specifications or driver source code. As a user who values your ability to use wireless in Ubuntu, this means that you have a responsibility to buy products where the manufacturer is cooperating.

This support isn't going to happen any other way. If you think it's simple to write drivers for your black-box wireless card, go for it! I think you'll find that it's not. We get the cooperation of all hardware manufacturers by only buying from those that cooperate. The ball is in your court.

Re:QA at Ubuntu?

[babbling]

I, too, am very happy with the excellent performance from the iw2200. I'm also on a Dell laptop.

When I got it, I reinstalled Windows (I only use Windows to compile programs for Windows users) to get rid of the Dell spyware and was annoyed to find that wireless wasn't working until I installed the driver.

I was pleasantly surprised when Ubuntu didn't give me any hassles. I was able to open Firefox and start browsing without doing anything else. An OS like Ubuntu is most beautiful when you are using properly supported hardware.

Re:QA at Ubuntu?

[Burz]

They already have my hardware details on file for a long time now. They already have many thousands of Radeon 7000 users with 17" Viewsonic displays, for instance. But the result is not so much a 'bug' as negligence... Why is my equipment being mapped to 'generic'?

I do file reports for bugs like forgetting the NIC IP address right after clicking Apply. But I am NOT going to get into a whining match with YET another Linux vendor over hardware they are DELIBERATELY ignoring. It is now Two-thousand-Friggin-Six and I've given them enough years to 'catch up' with my 5-year-old equipment.

Look, I have equipment from top-volume producers (ATI, MSI, etc.) and they can't even manage that. I've already helped Xandros, who actually seems to listen BTW, but while fixes in common components percolate to other distros eventually, configuration scripts and panels do not because distros rarely share them. So... Do I owe my time to each and every distro out there to help them fix the same problems over-and-over again?

BAH! Ubuntu LTS is a big disappointment. Xandros is better [i]by far.[/i]

Re:QA at Ubuntu?

[deviceb]

Well i would have said the same thing about Suse a year ago. BuTT Ubuntu has found every wireless system i have built /shrug. I have no complaints with Ubuntu in this reguard. Perhaps your hardware is outdated.

Re:QA at Ubuntu?

[babbling]

I've never had an ATI card, so I don't know what their status is, but is there even a free software driver for your card? If not, then you're probably blaming the wrong organisation. If ATI won't cooperate, you can't expect Ubuntu to magically still support ATI hardware.

Re:QA at Ubuntu?

[martinultima]

Yeah, I remember trying Ubuntu myself, after hearing all the hype – at the time my entire home network was wireless, so as a result it was completely useless on my system. Couldn't find any wireless packages for it anywhere, tried Debian's but – oh, that's right, it's not binary-compatible because Ubuntu uses a different version of the kernel and GCC! Not to mention, it was unusably slow...

Anyway, Ubuntu trolling aside, I think the reason there's no real wireless support is because they won't put in programs like NdisWrapper, which is often the fastest and easiest way to get wireless running on Linux. And why don't they include NdisWrapper? Their free software guidelines don't allow it; it doesn't matter how convenient it may be for the end-user, if it's patented, involves binary blobs, or anything else that would restrict its freedom, it can't go in. That's the same reason you can't get MP3, DVD, or Flash support out of the box; first is patented, second requires "illegal" decryption software, and third is proprietary software.

Just to put things into perspective – I've been maintaining my own distribution a while now, and personally I'm taking a more pragmatic approach to the whole thing... the way I see it, I'd much rather a system that's ready to go out of the box than one that's basically assembled by idealistic purists. I can understand why the whole freedom thing's important and all, but a lot of the reason I like Linux in the first place is because you get so much ready to go "out of the box," and when everyday things like Flash and MP3 aren't available, that's really defeating the whole purpose. So MP3 – yep. Flash – yep. And wireless – one of the first things I did was make sure NdisWrapper was included, because otherwise all my NETGEAR adapters would go to waste, and I'd much rather use what I have than go all out and replace them with more "free" ones just because my favorite distribution refused to include a perfectly good driver all because of "freedom". (And yes, I am working on the ATI and nVidia drivers...)

But anyway, to get back on topic: Long story short, as far as I know, the whole wireless thing has nothing to do with Q&A, it's entirely because of their free software guidelines. So either go with their rules, or make up your own – you have the freedom to choose. Use it wisely.

Re:QA at Ubuntu?

[Beavbo]

I find it interesting to see the sort of culture shift that's taking place in the Linux community.... 4 years ago, the majority of *nix users would have scoffed at the idea of doing ANY configuration using a GUI interface (CLI and/or die). Now it seems as if not only are those tools being developed to some extent, but the community is actually welcoming it. If that doesn't attest to the fact that Linuxen are becoming more popular to the masses, I don't know what does! Huzzah!

Re:QA at Ubuntu?

[DarkShadeChaos]

I would say that is pretty dependant on hardware. In my case, wireless was tricky until 6.06 came out. Before I had to run through the GUI, set gateway manually, edit text files, etc. Now, it works automagically - I'm impressed. Good job dev / support team!

Wireless: Netgear WG511

Side note (not ubuntu related, more xfree86/xorg): my HP laptop came with a TwisterK graphics card and that was a lot of fun getting DRI working. If anybody else had/still has this problem, let me know and I will help you out.

Re:QA at Ubuntu?

[andrewman327]

I think this way of thinking became firmly planted with the creation of Linux live CDs. I can order a free Ubuntu CD and drop it in my Toshiba laptop to play with this OS. I consider myself a geek, but prefer to spend my geek time coding Java rather than learned obtuse Linux commands. Another possible cause of this shift in mindframe is the fact that Linux suddenly had the opportunity to earn some more market share instead of holding steady in its obscure niche. Companies took advantage of this and made it more approachable.

I do not think that being able to use the command line to connect to an excrypted wireless network is a requirement for being a geek (it doesn't hurt, though). There are loads of people who are savvy with computers but who do not want to learn loads of commands in order to test Linux. For the record I was very impressed with Ubuntu.

Re:QA at Ubuntu?

[Beavbo]

I agree with basically everything in your post. Personally, I'm happy to see more GUI configuration options and the like as it cuts back immensely on the learning curve. When I first started using Linux, I remember trudging through page after page of forums trying to figure out things like why DMA isn't enabled on my CD/DVD drive, why it didn't like my graphics card, why drives need to be mounted, why certain websites didn't like this new Phoenix browser, etc, etc, etc. Did I learn a lot in the process? Sure.... Would I have liked to cut that setup time down to a very small number so I could enjoy my minimalist fluxbox desktop? Absolutely! Onward and upward, folks! Oh, and for the record, I just recently tried out that new Ubuntu release.... and my Dlink wireless card worked out of the box. I was pleasantly surprised *grin*

Re:QA at Ubuntu?

[andrewman327]

I am pleasently surprised that my Toshiba integrated wireless card works out of the box, but I do not want to change the encryption settings that my whole family uses because it doesn't have an easy GUI WPA dialog. Anyway, I wish that I had the time to learn Linux now days.

Re:QA at Ubuntu?

[irrelative83]

Similarly, some hardware manufacturers want to, but cannot. Many wireless cards allow software control of the transmission frequency. If they released source code, it would be possible to modify it to work outside of the FCC's designated spectrum. This would cause the device to be in violation of the FCC, and cause all sorts of pain for the manufacturer.

Result? No open source drivers.

Re:QA at Ubuntu?

[Burz]

The ATI driver works fine, thanks. It's not ATI's job to configure /etc/X11/xorg.conf.

The failure lies somewhere between Ubuntu and Xorg.

Re:QA at Ubuntu?

[GmAz]

My router is an AT&T brand as is my wifi card. That works great when the drivers work under windows. However, under Ubuntu, I had to use the generic Atheros drivers. It worked, but was unable to communicate correctly with my router with WEP enabled. If you have ever used a network with a mix of manufacturer hardware, you may find that some brands don't work with eachother for certain models. Netgear and Linksys are two good examples. My router probably uses a different algorithm for its WEP key security while the generic drivers for my Atheros chipset wifi card wasn't recognizing that algorithm. I have seen this issue several times even under Windows environments. Fortunatly, I haven't seen WPA affected by this same issue.

Re:QA at Ubuntu?

[jlarocco]

Fuck off.

99.9% of open source developers work for free in their spare time. They let you download their software for free. They're not obligated to get your shit working. They can be as lazy, self-serving and self-important as they want to.

If you paid for your distro, maybe you should have checked to make sure it was compatible with your hardware. That's like buying a PC game for your Mac. Oops.

It takes less than half an hour to find out if a particular laptop, desktop or piece of hardware will work with Linux. All you have to do is Google it. If you want hardware that works with Linux, do the fucking research. It's nobody's fault but your own if it doesn't work.

If you want to use hardware that's not currently supported, you have 3 options:

1. Make the drivers yourself or help somebody else make them.
2. Shut the hell up and wait for somebody else to make the drivers.
3. Shut the hell up and use an OS that does support the hardware.

Re:QA at Ubuntu?

[babbling]

That's a bad response. Telling people to "fuck off" isn't nice. Especially when they have what appears to be a legitimate complaint. As a free software developer, I am happy for people to complain about my software, although, I don't write drivers.

Anyway, in this case the problem doesn't lie with free software developers, otherwise there definitely would be a driver by now!

The problem is that people are buying hardware from hardware manufacturers that are being absolute bastards.

Re:QA at Ubuntu?

[babbling]

I sought out a laptop (Dell Inspiron 710m) that would work. Why can't other people?

Re:QA at Ubuntu?

[babbling]

How did Intel get away with it, then? Besides, it is simple enough (but illegal in some places, hence a legal driver can't be written from this method) to reverse engineer the existing driver if someone is determined enough to do this.

Re:QA at Ubuntu?

[htnprm]

WPA plus authentication with Active Directory. These (Looooong) instructions didn't even work. As for "writing my own drivers", do you see the work developer written on my head anywhere? No you do not.

I can't believe people keep deluding themselves that Linux is ready for mainstream PC users migrating from Windows. It's not. It's just not! Please stop deluding yourselves. It may be some day, but right now, it's just not!

