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Is Ubuntu a Serious Desktop Contender?
Exter-C asks: "2006 was the year that a large amount of people started to talk Ubuntu as a possible contender for the Enterprise Linux desktop. There are several key issues that have to be raised: Is Ubuntu/Canonical really capable of maintaining Dapper Drake (6.06 LTS) for 5 years? I know this is not a new question but the evidence after 6 months seems to be negative. A case in point is the 4-5+ day delay for critical updates to packages like Firefox. Given that such a large percentage of people use their desktop systems on the web critical, browser vulnerabilities seem to be one of the core pieces of a secure desktop environment (user stupidity excluded). Can Ubuntu/Canonical really compete with the likes of Red Hat, who had patches available (RHSA-2006:0758) the day that the updates came out?"
Competing against Windows? I'd say a better idea would be to compare cost / exploits / patches to Windows on the enterprise desktop rather than Red Hat Linux...
What do I score if i get it right? Sheesh! The pressure!
Semi-automatic amateur armchair Australian philosopher; conjecture ready at any moment...
..if they hire some real graphics artists. Not trying to troll, but the orange and brown is a real turnoff.
I gave Ubuntu 6 a shot as my exclusive desktop for about a month and a half, but switched back to Windows XP Home a day or two ago for a variety of reasons, all of them desktop related.
.NET hobbyist like is simply not there.
1) I got sick to death of having to run CD burning software with sudo.
2) A lot of software I as a
3) I hate to say it, but Windows XP actually runs consistently faster under load on my laptop than Ubuntu. The GUI in particular is more responsive under load than GNOME or KDE.
4) Things like easily configuring wireless connections really do work out of the box better on Windows XP than they do in Linux.
5) Windows has far more good software options.
For me the final straw was when I tried playing the high def trailer of Halo 3 in VLC on Linux, and it sucked. Choppy as hell. MPlayer handled it better, but then it was using a minimal GUI and actual Windows codecs. VLC on Windows can handle that stuff with no problem on the same machine.
It's a light weight contender at this point. I would recommend it to geek and nerd friends who will understand its limitations, but not a normal user who uses their machine for anything other than things like office functions and web browsing.
What competition?
To be trurly competitive Linux needs to change it's marketing image. Right now it's 'GEEKS for GEEKS'. That's the main reason why people stay away from it. I work with few people who used Linux during their studies. They were forced to use command line and stay away from X-Window. Now they hate it. Think what kind of message it passes downstream...
Plus Linux is terribly undocumented. For Average Joes of course. Books are GEEKY looking, and not really user friendly... Why not to release packages with GOOD book + CD(s) + (optional) + USB live distro + poster + stickers and so on? Do it once per year and people will get hooked. Especially with USB distors - that's true Plug and Play. That can also apply to OpenOffice and other FOSS.
Next? Why not to stick to 1 year realease cycle and do some proper relaease that will work with every kind of software? Why every distro is good for something particular but not everything?
Before FOSS comunity overcomes their fear of users, competition will be only another word. Wake up! Linux has a great possibilities, but we're wasting it.
I'm posting as AC, otherwise you would kill me for that post. Karma whoring it is...
While I am forced to use Windows in my work envirionment, while at home Ubuntu is my chosen desktop. I have never been one to insist on instant updates, so a few days delay in a patch does not concern me much.
Ubuntu (with some necessary updates and enhancements) is a perfectly capable operating system, and the Gnome2 desktop serves my needs just fine. I can do everything (and more) that my windows box can do, plus I get to use my choice of scripting languages to customize my experience.
Nothing is hidden away from me in cryptic registries, and I run only those things that make sense to me. On my Windows box, there are several programs that have installed themselves over the years, and seemingly cannot be uninstalled. I keep most of them disabled and beaten down, but can't seem to eradicate them entirely. Even tools from my huge international IT industry company don't seem to be able to keep the buggers off of my Windows machine. Number of virii or malware programs on my Ubuntu box? Zero.
So, yes, Ubuntu can be an effective and pleasing desktop.