There are so many articles like "My solution for my family's Windoze box getting pwned in five seconds. I give them Linux". The subheading for these articles should be "I get lots of phone calls from my family because they can't remember what the application is called to do XYZ". It has been said many times, but I'll reiterate. Don't run with admin rights under Windows if you don't have to, and run Firefox.

Don't get me wrong. I'm enjoying (For the most part) playing with Ubuntu and SLED. But I'm positively tired to death of how much time I spend reading wikis and googling for answers when things don't work as expected.

Re:QA at Ubuntu?

[Ash-Fox]

Anyway, Ubuntu trolling aside, I think the reason there's no real wireless support is because they won't put in programs like NdisWrapper, which is often the fastest and easiest way to get wireless running on Linux. And why don't they include NdisWrapper? Their free software guidelines don't allow it; it doesn't matter how convenient it may be for the end-user, if it's patented, involves binary blobs, or anything else that would restrict its freedom, it can't go in. That's the same reason you can't get MP3, DVD, or Flash support out of the box; first is patented, second requires "illegal" decryption software, and third is proprietary software.

From Ubuntu's wiki:

Ubuntu comes with the necessary ndiswrapper module pre-installed, but it needs the ndiswrapper-utils package to get it working. There is also a graphical interface to using ndiswrapper which you can use.

Note: for Ubuntu 6.06, ndiswrapper-utils is included on the standard installation CD. You can install the package from the CD and skip to section 2.2...

Re:QA at Ubuntu?

[andrewman327]

I think that bootable Linux is ready for the mainstream as long as you only need to do a few things like web browsing and document creation. For more advanced features, however, it still has a few iterations to go.

Re:QA at Ubuntu?

[StarKruzr]

What is the hardware manufacturers' motivation for not releasing the data necessary to write open-source drivers?

Also, suppose all hardware manufacturers started releasing binary-only drivers and made them free-as-in-beer, but not to decompile. Would you support their incorporation into Linux distros?

Re:QA at Ubuntu?

[babbling]

1. They don't seem to have any motive. That's what makes it so frustrating.

2. No, because most drivers run at kernel level. That's like giving each of those companies a root login to your computer. Would you run absolutely any binary code that I send you as root? Give me your email address.

Re:QA at Ubuntu?

[StarKruzr]

2) is the same thing that happens with Windows and you don't see (for example) Canon trying to root my machine when I install my Powershot A620 drivers.

Geez

[dolson]

Ubunutu? Can we get an editor here?

Re:Geez

[neonprimetime]

Ubunutu? Can we get an editor here?

Sadly, the editor is not the only one that spells this wrong. Take a look at a google search. approximately 25,000+ results can't be wrong, can they?

Re:Geez

[RpiMatty]

Yes, they can, espically compared to http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&sq=Ubuntu>57,20 0,000 results

Re:Geez

[Klowner]

Well, my boss referred to it as "Bubanti" the other day, but he also shortens "Christopher" to "Christ", so.. I think he may have some sort of actual mental problem.

Re:Geez

[Luke Dawson]

Obviously Slashdot's QA department could learn a thing or two from Ubuntu's!

Re:Geez

[KokorHekkus]

Yes, it's truly rediculous....

Re:Geez

[neonprimetime]

Hey, don't feel STUPID. There are over 420,000 others who espically can't spell compared to you!

Re:Geez

[dna_(c)(tm)(r)]

You're not an espically good speller yourself, are you?

I htae it wehn anynomous cawords becmoe garmra nzais!

Re:Geez

[WilliamSChips]

I know, they always say "No garmra for you!"

More Talks

[Andareed]

There's also more talks at http://www.csclub.uwaterloo.ca/media/

Inaccurate

[Risen888]

Ubuntu is not a company, it is a community-driven distribution. Canonical Ltd. is a major financial sponsor of Ubuntu, but (AFAIK) provides very little guidance of the project.

Re:Inaccurate

[morgan_greywolf]

Ubuntu is not a company, it is a community-driven distribution. Canonical Ltd. is a major financial sponsor of Ubuntu, but (AFAIK) provides very little guidance of the project.

Not true at all. If it weren't for the Ubuntu Technical Board, Ubuntu wouldn't be the highly polished, well-integrated desktop distribution that it is. They decide what packages make it into the distro, what features will make it into the release, and how the parts will integrate together. Additionally there are project-based teams that deal with the nuts and bolts and local teams that deal with the issues of L10n adn I18n. Some of these teams include people from Canonical, and others are comprised of strictly members of the community. It's not lopsided like some other Open Source projects with corporate backers, like OpenOffice.org or Mozilla or even the Fedora Core Project. In my mind, Ubuntu represents a good balance between community interest and corporate interest...the question becomes will Canonical, Ltd. make money on its investment or not?

Re:Inaccurate

[zlogic]

Yup, so you think the guys pay for our free CDs but don't actually care what is actually burned on them?

Re:Inaccurate

[chris_7d0h]

In a speech by Mark I heard him explain that the entire Ubuntu initiative is a purely social contribution in a philanthropic sense from his side. Canonical is not in this to make money.

Most people with insane riches want to be seen as philanthropic. Bill G. for example started a foundation where he funds initiatives related to education and health (a wide domain where he helps financing selected initiatives).

Mark on the other hand is more focused and is aiming at a specific and narrow problem domain in the technology sector. He wants to help Linux become a viable computing platform option for the average person, by providing both financing as well as leadership. Seeing that Slashdot is mostly comprised of people who have an education and "food on their table", the work of Mark will likely have a more direct impact on our lives than other initiatives, thus making the effort of Mark rather interesting in our little technology corner of the world.

Being an industry professional I am (as I believe many of you are as well) constantly consulted by friends and family about technical matters. If one day these people would be willing to start using a platform which I am familiar with, the effort on my part as well as those seeking help would greatly diminish and we would all be able to spend more time on stuff that matters. Ubuntu is in that regard an extremely interesting initiative to me personally and I commend Shuttleworth for incepting Ubuntu and his colleagues and the rest of the contributing community for focusing on the last 10% of what Debian is missing for wide spread adoption.

Re:Inaccurate

[ClamIAm]

Canonical Ltd. is a major financial sponsor of Ubuntu, but (AFAIK) provides very little guidance of the project.

Um right. Oh and if you think that's just some humorous speculation, look at what Bruce Perens had to say:

I actually considered going to work with Canonical when Mark [Shuttleworth] was starting it, and there were a couple of problems with that. I think that Mark is eventually interested in having a successful and profitable company, and I don't believe that Linux distributions are a natural fit for for- profit enterprise. Indeed, if you go on my website I have a very long paper on the economics of open source, and one of the things that you can derive from that is the fact that open source works almost worst for a for-profit Linux distribution. ...

As far as Canonical is concerned, one thing that struck me about Mark is that he really insists on control. For example, when I considered being an employee one of the things standing in the way was the fact that Mark doesn't give his employees stock in his companies. If I'm going to work for someone I'm going to be a little entrepreneurial about it, so I felt that although Ubuntu and Canonical could do a great deal for Debian and be excellent community members, they were never going to be the core, and we could actually get closer to the core by following what I have set up for UserLinux.

"Little guidance" indeed.

Re:Inaccurate

[adah]

Ubuntu [ubuntulinux.org] is not a company, it is a community-driven distribution. Canonical Ltd. [canonical.com] is a major financial sponsor of Ubuntu, but (AFAIK) provides very little guidance of the project.

Nonsense. I can tell you that even Mark Shuttleworth himself is personally involved in the project. Once I received his personal e-mail commenting on my Chinese test report!

Matter of scale

[treerex]

It seems to me that the reason Ubuntu (and other OS projects) can respond to user feedback and bug reports more quickly than larger (non-FOSS) companies is the relative sizes of the user communities. Compare the size of the Ubuntu install base to that of Windows (or Mac OS X, or...) and it becomes a no-brainer that you can respond more quickly. Don't get me wrong, I applaud the work the Ubuntu group does, but the ability to respond quickly will lesson as they grow. Compare with RedHat and its enterprise offerings.

Just my US$0.02 worth.

Re:Matter of scale

[jbrader]

Or maybe they are just listening.

Re:Matter of scale

[SCPRedMage]

Good observation, but to the opposite effect; the GP post was stating that as the installation base grows, their responsiveness lessens. Since Red Hat Enterprise has a larger installation base, it would figure that they'd be less responsive.

Re:Matter of scale

[CastrTroy]

I think they have more at stake to listen to their customers. You can't easily switch away from MS Windows, just because they don't fix bugs that you need fixed. However, with Linux, you can more easily (although it's still a hassle) switch from one vendor to another when you don't get the bug fixes you need. You will have more incentive to switch if the distro you are switching to is willing to fix the problems you are encountering. Another reason might just be less bureaucracy. When you submit a bug report to an open source project, there's a lot less red tape to go through to get the fix out the door. You can even fix it yourself if you like.

Re:Matter of scale

[HugePedlar]

Not that I disagree with you as such, but I believe the opposite can also be true. I do IT support in the medical profession, and we have "professional" software suites that cost thousands per year to license and have, on the scale of things, a fairly small user base. Getting prompt, relevant support is an exercise in frustration. You know the drill: log a call, wait for someone technical to call back, etc. etc.. Sometimes a bug can take months to be fixed, if at all.

Compare this with Pandion, the open source IM client I installed in our building. An update failed to install on our machines and left the old version inoperable. I posted a query on the official forum at 8:30 on the morning of the rollout and got a fix (from several people concurrently who were also browsing the forums) within half an hour.

It's the large, expert community (that has access to and therefore something of a stake in the source code) that enables such superb support.

Re:Matter of scale

[Eivind Eklund]

I'm sorry, but I believe you're taking a very minor parameter and attributing everything to it. In open source, the support community grows at roughly the same rate as the developer community, and there's completely different mechanisms at work.

The reasons for faster response, from my point of view (having had a commit bit for FreeBSD for almost a decade now):

• The developers actually do support. They're in contact with the end users. And some of the end users are other coders, and are allowed to do things with the OS code. This allows them to send in suggestions for how to fix their own problem. As opposed to the rumours, we only use these as is less than half the time - yet they're useful for pointing out things.
• The developers are allowed to prioritize their own time. This result in both higher quality code (developers clean up when they feel cleanup is warranted), and easy end user problems being prioritized. Especially in combination with developers doing support.
• Open source software is mostly designed based on what's technically reasonably easy, not marketing. This makes for simpler and more nimble codebases.
• Open source goes through evolution: Those codebases that aren't nimble mostly die. In closed source software, those codebases that sell can add more resources (programmers) to get around not being nimble.

I think these things are much more important. Especially the first two.

Eivind.

Re:Matter of scale

[gutnor]

Listening suppose somebody tells you something you understand.

As they grow larger, communities tend to produce more noise than information. Your objective becomes to find the significant subset of the community that you will listen to for a specific subject and try to make concessions for the rest of the community. Certainly not an easy thing, and even less when there is interest clash : geek / mom-pop / dell-hp-... / business.

Same as democraty. In a small village you can invite everybody to take the decisions about a new road in the village. At country scale, you can't do that as easily.

Re:Matter of scale

[honkycat]

Open source software is mostly designed based on what's technically reasonably easy, not marketing. This makes for simpler and more nimble codebases.

This, of course, can be as much a curse as it can be a blessing. Some very important features are hard to code and not at all rewarding to the programmer. For example, an easy-to-use beginner GUI...

Re:Matter of scale

[babbling]

Come here so I can teach you a lessen.

Re:Matter of scale

[treerex]

In my experience the RHEL support is not as speedy as that found in other FOSS projects, or in other Linux distros.

Re:Matter of scale

[Pollardito]

the support community grows at roughly the same rate as the developer community

the point that the grandparent was trying to make is that the support community doesn't grow as fast as the end-user community. the first people onto these projects are people that are really knowledgeable with computers and often are people that are looking for a "project" that they can pitch in on. as the software goes more and more mainstream and becomes easier to use, the community adds in lots more non-technical people who both need more support themselves and probably won't be able to provide support for others. that's the tipping point from "linux is for hobbyists" to "linux is easy enough for my mom to use", because adding a hobbyist potentially grows your support community and adding an uninformed user just increases the support load

Re:Matter of scale

[jbrader]

I understand that. But I also understand that a lot of large companies don't bother to listen to their customers at all.

Re:Matter of scale

[Zonnald]

I think what you have just said is that large companies "appear" not to bother to listen to their customers at all. Which goes back to the GP, assertion that as the company gets larger it has to deal with a lot more input from interest groups who feel that their concern is the most important.

Re:Matter of scale

[Eivind Eklund]

Sorry, I meant end user community. And in my experience, it grows at roughly the same rate, as long as support is reasonably distributed. The challenge is not in the number of people available - for any particular level of support, this tend to be enough - it's on the level of internal communication in the top tier of support/developers.

A large number of uninformed users rapidly start giving *some* support to others, and the short path upwards makes this work fairly well. The problem with the commercial companies is that their developers are NOT available to give support.

Heck, I know a numbers of the developers at Apple, and when they were doing FreeBSD, we'd be exchanging support - in the public mailing lists and in the form of code, making it all available for everybody. Now that's gone, and the feedback loop with it.

At Microsoft, the high end support people don't even have access to developers or code. I had one case where one of my consulting customers had a problem with an Exchange server on a clustered system. They were a large, priority Microsoft support customer (with a very expensive support contract), and my customer had lodged about a ticket a month earlier, and now things were coming to a push, so they'd had two people trying to solve the case locally for three days. No go. Then a Unix person there (me, actually, but that's besides the point) was pulled in, went through the docs, found an analogous problem with a solution for MS-SQL, they tested the solution, and voila - it worked! It was a fairly trivial registry tweak that would have been obvious from looking at the source (direct string compare on an id that wasn't the same for RAID disks).

Anyway, the ticket with Microsoft support was closed. An hour or two later, MS support called back. They wanted to know what my customer had done to resolve the problem - since MS support had three other priority support tickets against the same problem, and hadn't been able to find a solution.

This is what happens when support doesn't have access to and competence in the source code. Open source OS projects give better support and are more responsive because we have that access, and because we get into the habit that if a customer is willing to give us info on a reproducable, we will solve the problem. We almost never have any insurmountable barrier that stop us from doing so.

Eivind.

Re:Sounds Swell...

[Anonymous Coward]

There are thousands Ubuntu users, milions Windows users and couple of hunderts of OSX users that have problems like yours. On my laptop Ubuntu started in 1280x800 (max resolution on my monitor) and Windows started on 800x600 (and I couldn't make it bigger)("Dear Windows it's 2006?").

You expirience isn't everybody's expirience.

Business model

[syntaxglitch]

I thought Ubuntu's business model was "be funded by an generous and independently wealthy geek". You mean to tell me it actually makes money?

Re:Business model

[Anonymous Coward]

I know first hand of several deals Canonical is working on. One is HUGE, but not yet a done deal. One is medium and being installed now. Another is smallish and will be installed soon. Sorry for the vagueness and anonymousness, but I cannot say more. The point is--they are making money; though not necessarily a profit.

No Bittorrent...

[Anonymous Coward]

Note: We are sorry that these talks are not available through BitTorrent, however under present IST policy we are not allowed to run BitTorrent. We thank you for your understanding.

After having their large video files slashdotted, I think they'll be the ones being sorry.

Re:No Bittorrent...

[coffeeisclassy]

I think this is the second time the csclub has been slashdotted with large video files. Last time, it went up to the top of IST and then nothing changed. This time, perhaps things will change, but the general internet connection is still not being maxed out. IST has there mrtg stats online, and you can clearly see when the slashdot article went up :-)

Re:No Bittorrent...

[Justin Shreve]

After having their large video files slashdotted, I think they'll be the ones being sorry.

I think so too, after finding all the tubes are clogged.

Re:wait with the legit first post please!!!

[lolocaust]

Anybody got a streaming youtube/google video link?

obligatory business model

[morie]

1. Change name from Ubuntu to Ubunutu
2. ?????
3. Profit!

Re:obligatory business model

[SCPRedMage]

Well if this is the new buisiness model, I want my underwear back!

Re:obligatory business model

[SCPRedMage]

I don't know if I should be happy I got modded up, or disturbed that someone finds my underwear "interesting"...

Re:obligatory business model

[creepynut]

Maybe we're "Interested" to know how they got your underwear in the first place... ;)

Re:obligatory business model

[superbondbond]

Or how about GNU/Ubunutu.

Say that three times quickly.

Re:obligatory business model

[lullabud]

But see, the hidden detail of step 2 was "Force everybody to buy new Ubunutu underwear".

Re:obligatory business model

[SCPRedMage]

So in other words, not only am I NOT getting my underwear back, but they're rebranding it?

Those bastards!

X & NVidia Drivers

[ilovegeorgebush]

Is it just me or did Dapper increase the problems related to X when updating kernels. I had to recently upgrade to 2.6.15-26amd64-k8 because of a serious security flaw (otherwise I wouldn't have bothered just yet), but inevitably I had to recompile my NVidia drivers. Is this the sort of QA Mr Law is overlooking perhaps?

I have to say though, the Ubuntu forums is an awesome resource for fixing Ubuntu related problems. If it is any sort of testiment to the level of paid support then Canonical Ltd. (the commercial organisation behind Ubuntu Linux) are certainly on the right tracks.

Kudos to them.

Re:X & NVidia Drivers

[Anonymous Coward]

If you install the nvidia drivers from the repositories instead of installing your own nvidia drivers outside the standard package management system this won't be an issue.

Re:X & NVidia Drivers

[strangnet]

I ran into troubles with my X (running an ATi card) as well, when upgrading to kernel 2.6.15-26amd64-k8. But I only did a quick dpkg-reconfigure on X and got it working within minutes.

Re:X & NVidia Drivers

[ilovegeorgebush]

Ahh interesting. FYI, you may want to look into module-assistant (sudo apt-get install module-assistant, man m-a and use m-a install kernel-module-name as root to build and install a kernel module).

Re:X & NVidia Drivers

[just_another_sean]

I really didn't have any problems with X or wifi when I recently installed Dapper.

But seeing a number of posts to the contrary I wonder if Debian's recent work on making x.org the default for Etch has anything to do with Debian based distros experiencing hiccups with X? All in all I've had very little trouble with Ubuntu since I first tried Hoary Hedgehog but then again I've only put it on slightly older boxes with pretty standard hardware. From the grumblings I'm hearing it would seem it does have some trouble with bleeding edge hardware. Then again what OS doesn't?

Anyway, with 5 years of support to depend on Ubuntu is starting to make a lot more sense for use on servers.

Thanks Mark!

Hope this helps..

[CptnHarlock]

Yepp, I've run into some problems wint the new kubuntu and wireless. For some reason it won't let me do "chanel switching" (the parameter that messes it up is "channel 6"), and since that is the GUI driven wlassistant tries to do the whole configuration fails. My solution is to "strip" that part of the command and run it like this:

/sbin/iwconfig eth1 mode managed rate 11M key open 1234567890 essid firewall nickname mycomp
dhclient eth1

I've got those rows in a file called wireless.sh that I run as root with sudo.

The problem has something to do with insufficient rights on the device. I know it's a bummer and ubuntu should not have to be fixed with haxx0r scripts considering one of their goals is to be simple at a Joe SixPack level... but I've run into this problem on just one comp and all the others are working excelelently.. :)

Cheers...

P.S. No, that's not my passphrase or my essid or computers nick.. :P .. and yes, I'm running against an old router which can't do better than that.. :P

Review of the video.

[Anonymous Coward]

Seeing it's slashdotted (apparantly).

1) 30s of video held at 15 degree angle (obviously setting up).
2) Nope, launch right into the talk. 20 minutes or so of ubunutu Q+A guy. (camera still at 15 degree angle)
3) Mildly interesting (and entertaining) Question & Answer session. Check out the guy's voice at circa 28 minutes! (camera still at 15 degree angle)
4) The interesting bit - ubunutu guy leaves & audience exits...hahaha - check out the nerds - especially the guy in shorts!

Re:Review of the video.

[cbirkett]

Works for me. Of course, UW is 5 minutes down the road :)

Where is the OSS love?

[keithpreston]

You would think with all the different video formats that they offer, that ogg theora would be one of them. Considering this is the only default out of the box video that ubuntu can play.

Re:Where is the OSS love?