If you're not living on the edge, you're taking up too much space.
scenario.
i have one pc at home.
it's connected to a wifi network belonging to my landlord on a weak signal.
i have no control over the ap so i can't change any settings or its location
or improve the signal
or run a network cable to it.
so i look around to find a usb wifi adapter that will work with ubuntu. had tried a pci card but that will not get a good enough signal so it has to be a usb adapter which can be at the end of a 2 metre usb cable.
don't want to risk my windows partition so i buy a new disk.
then try ubuntu install only for a bunch of errors caused by the dvd rewriter
'hdc: ide_intr: huh? expected null handler on exit'
'buffer i/o error on device hdc, logical block'
curses. get my mitts on a dvd rom drive and over christmas i try that. it works! ubuntu installs! excellent! love the interface. boots much quicker than windows. try to access the wifi network and... no joy!
now i've gotten the following device onto the network
* nokia 770 internet tablet (signal so weak that it will only work when the metal sheath is off)
* nintendo ds web browser (the ap is considered unsupported and online gaming won't work but the browser can be coaxed into working with it)
* nokia e61 web browser (took the longest but now that it works i can access gmail and web pages anywhere, joy!)
* windows 2000 which the pc normally runs. about once a week the usb adapter has to be moved to pick up a better signal.
so i don't consider myself a wifi newbie. i tried everything i can think off. couldn't find any software builtin to ubuntu to search for wifi networks, using ubuntu 6.10. i eventually got the thing transmitting packets but not a one came back. then there are 2 adapters listed wlan0 and wmaster0. which to use? other people have reported this and gotten no answers.
i will keep trying as windows is getting more annoying with wga and assorted viruses and crap but until i can get it working i cannot recommend it to family which is really what i want to start doing. might pop out and buy a linux mag with a few distros on it and give them a shot instead.
sorry for the saga, just venting annoyance,
moylan
I always laugh at Linuz folks and their desire that "everybody should use Linuzz" and "This MUST be the year where Linuzzz becomes mainstream".... The question is WHY? Use it, but let the others use whatever they want? I don't care if you use "The Bat!" as an email program or "Cobian Backup" as a backup solution. I don't care if they become mainstream eather.... here it is. My weekly tuesday rant.
It's time to realise that Abble's products are the biggest abomination these days. Just say NO to the dumb iAbble way!!
Looking at Ubuntu (and other distros I suppose), Windows, and OS X the match seems pretty even. All suck pretty hard in significant ways, but all have their strong points as well. Linux would be a great fit for the browse the web/write papers/listen to music crowd. Not so much for the gamers, due to the lack of commercial development, and not so much for the artists (due to the elitism), but it does what a lot of people need. The problem is, as always, getting to those people. Even if they have by some miracle heard of Linux, most will see the work required to switch as too scary or too much of a hassle for the benefits they would gain (a snappier system, better security, package managers that can pull down updates for the whole system, and so on). Oh well, maybe next year will be the year of Linux on the desktop.
I've realised after all these years linux on the desktop for the masses probably will happen last. While some people have seen this as a goal to de-throne microsoft's desktop, others have been sneaking linux into our daily lives. This is the important frontier for linux. Everything but the desktop. Servers, embedded devices, control systems, etc, etc. There are MUCH more of these sorts of devies than there are desktops. The desktop goal has been important to many people because it's what they see everyday, but these sneaky devices are a much more important.
If an officer ever threatens to taze you, say you have a pacemaker.