[Andareed]

Unfortunately, the build of ffmpeg we were using didn't allow theora encoding. We tried :(

Re:Where is the OSS love?

[babbling]

Must have been pretty old. VLC is based on ffmpeg, and the VLC in Debian Sarge is capable of encoding to Theora.

Thank you Captain Obvious

[HotBBQ]

So an open source Linux distrobution developed by communal means responds to what the community wants/needs better than a private organization resposible only to share holders? Holy crap someone needs an award for this enlightenment!

Ubunto

[iPaqMan]

What is going to make Ubanto more than a Linux flavor of the week? The only distribution that seems to have real staying power is Red Hat. Every other distribution comes and goes in popularity like SUSE, Mandrake (Mandriva), Linspire, etc, etc...

IMHO, the problem with Linux for the desktop is users have no loyalty. Once something better comes along they drop thier old distro like a bad habbit. This ultimately makes it impossible for a distro company to be profitable more than a few years.

Re:Ubunto

[massysett]

The only distribution that seems to have real staying power is Red Hat.

False. Debian's first 1.0 release was about ten years ago. SUSE's first release was about twelve years ago. Slackware's first release was about thirteen years ago. All are about as old as Red Hat, which was first released about twelve years ago.

Re:Ubunto

[infosec_spaz]

HAHA!! SuSE Dead? Dang, the company I work for, who just switched about 150 desktops to it is REALLY gonna be bummed about that...seeing as we have a support contract from Novell. Does anyone on this site ever base any of their comments on fact, or just conjecture?

Re:Ubunto

[Luke Dawson]

Two different spellings of Ubuntu and neither one is right. By the way your assumptions about distro popularity are flawed. SuSE and Mandrake are consistently at the top, whereas Red Hat barely makes the top 30.

Re:Ubunto

[Elektroschock]

I think Suse is still very good because of Yast. Same for Mandrake, excellent tools.

RedHat/Fedora does not reach for the desktop market. Ubuntu does, it has good default configurations, very polished.

What is needed is more consolidation. Distributions are still to backend diverse. System configuration etc. should be made easier. I would like to see a kind of Yast everywhere approach.

Re:Ubunto

[miro f]

novell's YaST and Control Centre are fantastic, you can pretty much configure anything with them

The only problem is it's so SLOW, especially if I want to install more software. Fedora's package manager is equally slow. Ubuntu is fantastic in this regard, Synaptic package manager beats the pants off all other competition that I have seen

wireless has been a b*tch for me too

[taxman_10m]

I find the Ubuntu forums to be totally inadequate. There were at least 15 different threads on how to get wireless working for my dell b130, with none of them working for me.

I still don't understand why the latest stable ndiswrapper isn't included on whatever Ubuntu CD is offered on the website. That alone would probably solve most people's wireless issues. Everything needed to get wireless networking working should be on the CD. Not everyone has wired access, certainly not with city's and towns rolling out municipal wireless.

Re:wireless has been a b*tch for me too

[wozbk]

I got the O'Reilly Ubuntu Hacks book http://www.oreilly.com/catalog/ubuntuhks/ and was able to easily setup and roam with my old Linksys WiFi card on an ancient P3 Winbook. Anything I wanted to do with Ubuntu I now can, thanks to this book. The laptop is actually much faster and more useful than it ever was with Windows installed.

With the right info on hand Ubuntu is a true gem of an OS - possibly the best available (on older machines be sure to install in "safe Mode" so it doesn't "hang" on you).

Re:wireless has been a b*tch for me too

[Reorax]

The Dapper CD's have the ndiswrapper-utils package on them, but it's not installed by default. It's in pool/main on the CD, and you can just install it with dpkg and go from there.

Re:wireless has been a b*tch for me too

[Pollardito]

With the right info on hand Ubuntu is a true gem of an OS

that's the rub though, distributions of Linux are primarily collections of software that was written by other people. it seems to me that the main work of making a distribution is collecting together those pieces that other people wrote, building an installation process, and documenting for the user how to use/navigate the collection that you've built (Ubuntu is even built on the work of the Debian distro, so even a lot of these tasks were done already by others). it seems like Ubuntu should be the ones fleshing things out the rest of the way, not O'Reilly.

First version of Ubuntu that works for me!

[fprintf]

This is the first version of Ubuntu that works for me pretty much out of the box. I got the CDs on Friday from ship-it and had the AMD-64 version of the system installed on my 20 GB partition within 1/2 an hour. And then about 1/2 an hour later had a VMWare copy of Kubuntu loaded also.

In Native format the Wireless works better and at least recognizes my USB Wireless adapter, though it gives me a Linux version of the BSOD when I try to connect... it just freezes the system entirely.

In VMWare mode it works perfectly, mostly since Windows is handling the Wireless connection for the system. I am not sure whether I'll use it, though, since it doesn't really offer me anything that I don't already have on Windows. In a way I wished that it shipped with Kdevelop or some other IDE so that we could use this as a way to entice young developers to begin coding on Linux rather than using http://kidsprogramminglanguage.com/ or the now free C#/VBasic tools offered by Microsoft.

better "business" model

[neersign]

personally, i like Slackware's "business" model/release schedule better.

ChanServ - Newb has joined ##slackware.
Newb: When is Slackware (choose ver. #) going to be released?
SlackPro: When Pat wants to.

Re:Sounds Swell...

[Anonymous Coward]

Ah, I see the problem. If you used "vim config" instead of "nano config" you'd be done by now.

j/k. Hardware config in most Linux distros is a royal PITA.

Linux desktop

[rhaas]

Either that, or it's just that the Linux desktop isn't that great to begin with. I realize that's an arguable point, but it seems to me that, for example, Firefox running on Linux is significantly slower than Firefox running on Windows on the same hardware. I have to say the Windows desktop looks a lot more polished, too. And the fact that GNOME (at least on the systems that I've used) opens a new folder for every directory instead of replacing the contents of the current window is just really annoying. So I use Windows for my desktop stuff and Linux for development and other real work. YMMV.

Re:Linux desktop

[rhaas]

You're right, I did notice that when I was using Ubuntu, but it slipped my mind. I agree that Ubuntu is definitely better than Red Hat in terms of a desktop system, but it's still quite a hassle. I set up Evolution to access my mail and it ran so slowly that it was unusable (don't ask me why: I ran a packet sniffer on it and still couldn't figure it out). Thunderbird was better, but not as good as Thunderbird on Windows, which in turn is not as good as other mail clients on Windows (eg: no calendaring). Ubuntu's graphics performance also seems to be a bit snappier than Red Hat, but it's still noticeably slower than Windows, which is unfortunate. It seems like a very substantial part of the Linux community just doesn't care about X performance, which is probably because they're not actually using it as a desktop system. But it's baaaad. And that's just local X. Remote X is not even as good as VNC, and VNC is pathetic compared to RDP, which is excellent. Linux columnists like to talk about how Linux is ready for the desktop, but it's just not. The features are pretty close, but as long as the performance is noticeably worse, I don't think it's going to gain much traction.

Re:Linux desktop

[rhaas]

Yes, I do mean Nautilus. And I'm sure it does have an option. But I spent 15 minutes looking for the preferences and couldn't find it. I just looked again and I still can't find it. I have a CS degree and ten years of work experience, I use Linux on a daily basis, and I can't find it. Maybe if I opened up every dotfile in my home directory and looked through them for possibly relevant settings, or read the source code, I could find it. But I don't really have time to do that kind of shit just to get my desktop to work. Sorry.

Re:Linux desktop

[just_another_sean]

Ah it's Monday and I can't be bothered to sit and discuss each of your points. But one thing I will say...

Linux columnists like to talk about how Linux is ready for the desktop, but it's just not.

Regardless of what your experience has been, regardless of what columnists say the fact is I run Ubuntu on three computers in my house, for me, my wife and my kids. And my mother uses it too.

And out of those four machines I am the only user who knows "what a Linux is". The most insightful comment I got from my clueless but happy Linux users was from my daughter... "Oooh, it looks kind of like Aunt Mysha's Mac!".

"Ready for the desktop" is a relative statement anyway, but me, I think Ubuntu is ready. More telling still; so does my mom. :-)

Re:Linux desktop

[init100]

not as good as other mail clients on Windows (eg: no calendaring)

I think the lack of calendar is intentional, to keep Thunderbird a mail client and not everything and the kitchen sink.

Re:Linux desktop

[rhaas]

There's a couple of projects out there that are working on adding it (e.g. Mozilla Lightning), but I'm not sure how active they are or when they'll be ready. I don't think you need calendaring for your personal email, but I predict very few businesses will want to use a mail system that doesn't include it. I don't actually use it all that much even at work, but my coworkers who, unlike me, actually have a lot of meetings really rely on it to keep themselves organized.

Re:Linux desktop

[rhaas]

Hmm, well, if you won't discuss my points just because it's a Monday, they must not be valid. Oh wait. I freely admit that if you're just browsing the web Linux works fine. It is still slower than doing the same thing on Windows, and the fonts don't look as good, but it works. My wife will use it too if that's what I leave running on the computer, because it's not worth the trouble to reboot. She sometimes doesn't even notice that it is Linux, unless of course she wants to use Windows Media Player or iTunes. But I don't really care what she runs on her computer. I want to have a version of Linux that I can run on mine, and like, and I don't, because the X performance bugs me, the Nautilus settings that I can't figure out how to change bug me, the fonts bug me, the crappy wireless support bugs me, and as much as I'd like to have a Linux command line locally rather than having to log into a server over the network every time I need one, it's just not worth the trouble for me at this point.

In a larger sense, you and I and our respective families aren't very relevant. The real key to adoption is to get big companies to go for it. And then there's a whole other host of features that become relevant. You've got to be able to publish applications over the network, and remote X doesn't cut it, especially if they're Windows applications. RDP would work, but as far as I know is not supported. In some environments (e.g. schools), you've got to be able to control what software people can install and run on their machines. You've got to be able to show them that if they stop paying a million dollars a year to Microsoft (sometimes literally) and pay you some much smaller amount instead to maintain the systems, their users won't revolt. And I don't think we're quite there yet, not only because the kinds of problems that I've mentioned would keep me from getting buy-in for a switch here, but also because I don't see a lot of other companies switching either. Are there some? Yes. Many? No.

Re:Linux desktop

[just_another_sean]

Hmm, well, if you won't discuss my points just because it's a Monday, they must not be valid.

Absolutely. Your points were not valid.

better able to respond?

[lytles]

i've been running gentoo for a few years, but when i bought an x60 recently, the livecd wouldn't boot. so i tried ubuntu, at first thinking that i'd just use it to bootstrap gentoo, but this quickly faded into i'll try ubuntu, and then "i've spent all this time getting it to work, i guess i'm committed". so ubuntu for the last few months on my primary personal machine. and yes, a lot of stuff works.

but some things don't, and there doesn't seem to be any response at all from ubuntu. the biggest issue is a minute long hang during boot with the message "mounting root filesystem".

http://www.ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=18611 5&page=17

this thread is 18 pages long and started june 1st, and there are many other threads, bugreports, etc that are dealing with the same issue. there are a hundred "me toos", and one has to assume many people like me who haven't put their two cents in for every one who has. so i'm pretty sure it's not an isolated problem. and yet there is very little response from ubuntu. a few pages with sloppily put together work-arounds. but i haven't seen any sort of official statement on the problem or a commitment to fix it or a disclaimer in any of their pr that the problem exists, or even a statement of the scope of the problem (eg. which cpus are effected).

in some ways i'm very impressed with ubuntu, but responsiveness isn't one of them. in the gentoo world, there would have been a 10 page official document describing the problem, summarizing scope, offering work-arounds, and naming a team assigned to solving the problem.

seth

Re:better able to respond?

[Dan Ost]

Out of curiosity, are you happier with Ubunto than you were with Gentoo?

Re:better able to respond?

[INowRegretThesePosts]

My experience was very different. When I submitted bug reports to Ubuntu, the Ubuntu guys answered really quickly. I was amazed. This was during the release candidate testing though, so maybe this doesn't happen all the time.

Anyway, I think this problem you are reporting is an exception. You can't judge a distro because of only one problem, specially without hearing the Ubuntu guys on the reasons for this.

Anyway, at least Ubuntu is not like certain big monopolist companies, that makes products with security holes that take years to be fixed... :)

Ps: Interestingly, I was a user of Ubuntu, but now I use Gentoo (the opposite of you). I still love Ubuntu though, and recommend it to anyone that wants to try Linux.

Re:better able to respond?

[INowRegretThesePosts]

I have switched from Ubuntu to Gentoo, so I think I can answer this.

I prefer Gentoo than Ubuntu, because of Gentoo's excelent forums and documentation*, customizability** and speed***. These three points are more or less important depending on how you use your computer. I still recomend Ubuntu to friends that want to try Linux. I know there are Gentoo-based distros that focus newbies, but I don't know them, so I'm just comparing Gentoo to Ubuntu.

* At least from my point of view, Ubuntu's documentation covers the necessary steps to get your system working, but if you want to know how your system works, or to customize it, Gentoo is better. For example, most people install Gentoo by hand, because Gentoo's excelent documentation makes it easy for you to do it and learn some things in the process (I don't even know if there is an official installer). This was just one example; Gentoo's documentation teach you how to do anything you want with your computer, in an easy (but not dumbed down) way. Gentoo's forums are also good.

** I think Gentoo is more customizable than Ubuntu in many ways. For instance, in Ubuntu, the package ubuntu-desktop depends on nearly everything, so you can't uninstall the default Ubuntu packages without uninstalling ubuntu-desktop. But if you uninstall ubuntu-desktop, Ubuntu will not handle upgrades as gracefully (AFAIK). In Gentoo, you don't have a package like this. Gentoo has other ways to handle upgrades, both by technological means, and by providing an awesome documentation.
Also, Gentoo's documentation always provide you with many options, dicussing the benefits of each one.
Other features of Gentoo that make it customizable are USE flags and CFlags.

*** Because of the customizability (my PC has only the features that I use, making it faster), and compiling everithing from source with machine-specific optimizations, my computer feels faster than it was with Ubuntu. People make jokes about the time a Gentoo box keeps compiling packages, but they are not founded (IMO). I install Openoffice and Firefox from binaries (which are included in Portage), because these packages take a lot of time and space to compile, and since I don't use them too much, the speed gains from compilation wouldn't be worth it. Of the packages that I compile from source, only gcc and X.org take a long time to compile; most packages compile in seconds or a couple of minutes (in my Athlon XP 2600+ 512 MB RAM). Packages like gcc and X.org are very rarely upgraded, and you can always let them compile while you are not using the computer (or let they compile in the background, though it may slow down your computer depending of what you are doing).

Re:better able to respond?

[lytles]

dan asked:
  by Dan Ost (415913) Alter Relationship on Monday July 31, @10:44AM (#15817157)
Out of curiosity, are you happier with Ubunto than you were with Gentoo?

i was the original poster. i agree with a lot of what the parent said, especially wrt the level of the documentation, in favor of gentoo. there are lots of negatives with both, but i'll focus on some positives.

pro gentoo:
excellent docs
the source is right there (helps debugging and configuring)
package system is simple, and almost everything is in one place

pro ubuntu:
lots of stuff just works (installer, wifi, etc)
pkgs install faster

so i'm not dramatically happier with one or the other, and their focus is so different (expert vs newbie) that it probably doesn't make too much sense. i may stick with ubuntu for the experience (more mainstream) and because it's already running, but if it rains next weekend, i may just switch back :)

seth

Re:Video and no text

[oojah]

Pff, use mplayer -vo aa and then lipread :P

So ya

[guysmilee]

So ya like oh my god its ubuntu ... I pray to god this man is not the ubuntu evangalist ... I can speak better than this guy and thats not saying much!

Natural Selection

[LKM]

IMHO, the problem with Linux for the desktop is users have no loyalty. Once something better comes along they drop thier old distro like a bad habbit. This ultimately makes it impossible for a distro company to be profitable more than a few years.

Watch natural selection at work. It's a good thing. The problem with Windows is that its users do not abandon it if they find something better. Hence, no incentive for Microsoft to improve Windows (see: Vista).

Distros most certainly can have staying power, if they keep working on themselves and improving their distros. If they don't, good riddance.

Re:Natural Selection

[gravyface]

The problem with Windows is that its users do not abandon it if they find something better.

You mean, cannot abandon it, because loyalty remains with the applications -- you know, the things that actually do something -- not the operating system. The applications that matter do not run in Linux. Period.

Re:Natural Selection

[tonyr1988]

I'll second the "staying power" of distros. I am currently using Ubuntu on my desktop and laptop, and I won't change distros anytime soon. Why? Because, like any user of any operating system (Windoze, Linux distros, Mac OS X, even MS DOS), I'm used to it.

But, this applies not only to operating systems, but everything. It's the inertia of technology. I use aMSN instead of Gaim or Kopete because I'm used to it. I use Gnome instead of KDE or Xfce because I'm used to it. It's not that I'm an Ubuntu/aMSN/Gnome fanboy - that principle applies to everyone, including those WinXP/Microsoft Office/Hotmail users.

Re:Natural Selection

[Kjella]

Watch natural selection at work. It's a good thing. The problem with Windows is that its users do not abandon it if they find something better.

If their feature list involve such things as:
1. Being able to use all their current applications.
2. Keep all their current data locked up in various proprietary formats.
3. Being able to use all the gadgets and bundled software.
4. Being able to run most of the games out there.
5. Being able to ask the local windows guy/kid for support.
6. Not having to learn the quirks of a new OS. ...then there's no better solution than Windows, because whole premise is for it to be Windows. The question is simply what flavor of Windows, and ranging from 2K to ME (curiously, both the best and worst Windows edition ever were released at almost the same time) there's no doubt people pick the best flavor. I'm trying to switch to linux 100% and here's a few killer issues for me:

1. Limiting incoming traffic a la netlimiter (force TCP to send congestion packets) can't be done, or well not without a non-standard kernel patch and installing my own kernel. I need to share my bandwidth with the landlord, and not being able to is simply a killer flaw. Yes, I've looked at the traffic shaping, no it can't be done, only outbound traffic.
2. Inability to play HDTV .ts files (why the fuck, I don't know since they're MPEG2 transport stream, can't make it work properly even with all the win32 codecs). Runs like a charm in Media Player Classic on Windows.
3. A proprietary Windows app I'm quite fond of, and that I haven't found any complement to in Linux crashes when trying any network accesss in WINE. Only possibility I've found is to run it in a VM.

There's some other minor quirks too, but those I'd get around. The long and short of it is that a proper Windows install (anti-vir, firewall, updated, not using IE/Outlook, running a custom pick of applications) is quite a good box, really. It's not a security nightmare, it's not a stability nightmare, it navigates decently through familiarity if nothing else. I wouldn't run my heart machine on one but it is complete adequate and usable in every respect. Combined with it simply being Windows, for many people it is the best choice. Maybe not on the technical feature tick-off, but in practical use.

Re:Natural Selection

[LKM]

Combined with it simply being Windows, for many people it is the best choice

I'd argue that for people who know Windows (and I don't mean that in a "I know where to click to get on the Intarwebs" sense), a Windows box can be the best choice. But that doesn't apply to most people. People want to surf the internet, check their mails, chat with their friends and maybe write a letter a few times a year. You don't need Windows to do that. In fact, an Ubuntu or Mac box can do that just as well as a Windows box, and without all the security problems (because people don't install working anti virus apps, and if they do, they quickly grow tired of updating them).

And yes, most people don't care about commercial games. They may play a few casual games - flash games, maybe the card games that come with all OSes - but no commercial PC games. The market for commercial PC games is at most 20% of the home PC market - it's mostly teens and twens who have really hot new machines and go to an actual shop to buy actual shrink-wrapped games which they then install on their dedicated gaming rigs with new graphics cards and big screens. That description fits very few PC users.

Re:Natural Selection

[westlake]

But that doesn't apply to most people. People want to surf the internet, check their mails, chat with their friends and maybe write a letter a few times a year. You don't need Windows to do that. In fact, an Ubuntu or Mac box can do that just as well as a Windows box, and without all the security problems (because people don't install working anti virus apps, and if they do, they quickly grow tired of updating them).

This is the "network appliance" argument.

Which drowns in a flood of red ink everytime it is tested in the marketplace.