I have wondered this for a while and this article highlights it. With all the distributions out there, why so much hype this year for Ubuntu? I downloaded both the Drake and the current, and I have neither time been impressed with it. I don't understand what makes people think its better than Debian, which by the way always seems to work better and with more success. I'm sure there has to be a contender better, anyone would be better. The distributions that get the most exposure (preloads, etc) are not the ones that are getting recognition d(remember we are talking desktop usage). I used Caldera Linux (ack I know) all the way back in 1997 and it was better than the current flock of Desktop OS's. I wonder why someone couldn't bring it back, limit the crap in the install, but make it available (you dont need emacs or vi, you need Write or a notepad). Keep many common services that people may just want on their pc like httpd, ftp, ssh, but get rid of SQL servers and the like for advanced users. Give a good browser (firefox with alot of preinstalled extensions) with a good starting page. Links to office apps, browser, drives, on the desktop. DONT SLACK ON THE NETWORKING (more IM's, browsers, clients, etc). DONT GIVE ME 5 MEDIA PLAYERS, just one really well maintained one would be great (vlc if the comment above werent true). And for gods sake, drop all the extra games, apps, etc. If someone needs anything in particular for a desktop os, they WILL download it. I mean come on who of us uses linux for a desktop that doesnt have access to updates?
*rant mode off*
This reply should have been a ASK Slashdot, but we all know we miss actual articles. So I wont put us through it.
Ben
There was an interesting story recently on slashdot that generated quite a few comments in case you're looking for some other views on the topic(desktop linux). You can find it here. Furthermore, the slow firefox update is a problem of Mozilla/Debian not playing nice together. If Ubuntu goes the iceweasel route (eventually - they're sticking with firefox now), you'll have a rebranded firefox with faster security updates (because Debian won't have to submit them to Mozilla for approval). Hopefully.
To everyone else - how would you compare Ubuntu and Red Hat for enterprise? I was under the impression (and I may very well be wrong) that a major service Red Hat offered was their enterprise support/subscription services. Does Ubuntu offer something similar? Would you still consider it if it didn't?
Keep in mind that Ubuntu is Free Software.
And Free Software is not always about being better, it's about being Free.
After a few years of using only Linux (various distros, Ubuntu for past year) I would never install a proprietary system on my computer.
Just look where proprietary software is leading - DRM, spyware, adware... It's much easier to hide these "features" in closed-source software.
Ok, Windows supports all the hardware, Linux does not - oh well, I just check hardware for Linux compatibility before I buy it.
I just believe that Free Software is the only way we should go. Things like DRM just hurt customers, they simply haven't realized that yet.
after years spending time on a red hat box and the mac os x I found it to be quite enjoyable. The installer is the best I have seen so far. Easy to use and able to detect the chipset pretty quickly without all the hassle from the redhat installer. I am using the kde version. The only thing that I disagree with is the package management system has limited set of packages. It should allow you for example to be able to install enlightenment through the system or Eterm but the packages do not exist yet.
In terms of the general consumer, whatever is popular and hyped (and recommended by their IT guru son/nephew/uncle/whoever) is going to be purchased. Until Ubuntu can dust itself off and really *wow* the techie community, it can never catch on as a widespread desktop solution: there are simply a number of better distros, and all of *those* still have to compete with Windows.
Well, it depends. A contender to who? Windows - no. Fedora, Gentoo - yes. Servers - maybe, but debian is still the leader there.
Ubuntu has a potential, but it's not some kind of magic distribution.
my Windows Desktop has been seriously neglected. I haven't fired up my Windows machine since October.
I ordered Ubuntu with the intention of installing it. I liked the buzz and feel-good-help-one-another it promotes. I gave a copy to my Dad. Craiglist is another business like this. I like not being treated as a cashcow.
The problem was when I tried to install it. It doesn't work under Virtual PC (I'm not going to Format my C: drive straight away). Went to the support site and while the people there were nice and did their best to be helpful, well, it just didn't fly. Connectix Virtual PC doesn't work due to some silly changes to the mainstream Linux kernel two years ago (nice testing guys). There were some instructions around for getting it to work, but they were horribly technical stuff and required you wait for a long time during the setup and interrupt the process to reconfigure the video card parameters. Does this sound like Linux for Humans to you? After wasting a couple of days, I gave up and it was back to Windows for me.
I *was* trying to get it running under a virtual Pc, which I guess is a little unusual, but then again, isn't this the way most peple would migrate anyway? Some of the less helpful comments were the usual 'Just format your hard drive already!' But yeah, most of them were nice and tried to help. But the support volunteers aren't kernel hackers.