Fully half of Apple's revenues are to be found in sales of the iPod and iTunes. The second and third tier players in online media are by no means doing badly. There are reasons why Win MCE has become the default OEM consumer install even on the laptop.

It is not only teens and twens who play PC games. You might take a look at the PC sales chart at Amazon.com. RPGs Simulations. RTS. Adventures. Games for adults. Games that do not require a high performance system.

In fact, an Ubuntu or Mac box can do that just as well as a Windows box, and without all the security problems (because people don't install working anti virus apps, and if they do, they quickly grow tired of updating them)

My cable ISP provides spam filtering and a security bundle similiar to Norton NIS. The signatures are updated every few hours. I have other scanners on the system, all run live or on timers, all do the auto-update thing.

Re:Natural Selection

[LKM]

There are reasons why Win MCE has become the default OEM consumer install even on the laptop.

Yeah, there is one reason: Because people buy the machine with the most checkboxes checked. They aren't going to use those features. Ever.

"I buy the box with the most features" is not the same as "I use this box for anything other than surfing myspace."

Re:Sounds Swell...

[shreevatsa]

I have no statistics on how many people face this problem (obviously), but I can personally report that I experienced this issue with release 5.04 ("Hoary Hedgehog"), but haven't had it with (fresh) installs of either 5.10 ("Breezy Badger") or 6.06 ("Dapper Drake"). I guess they just added support for auto-detecting my monitor or something.
FWIW, in case someone still has this problem, https://help.ubuntu.com/community/FixVideoResoluti onHowto has a few solutions.

Re:Sounds Swell...

[laffer1]

Also consider xorg's auto detect isn't perfect. For instance, 6.9 detects the maximum resolution of my CRT monitor as 1600 x 1200. While it does work at that resolution, its not the ideal resolution for my display. LCDs are often best at their highest supported resolution, but that is not always the case for a CRT. In my case, I can't read xterm at that resolution and the flicker is annoying. Microsoft's default isn't great, but it works for everyone. (not ideal sometimes)

Apple has an advantage since they control the hardware. OS X can say hey thats an iBook with an LCD.. i'll use its highest 1024x768 setting! Plus I think there are more than a few hundred of us using Macs. I've got 4 in my home not getting into other systems. I used to administer ~40 at my old university. My mother in law has one. 45 systems I am familar with alone exist.

For the record, the only time i've had a problem with a Macs resolution is when I've either used a kvm switch or had another person change it!

Linux desktop and user loyalty

[Dcnjoe60]

IMHO, the problem with Linux for the desktop is users have no loyalty. Once something better comes along they drop thier old distro like a bad habbit. This ultimately makes it impossible for a distro company to be profitable more than a few years.

That may be very true for the home desktop, but probably not the business desktop. Ubuntu is targeting the business desktop with it's feature list, paid support options and now longer support guarantee. A business is much less likely to start switching distros based on the flavor-of-the-week mentality.

Redhat recognized this by targeting the server market first. Then they made in-roads on the business desktop. Ubuntu, likewise has server offerings and business desktops.

It's not that either one of them can't be used for home or hobby use, it's just that their default setup is not that. What is the biggest complaint for new users to either Ubuntu or Redhat? They can't play mp3s or watch videos. Those aren't normally high priorities in a business setting, but are for home use. Both distros have pretty simple instructions to add that capability, too, but neither include it out of the box (or ISO, so to speak). Why not? Because, ultimately, it's not their target audience.

So, unless Ubuntu does something really dumb, it's going to be a major player. Will it always be number one on distrowatch? Probably not, but it's here to stay.

Re:Linux desktop and user loyalty

[steve_l]

I agree. RedHat effectively abandoned the desktop market with its split between RHEL and fedora. I could get RHEL at work, but that would make my home boxes a different OS image, and that is just inconvenient.

I switched to SuSE, and have been happy right up until SuSE 10.1 screwed up their update process. Never release an OS with a broken auto-updater, as it is well-nigh impossible to fix.

As for Ubuntu. they are looking at the mass market, they care about laptops. And they want to work with the PC vendors to get preinstalled images. I don't know what their staying power will be, but they have executed pretty well to date.

Re:Shuttleworth

[Dcnjoe60]

I wonder of Gates knows what giving feels like.

For $1.50 he'll give you the opportunity to download and beta test Microsoft Office.

Re:Shuttleworth

[Anonymous Coward]

Just to play devil's advocate here, Gates is known for making huge charitable contributions.

wow, the hate

[clutzman]

I see people whining about Ubuntu. Frankly, its the first distro that works right out of the box with minimal config. And, if you want to save time.. Download Automatix for it and then run. Check what you want installed (video drivers too) and then let it run, enter your password every once in a while and it sets it up.. and it works. yes, it has problems (which OS doesnt?) but, it is stable and userfriendly. I have yet to find a problem or question about Ubuntu that doesnt have an answer somewhere. So, even if their QA isnt perfect, so what? it is still light years ahead of micro$haft.

Re:wow, the hate

[a_karbon_devel_005]

I see people whining about Ubuntu. Frankly, its the first distro that works right out of the box with minimal config.

What rock have you been living under? SuSE has shipped a product that worked well out of the box for quite some time now. Mandriva has as well.

Ubuntu is easier to set up than like, Debian or Gentoo... but other than that, there's nothing that really makes it any more easy to use than a solid Deb install or even Fedora. It's all the same software.

At least SuSE and Mandriva (Mandrake) have added nice system tools.

Re:wow, the hate

[mislam]

Try Suse. I must say I was way more impressed with Suse/OpenSuse 10.1 than Ubuntu dapper. My video card worked out of the box. USB wireless adapter worked almost, needed a bit of tweaking. But with Ubuntu I had a dreadful time just getting it to install (mainly because of the ATI video card that came with Dimension 9150)

+3 Insightful?

[syntaxglitch]

But... I was trying to be funny. :(

Re:+3 Insightful?

[creepynut]

And a +5 funny to a post with a :(

You know what that says? We enjoy your sadness.

What Do You Think Gates Does All Day?

[woodsrunner]

Just for the record, ever since Bill Gates quit his day job at Microsoft he has been running one of the largest privately funded health and education initiatives to allieviate misery worldwide. His project has been so successful that he has been able to convince Warren Buffet to donate the bulk of his wealth to the fund, too. http://www.gatesfoundation.org/default.htm

Re:What Do You Think Gates Does All Day?

[lottameez]

Yeah, but he's not giving away free Linux distributions, is he? IS HE???? World misery - Pah!

Re:What Do You Think Gates Does All Day?

[woodsrunner]

That is true, he isn't... or is he? (wow, that would be a plot twist.. Gates secretly funding Linux to get revenge on Ballmer, this time it's personal).

Re:What Do You Think Gates Does All Day?

[giorgosts]

Apparently Gates acknowledges that collaboration and sharing of results (the bazzar vs the cathedral) produces superior outcome. See his latest efforts for a vaccine against AIDS http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/americas/5197082.stm It's just that Microsoft is here to make money and not necessarily to make the software world a better place.

Re:Shuttleworth

[dyefade]

Yeah I wonder.

Re:Shuttleworth

[Filip22012005]

I wonder of Gates knows what giving feels like.

I sure hope this is a joke. But without proper moderation... Who can tell?

Re:Sounds Swell...

[GamerCowboy]

Care to share your hardware config? I've had no problems on any of my three installs and two LiveCD runs on separate systems.

Re:Shuttleworth

[SIInudeity]

Sure, Gates has his foundation. I was talking from a software perspective. But, being South African, always reading about the G8 nations promising aid to Africa, and wondering what the hell happened to these funds. I dont see any improvement. Ten to one, some corrupt government official, is using it to aid his personal offshore accounts, or his platinum mine.

Why Ubuntu is so great?

[A.K.A_Magnet]

Traditionnally, most of the big players in GNU/Linux distributions have had a bottom-up approach. They get the kernel, a few hundred of common software (GNU utils, desktop environment) they package, they try to get everything to work together and once it's good enough they ship. It's up to the user to set it up regarding his needs (e.g: some users spend some time on seting up the desktop appearance while many others won't care, but will spend some time on installing some scalable fonts and setting X up for dual display and get all their peripherals to work). Major GNU/Linux distributions have required tweaking for years. Now that wasn't really a problem, since most users went to GNU/Linux to discover the OS's internals and learn more about compiling, OS architecture and on. Most LXers/Slashdotters (me included) didn't care, and on the contrary were in fact quite happy with the state of GNU/Linux (using the shell before friends/girls looks like some kind of voodoo, I've always found it fun to mount an USB key with dmesg | tail then mount -t vfat -o uid=1000 /dev/sdaX /mnt/usb before friends ;)). However, we couldn't expect massive GNU/Linux adoption with this approach. The user should NOT care about the OS.

The great paradigm shift with Ubuntu (and a few others, but I don't know them really) is that they took a top-down approach. Instead of taking the existing software as a starting point, they take the final result: if they want the desktop to behave some way (e.g: have hints for new users, give more visual feedback, make some apps easier to use), they'll modify GNOME appropriately. Mark Shuttleworth has a lot of money so the bounty system works just right. They also have integrated Ubuntu with Launchpad, their bugs/features request/apps discussion database/website (which code is unfortunately proprietary), so that it supports their mantra better (anyone who knows how to fill an HTML form can request a feature). But under the hood, it's still Debian. In fact, it's 90% Debian, 10% Ubuntu (Debian has done 90% of the road up, and the Ubuntu people 10% down). They couldn't do Debian's work better, but most Debian people wouldn't want to do Ubuntu's work (but some of them are both Ubuntu and Debian developers, quite a lot in fact). The accomplishment with Ubuntu is that it was the last piece of the puzzle needed for a community-made distribution (even if it's financed) to go mainstream. It has all the technical greatness of Debian (including the wonderful APT framework) with a great ease of use.

As a Debianist, I used to be quite against the Ubuntu hype. First, with their high dependancies and their oh-too-recent toolchain, they make .deb packages that I couldn't install on my Debian (they even broke some dependancies). Before, about all .deb packages used to work on Debian Sarge (which was at the time still in development). They broke the ABI too, but that I didn't really cared. But my main problem was with the community and all the hype. But well, I can't blame a distribution for its community (not talking about developers but all the forums full of newbies, it feels like Digg or MySpace for Linux ;)). And anyway, it was just Debian, no?

Well no, it's Debian plus a bit more. And the bit more is that it can go mainstream for the desktop use (and it has already started). My mom has been using Debian for almost 2 years now (of course I installed it, but she's using it) with no problem. However, she's totally insensitive to computer aesthetics and she doesn't care as long as she can use Thunderbird and Firefox. Some times ago, a friend of mine couldn't upgrade his pirated copy of Windows because of the WGA (maybe he could, but he's not tech-savvy at all, and I told him I wouldn't help him with Windows anyway). So I proposed him to test GNU/Linux, say in a dual-boot. He was like "no, I don't want no fuckin' dual-boot, I just want Linux". I was quite surprised, he doesn't know anything about c

Linux

[Anonymous Coward]

I bought a Mac and stopped worrying about this ages ago.

When is Linux going to "be ready"?

I dunno but I got a ton of work to do and I haven't got time for the pain.

Re:Linux

[MegadeTH_]

It would be more than ready, if everyone ran a standard hardware platform like apple does

Re:Linux

[TeknoHog]

Linux has been ready for my desktop since 1999, and it may well have been ready for a long time before that, I just didn't happen to try it.

I've just gotten a friend to buy a Macbook, since it looks like the best way to get a proper OS preinstalled. IMHO the main problem with Linux adoption is that it doesn't come preinstalled like Windows and Mac OS. It can be hard to install it well, though IMHO much easier than installing Windows.

Re:Sounds Swell...

[Millenniumman]

You have to actually restart GNOME, not just logout. I am under the impression, with the "login" screen on, GNOME is running.

  I searched for my question and found "edit the xorg config file, and some syntax tips. I googled the location of the config file, but didn't find anything. I knew that /etc was where preferences are stored, so I just cd/ls-ed. As for the sudo thing, I am used to being able to authenticate when I save.

I shouldn't have to do anything but pick a resolution from a list. Things like this should just work. A good OS doesn't require reading a manual for every little thing.

If I was using Gentoo, or making my own distro, I wouldn't really have a problem. But Ubuntu is supposed to be easy to use. Not something that people should have to hire someone to set up.

And thanks to all the moderators who modded me troll for pointing out a legitimate problem.

funny but.

[LWATCDR]

When I started my desktop with Ubuntu it defaulted to 1280x800. I have a 21" monitor so I use much higher resolution. Then I couldn't find any good way to change my resolution and or monitor refresh rate using the gui.
I installed OpenSuse 10.1 instead since I wanted to try it out.
I really like Ubuntu but I think OpenSuse is every bit as user friendly and maybe a little more feature rich.

Re:Shuttleworth

[TomMorrisey]

I think that comment is terribly unfair. Say what you will of Microsoft business practices, etc, but Bill Gates is the biggest philanthropist of all time. No one is forcing him to give away his billions, he's already got all the fame and recognition he could possibly have. Why don't you take a look at someone like the Walton family, the heirs to the Wal-Mart fortune. Put together, Sam Walton's heirs are worth MORE than Gates, yet they've given very tiny amounts of their fortunes toward charitable causes. Gates deserves nothing but the deepest respect for doing the right thing with his money.

Re:Shuttleworth

[Anonymous Coward]

"I wonder of Gates knows what giving feels like."

Say what you will about Microsoft.
Bill, on the other hand, knows pretty damn well what giving feels like, arguably more so than any one else does. Take a Look

I don't know about you, but screw the "OS community", quite frankly, I'd think global health, education, and global development to be much more worthwhile causes. But then again, who cares about the helping people in need, who cares about starvation desiese and illiteracy, as long as your OS is free and open, and spiffy, right?

Re:Shuttleworth

[Dcnjoe60]

I don't know about you, but screw the "OS community", quite frankly, I'd think global health, education, and global development to be much more worthwhile causes. But then again, who cares about the helping people in need, who cares about starvation desiese and illiteracy, as long as your OS is free and open, and spiffy, right?

It is commendable that Gates is making all of those charitable donations to alleviate hunger and poverty and disease. Nobody can fault him and his foundation on that. However, it will never solve the real problem keeping those people and countries in poverty.

What the third-world really needs is investment in infrastructure, industry, educational institutions, etc., so that they can become self-sufficient. As long as they are dependent on subsidies from the U.N. or other countries or the Gates foundation, they will always be in poverty. What's the old adage? Give a man a fish, you feed him for a day. Teach him to fish, you feed him for a lifetime.

Unless there is real investment, whether through Gate's foundation or other sources in business that can provide jobs, and a market for their output, there will always be poverty and disease in those countries. If you want to alleviate world suffering, ultimately, you are going to have to give people in the rest of the world the means to support themself, not just a handout.

Mod as funny?

[oscartheduck]

I'm almost wondering if your post should be modded as funny. It reminds me of the old standby in the sys admin world: If your computer ain't working, email me about it.

If my wireless card isn't working, copying stuff from a web page might not be the best solution, as I don't usually have internet access then. I could run a wire to my ethernet card, but that would more often than not involve moving my desktop as I usually have my router in a different room.

Of course, I understand that your post was informative in that it may resolve some issues for people, and definitely worth posting, but I found the internal conflict of problem and solution amusing.

Re:Mod as funny?

[andrewman327]

Every time I call Verizon to report a DSL outage, their on-hold music is suddenly interupted with a recorded message telling me that I can save a lot of time by reporting this outage on their website. [smacks forehead]

Re:Mod as funny?

[BecomingLumberg]

How many people on slashdot only have one source of internet access anyway. I would imagine most of us have a Lain-style plug into the base of our skull.

Re:Mod as funny?

[ZzzzSleep]

Errr... if you're complaining about it on Slashdot, it's quite likely that you have internet access of some form.

Business model?

[50m31sl4sh.]

Hm. I always thought this was the real business model of Ubuntu.

Re:Sounds Swell...

[Jessta]

I'm guessing you've got a graphics card created by a hardware company that only release their drivers in a non-distributable binary blob.
You should take up the issue with the hardware company.

Re:Ubunt0 (SIC)

[Ludedude]

Well, I'll tell you that in my (limited) Linux experience, this is the first distro in years that I installed and didn't remove in frustration after a week. Coming from almost 15 years in Windows IT, this is a major deal. As a matter of fact, I've managed to abandon Windows completely on my primary desktop machine at home in favor of Ubuntu.

So, staying power? Absolutely. Finally a distro that works out of the box, requiring a minimal number of trips to oh so dorky terminal window. Oh they're not gone yet, god forbid, but you can actually get this distro running with minimal nerd quotient required. If they keep up the level of development and support, there's no reason this one actually has some shelf life as it will be harder to overcome the advantages for the common user.

Can we please stop with the Ubuntu stuff?

[Anonymous Coward]

Mod me "Troll" if you must, but at least hear me out... there are other Linux distributions besides Ubuntu... I don't know about you, but I'd really like to hear more about the smaller distributions that actually come up with innovative ideas... it's not like Ubuntu's anything special if you look at it from a purely technical perspective, it's basically just a re-compiled Debian with a shiny orange GNOME desktop... the only thing I see that really stands out is that it's backed by a space astronaut, besides that there's not that much there.

Re:Can we please stop with the Ubuntu stuff?

[martinultima]

And a release schedule's supposed to be an "innovation"? Yeah, right. Whatever the case though, GP's got a good point. Doubt I'll ever see anything about Ultima Linux on here, but they could at least mention the likes of, say, Symphony OS – the ones that don't just recycle the same desktop concepts, but that come up with something new and innovative, something exciting... just because it's "yet another Linux distribution" doesn't mean it's not worth talking about, it doesn't just need to be announced on more "specialized" sites like DistroWatch. This is something that could eventually wind up changing the whole industry or whatever as we know it, whether it's because of them specifically or else someone taking it even further...

By the way, no, haven't gotten around to trying Symphony yet – and yes, I know it's Debian-based (it is Debian-based, right?) – just mentioned it because it's one of the more innovative systems and the first one to pop into my head...

Manufacturer's Fault

[mkw87]

People were sure quick to jump all over poor Ubuntu, without doing any research at all apparently. I happen to have a laptop I wanted to put it on, but it has a Broadcom 4306 wireless chipset, and an ATI 320m video chipset. Guess what? Neither have supported drivers, and why is that you ask? Well it is DEFINATELY not Ubuntu's programmers fault, its the product manufacturers who refuse to write drivers for linux, and also refuse to open up things / provide details to those who want to write drivers for them.

As for other things people (in general, not necessarily here) bitch about, such as off-the-cd mp3 and dvd support, there are legal reasons that they cannot provide this - not b/c they are incompetent, or lazy, but they legally cannot do it.

One last note to people bitching about unsupported hardware, would you rather spend XX dollars on a new, supported wireless card, or spend XXX dollars on windows XP (or soon vista.....or not so soon, whichever)? The decisions is yours, but you are ignorant to blame Ubuntu, its Ok to file a bug report, but the blame goes to the manufacturers.

Re:Sounds Swell...

[Elektroschock]

It is so sad that they do not support the YaSt2Debian port. YaSt is real fun.

Ubunutu?

[Cros13]

Ubunutu? What the hell is an Ubunutu? It's U B U N T U

Re:Sounds Swell...

[Teckla]

But why the fuck did I need to fuck around in vi and my X config file to get Ubuntu to run at anything higher than 640x480 when Windows and OS X just worked...

On my Dell Inspiron 1150 (which is, admittedly, a piece of crap), Ubuntu automatically recognizes and configures my video, audio, and network (Ethernet) hardware.

The latest and greatest Windows XP Professional, right from MSDN, does not recognize my video, audio, and network hardware. The network issue produces an interesting chicken-and-egg problem (how to get the network drivers on the system without having network drivers?), fortunately easily solved by my access to a second computer and a USB flash drive.

And no, Dell failed to ship me a drivers CD, which I didn't notice until my hard drive crashed, which left me having to reload the OS. Which only operated in 640x480 mode until I downloaded the appropriate video drivers.