I'll like Ubuntu to succeed. I really do. But they have to make this 'Linux for Humans' more than lip service. I'll look at it again in a few years maybe, but guys, and this goes for all Linux distros, MAKE SURE YOUR SYSTEM INSTALLS UNDER A VIRTUAL PC!
I think the majority of your rant comes from a few common issues that Windows users have when making the switch over to Linux. Reading this may be beneficial:
http://linux.oneandoneis2.org/LNW.htm
For fuck's sake, this is not a Windows/Linux article. Please at least read the first sentence of the posted article in future, before taking the opportunity to vent your Windows vs Linux obsession.
Now, does anyone have anything to say about the Enterprise Linux desktop?
I've only used fairly mainstream ones, but it's the fastest one short of Gentoo that I've used. Gentoo was the fastest only because I chose the painful option of compiling everything from source. Of all the major ones I've tried, Ubuntu was about tied for the fastest. Which is scary considering how slow some of them can be compared to a normal installation of Windows XP on the same hardware.
I'm struggling to understand what kind of Firefox security updates can be deemed critical for a linux user... what kind of malware and exploits are they talking about there?
LinuxMint makes Ubuntu usable. It has plugins and codecs that are missing from Ubuntu 6.xx. I can finally say that I have found a version of Linux that installs properly and is usable as well! Try it, you'll like it:
http://www.linuxmint.com/
Of all the Linux distributions I've seen, Ubuntu is the only one which has produced a sneaking feeling that it might just have a vague chance of achieving critical mass on the desktop.
However, it's a double edged sword. The Ubuntu people have apparently thought out a number of different usage scenarios, and an end-user following any of those can do so quickly and easily. The down side is when you're trying to do anything (and I do mean anything) outside of the box...it becomes a nightmare.
For people who want their computer to be an appliance, with only a few highly specialised uses, Ubuntu could meet their needs...and given that this description fits most end-users, that is the reason why I could see it becoming/remaining the most popular Linux distribution. For anyone who wants anything more versatile, however (and for anyone who cares about a system which follows UNIX design philosophy - I'm talking about the stuff here) both Ubuntu and Debian are to be avoided, in my own mind.
Ubuntu is a fairly good Linux distribution, with a pretty good set up. The Firefox update issue is probably not a fair consideration, since it's not actually Canonical, it's a function of Debian's issues with Mozilla.
The problem I have with Ubuntu's push is that it isn't really being pushed as a desktop for business so much as it is a desktop for the average user, to replace Windows or Mac. Unfortunately, it isn't ready for that, and it may actually be hurting itself because of it. If you're saying to people "Just download the CD's, and install it, it'll work with no problems.", you're asking for trouble. The people that are willing to give it a try are not expecting a Windows/Mac clone, but they do have certain expectations! Principally, that they're not going to spend the next three months learning how to debug, compile, edit configurations, and spend hours searching through various wikis, FAQ's, and web sites to actually use their computer for something.
These are the "first adopters", and the more unpleasant their experience, the harder is to get Linux out of the server/geek realm and into the home. It's been my experience that server OS's tend to make mediocre desktop OS's. That's been true whether it's Linux or Windows or (fill in the blank). The things you need to do on a server are different from what you need on most desktops. There's also a difference in needs between a business desktop and a home desktop. I think Linux is (mostly) ready to be a serious contender on the business desktop. Unfortunately, it isn't ready to be one on the home desktop. I think it could be one, but the community needs to listen and to look at what the average user actually is running into.
Here's a quote I found about Linux on the desktop on one of the other boards I frequent, that really helps summarize what needs to happen: "Come on nerds, would it really be such a terrible thing to spend $180 for a Linux will full hardware drivers and software codecs plus telephone support or even to pay $50 for a CD that gives you everything in the way of proprietary drivers and codecs ready to go for all your hardware and multimedia as opposed to spending hours and hours and hours downloading just bits and pieces of the solutions from all over the place and fighting to get them working? It's not like people who really want to couldn't still do that, but a simple, truly easy, less expensive alternative to the $400 Vista for the average Joe is what it is going to take to get the average Joe to come over from the dark side--and no one is ever going to have a prayer of winning the fight for open standards as long as all those ordinary Joe's are still living on the dark side."