So, when do you think Windows will catch up with Ubuntu? ;-)

Same for ATI, really

[Almahtar]

Kernel upgrades invariably cause recompiles with the ATI drivers as well, but the forums really came to the rescue for getting them up and running again. I mean hey, I have a pretty crummy card that has horrible support and buggy (at best) drivers supplied by the manufacturer, and I was able to get it up and accelerated (XGL/Compiz, even) in a little time after work one day. Not bad at all, as far as support goes. ... in contrast: my network interfaces stopped recognizing any form of connection in Windows, and after 3 days of research I ended up just reinstalling. :-p

Re:Ubunt0 (SIC)

[GoulDuck]

Well, I'll tell you that in my (limited) Linux experience, this is the first distro in years that I installed and didn't remove in frustration after a week

Yep, I feel just the same way. On my laptop, I have tried Fedora Core, Mandrake, SuSE and Debian, but only after installing Ubuntu 6.06, it feels like my Windows days can begin to end. I still have a Windows desktop, but only for my gaming needs.

Ubunutu.org

[lullabud]

Looks like Ubuntu expected that since they registered Ubunutu.org and simply redirected it to Ubuntu.org. Perhaps they should have a little message informing people that they are mis-spelling Ubuntu, rather than directing them to the correct location even though an incorrect location was typed. (Don't want to do any negative reinforcement, you know.)

Better yet, they should make a new organization for Ubunutu and call it "UNU" for "Ubunutu's Not Ubuntu".

Re:Fonts STILL look shit on Linux

[rhaas]

I agree. Sometimes they're OK, but a lot of times they look really bad. When I install a new version of Fedora, I usually have to fiddle around with my terminal settings for 10 minutes or so to change the fonts, colors, etc. to something that I like (cf. PuTTY on Windows, which comes up with white on black in a reasonable font in the default install). And Firefox just never looks as good as it does on Windows. A lot of the other GNOME applications are OK, but geez, why does this have to be so hard?

Not True

[LKM]

You mean, cannot abandon it, because loyalty remains with the applications

That is simply not true for 95% of all Windows users. Most people I know who own Windows computers use them for four things:

1. Web (that includes browsing and webmail)
2. Chatting (MSN, mostly)
3. Downloading and listening to music (often using the same P2P app for both)
4. The occasional letter in Word

There is simply no application on Windows that they use for which there is no replacement on Linux or Macs. Almost everyone could switch to an Ubuntu box and be happy with it. But people don't because Windows came on their computers, and it works well enough. They don't care. That's why Windows isn't going away.

Re:...more about the smaller distributions...

[Anomalyst]

What you want is http://distrowatch.com/

Re:Sounds Swell...

[Zonnald]

Can you say Supply and Demand? There is no compelling reason for a manufacture to set up a Linux driver development team. I don't for a minute think that there should be too many differences between distros but it would be remiss for this team not to avail themselves to every distro known to run a test to ensure compatibility. Then they start all over the again upon the next release of the device. It would be like painting the Harbour Bridge.

Re:Sounds Swell...

[chemaja]

My experience: A TNT2 Ultra 32MB GPU coupled with a Sony CPD-G400 19" CRT combination is not auto-configured by *buntu (either Breezy or Dapper). It is auto-configured by Fedora Core 5 and various other distros. In Ubuntu, I have to edit xorg.conf and specify HorizSync and VertRefresh for the Monitor, and ensure the Driver is "vesa" or "nvidia" ("nv" never seems to work).

Re:Fonts STILL look shit on Linux

[onlyjoking]

Actually I don't have a problem with the Terminal fonts since the fixed width fonts in console mode are perfect. It's the general GUI fonts which are the problem. They're all over the place and nowhere near what you get on Windows or, better still, Mac OS X. OK, Linux doesn't have the benefit of Adobe PDF rendering but all the effort going into "desktop Linux" is missing the point when the most basic visual feature of all - font rendering - is so backward.

Re:Shuttleworth

[grcumb]

"It is commendable that Gates is making all of those charitable donations to alleviate hunger and poverty and disease. Nobody can fault him and his foundation on that. However, it will never solve the real problem keeping those people and countries in poverty."

I couldn't agree more. I work in development, in a country that's internationally known as a malaria hotspot. Several people I know are employed by Gates Foundation money, and everyone here agrees that this is a good thing. But there's a limit to how much good this kind of thing can do.

One friend of mine once politely mentioned to a Gates Foundation researcher that we don't really need to know much more about malaria in this country. All we really need is trained and equipped medical staff within a day's walk of every man, woman and child. Malaria isn't a terribly dangerous disease if it's treated properly. I've had it myself, by the way, so I know whereof I speak.

The big problem in disease prevention around the world is an almost unbelievable shortage of health workers and medicines. Very little is being done to address these fundamental issues. Here's an interesting series of facts:

• Number of new doctors sub-Saharan Africa would need for its per-capita number to match America's: 3,900,000
• Number of new doctors produced by sub-Saharan Africa's universities each year: 4,000

(Source: Harper's Index.)

Again, I respect the work being done by the Gates Foundation, and I've seen its benefits with my own eyes. But to assume that those people working to try and improve education and communications are not involved in something equally vital is a little silly. In fact, it smacks of a holier-than-thou attitude that tends to tarnish most donor-driven projects, and often results in people chasing 'sexy' aid projects at the expense of 'boring' things like making sure that the local nurse has enough pills for everyone, and can order more when he needs them.

Re:Video and no text

[Akoman]

Don't worry, this video is kind of useless for everyone. Most people already understand how harnessing a vast user community is a "Good Thing"(TM). Video is only interesting as a primer, and even as a review it is sometimes painful to watch the presenter (good start, but needs to be a bit more comfortable with public speaking)

Re:Sounds Swell...

[gurumeditationerror]

You have to actually restart GNOME, not just logout. I am under the impression, with the "login" screen on, GNOME is running.

Not quite. The X server is what is still running. When logged out you can choose "restart X server" or press Ctrl+Alt+Backspace

As for the sudo thing, I am used to being able to authenticate when I save.

Interesting idea, but it would probably involve ugliness

I shouldn't have to do anything but pick a resolution from a list. Things like this should just work. A good OS doesn't require reading a manual for every little thing.

It did for me. Even on this rather esoteric Sun monitor (on a x86 system). I guess it's all down to luck. I found your mix up with Gnome/X enlightening, a lot of us geeks are so used to this stuff it seems perfectly obvious when it clearly isn't.

Re:Sounds Swell...

[Ash-Fox]

So, when do you think Windows will catch up with Ubuntu? ;-)

Don't forget to try one of thosed cracked MacOSX installers, I have a feeling it won't be any better. ;)

Re:Sounds Swell...

[Ash-Fox]

Can you back up that there are millions of Windows users and a couple of "hunderts" of OS X users that have that problem? I don't use Windows much, but OS X seems to get the right resolution for everything. And if it doesn't, you can easily change it in system preferences. With Linux, I have to:

*snip*

On Kubuntu, I do these extremely intensive steps:

[K button]-> [System settings] -> [Display]

Now I can view my current settings, and if I want to modify anything, I hit the [Administrator mode] button, that gives me a admin password prompt, which in turn would give me access to make any modifications I wanted.

Good Grief quoth Charlie Brown

[TaoPhoenix]

Sigh. This is what unnerves me.

I would much prefer to be fiddling with software than hardware/OS interactions. In the last few posts, four reasonably techincal posts have been followed by corrections.

Then I saw the comment that problems with drivers affect media and flash, forcing you to acquire external drivers from ... somewhere.

This is why I'm still a relevant party to the M$ YRO stories: because I can grind a price-reduced open-box mongrel machine to dust while I wait for Kentsfield without wasting time. Enduring the eternal derision of the /. experts is still the lesser of two evils. Humility is at least time-efficient.

NetworkManager

[miro f]

no need o download and manually configure wpa_supplicant. Everyone seems to think this is the only way as if NetworkManager wasn't included on the install cd (sorry, alternate cd). one install and wireless is set up with no hassles

Did you try *gasp* preferences?

[miro f]

interesting, my install of fedora core 5 came in multi window mode out of the box (interestingly enough, the only distro I've tried which does) and it took me 10 seconds to find the option to switch (edit, preferences, behaviour, Always open in browser windows)

Re:Sounds Swell...

[Jessta]

Although most linux distro don't make changes to the kernel or xorg, testing for each distro is done by the package maintainers working on the specific distros.

The hardware manufacturers are already spending the time to write linux drivers, if they actually released the source for the drivers and had them put in to the kernel tree, then they would be updated for any changes to kernel APIs by the kernel developers. Bugs would be fixed quicker and all with less developer resources coming from the hardware manufacturer.

Which applications matter?

[jotaeleemeese]

I have being using Linux as a desktop machine for 11 years. In very few ocassions I have needed to use other OS in order to get work (or pleasure) done. I can't believe that in the odd ocassion I needed something it was only for applications that mattered to everybody (I never had problems with Web browsing, USENET, email, documen writing, image processing, music playing, CD ripping, CD and DVD burning). I am thinking hard about something so fundmental that would make a Linux machine completely and utterly unusable and I frankly can't.

I made my Masters Degree using Linux exclusively as my workstation (I did not touch LateX or even emacs). After my experience and that of many other students our university began to suggest to the students to use OO.org, i.e. WIndows is no longer necessary.

I also upgraded my mother's PC to SuSE 10 (from Windows98) and she is as happy as ever. All the tools she needs are there and after a couple of months I have not heard any complaints.

So pray tell us, which applications are missing?

Re:Which applications matter?

[gravyface]

So pray tell us, which applications are missing?

How about every major game release and the majority of SOHO/SMB business applications written in last fifteen years?
Microsoft Office. No, Open Office doesn't cut it -- every law office I support has applications (see "mission critical business applications") that require Word; every small business with copy of Office has some sort of Excel or Access database who's macros or forms are "irreplacable" and do not work with an alternative.
Internet Explorer, for all of those portals that use ActiveX components.
Photoshop. GIMP? err... no.
I'm sure there are thousands of mothers and grandmothers happily plinking away in Thunderbird on Kubuntu, SUSE, whatever right now, but that's just not the case for people who have no alternative, and cannot switch which is exactly my original point and is precisely the foundation of Microsoft's business strategy.

Re:Sounds Swell...

[LWATCDR]

Or using OpenSuse just use SAX.
It is about as easy as it can get.