I would agree except that I have been using linux daily since 1994. My rant is derived from me getting a new laptop and pc in the last month and having a hell of a time getting a distribution that works as well as my old debian machine in the back room. It does myth, smb, vlc, firefox, msoffice (by way of crossover), and anything else I might use, but no extras. So far with my new installs, i cant get myth to work properly on one distro, no wireless networking on most of them, having to use multiple media players on one because there were only certain codecs installed with each one even though they could play anyhthing (really annoying considering I only use avi, mov, mpg, and mp4 videos, and my cellphone (blackjack) can do it with a player called tcpmp (gpl).
Ohh and on the damn ubuntu machine that is useless because it wont connect to get updates because no support for wireless lan.
Lots to rant over. I just dont have enough time in the day.
RH has a tiny market share. Even if Ubuntu replaced every single RH desktop, it still wouldn't even make a blip on the radar. The competition that (still) matters the most, is Windows. And a 4 day turn around on defects is a heck of a lot better than the once a month for Windows.
-Rick
"Most people in the U.S. wouldn't know they live in a tyrannical state if it walked up and grabbed their junk." - MyFirs
I used Caldera Linux (ack I know) all the way back in 1997 and it was better than the current flock of Desktop OS's.
I'll call that "selective memory".
I wonder why someone couldn't bring it back, limit the crap in the install, but make it available (you dont need emacs or vi, you need Write or a notepad).
Actually, no. I don't want any of those because for me there's really two types of text editors - plaintext (config files, code, small notes etc.) and formatted text (OpenOffice/KOffice style). I'd like just the one advanced text editor please.
Keep many common services that people may just want on their pc like httpd, ftp, ssh, but get rid of SQL servers and the like for advanced users.
Huh? People want to run a http deamon, but not any SQL database for a LAMP or similar setup?
Give a good browser (firefox with alot of preinstalled extensions) with a good starting page.
Let me guess - this customized Firefox should contain the extensions you like, right?
Links to office apps, browser, drives, on the desktop.
Again, your preferance. I prefer having commonly used apps in a toolbar.
DONT SLACK ON THE NETWORKING (more IM's, browsers, clients, etc).
More browsers? You just wanted one!
DONT GIVE ME 5 MEDIA PLAYERS, just one really well maintained one would be great (vlc if the comment above werent true).
Right.. so everyone will just agree that vlc is better than mplayer (with frontends) and xine.
And for gods sake, drop all the extra games, apps, etc. If someone needs anything in particular for a desktop os, they WILL download it.
Ten of the same I can understand. But if there's one app, what's wrong with it being installed? Is it the extra 5MB of HDD space killing you? The menu link? And it's always possible to not preselect any package. Been there, done that... install debian base and apt-get your way from there.
Basicly, I never understood this. If I got one or fice or ten applications which do the job, great. My problem is when the number is zero.
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
so i look around to find a usb wifi adapter that will work with ubuntu. had tried a pci card but that will not get a good enough signal so it has to be a usb adapter which can be at the end of a 2 metre usb cable.
Forget the trouble of USB and drivers. I picked up a Dlink Access Point. It can be put into client mode. Nice. Plug in a Cat 5 cable and pretend it's a hardwired network jack. I even tested it with my ancient Windows 95 laptop which has no USB and only 16 bit cardbus. I connected to my LAN without any trouble. It connected with no modifications. The access point in client mode can be treated just like a wired network jack.
From there the access point can be located anywhere to get a good signal and it has better than average sensitivity and power.
The truth shall set you free!
I'm a Windows user. XP does everything I need it to and does it well. Occasionally, though, I test out Linux to see how things are going. Every time I try things are much better and much closer to awesomeness. But not yet. My last experience was Kubuntu. Auto-detected all my hardware, set up my Internet access for me all automatically. Amarok is incredible. But once something breaks you're back to cryptic /etc files and other obscure things. Given time to research I can handle this, but the average person cannot. Linux is still more complicated to maintain than Windows, and that is going to be deciding factor for your average schmo.
And hardware support is still not as good as Windows. There are still a lot of things with no drivers. That never will have drivers. Yes, hardware manufacturers are to blame for this, but that doesn't matter to my computing experiece. And software support is still lacking. Few games are getting ported and while Amarok is at least as good of a music player as WinAmp, there is still no Linux equivalent to the beauty of Media Player Classic.
So why should I switch? Why should anyone switch? So my answer to your question is still no. It's getting closer. Maybe in a few years. But not now.
I used to be a Gentoo user but when I had less time for tweaking I decided to try an easier distro and was very, very happy when I got started with Ubuntu breezy - then I tried to upgrade to dapper and ended up with a completely hosed system and eventually had to reinstall breezy. The bug affected many, many users (probably everyone with nforce3 motherboards and sata hd:s - just one of the threads can be found here) and one of the forum staff called it "the worst bug in dapper" in his blog and hoped that we'd see an update to dapper some day. That day did not come - the developers decided "not to fix it since that might break something else" (I couldn't find the bug report quickly but that was precisely what it stated). I had to wait for edgy and the bug was still present to some extent but this time one of the workarounds worked - to install it I did have to use the alternative installation CD, though, and boot with the workaround then too (so an average user that might be able to install it with the graphical installer wouldn't have any idea what to do). So dapper support has already failed.
My wife, who knows almost nothing about computers beyond web-browsing, e-mail and instant messaging, prefers Ubuntu to Windows. For her the system is more reliable, she doesn't have the same fear of accidentally going to a bad website and infecting her computer with spyware or viruses, and it does everything she wants it to do. She's been using Ubuntu since version 5.04, and does not even want Windows installed on her laptop.
That being said, I absolutely despise ndiswrapper, which is the only way to get her Broadcom based PC-Card wireless NIC to work properly. Ubuntu 6.06 sees the card and attempts to use its own driver and fails miserably when trying to connect to the network. Not only do I have to use a driver written for Windows instead, I also have to blacklist the default Ubuntu driver as well, and I have to redo it each time a new kernel is released. Word to the wise, use terminal when setting this up, not the GUI ndiswrapper utility.
On the flip side my notebook with an Intel wireless NIC connected to the network during installation with no additional work from me whatsoever. I've been using Ubuntu on my laptop as my primary OS since version 5.10 was released, and I have been very satisfied with my experience. But I have kept a Windows partition so that I can take advantage of HP's photo software, and also for those DirectX games that just won't run properly in Wine. Ultimately I still use both, but I use Ubuntu more.
On another note, wireless has always worked for me on Ubuntu without the need for configuration. Worked directly off the Edgy live/installer CD. I'm sorry that you don't have hardware that's supported out of the box.
Change is certain; progress is not obligatory.
This includes, without limitation, any damage to computer systems, hardware or software, loss of data, or any other performance failures, any errors, bugs, viruses or other defects that result from, or are associated with the use of this website.
#1. People who are already using Ubuntu (like me) as their desktop.
#2. People who are using some other Linux distribution as their desktop.
#3. People who are using a Mac or *BSD or whatever.
#4. People who are using Windows because of reasons A, B, C and/or D.
Whether X is a "serious desktop contender" really depends upon what YOU consider to be the requirements for a "serious desktop contender".
Do people ask the same question in other areas of their life? Do they go to a pizza place and question when pineapple and Canadian bacon pizza is "suitable" for dinner?
Do they go to a Ford dealership and ask whether a Ford is "suitable" for driving?
And so forth.
My first ever non-Windows system was Ubuntu, and I haven't looked back since. I'll admit that I was never an amateur in the computing world, but the system was clearly very easy to use, cleanly coded, fast and well designed. It's few drawbacks, such as the obvious "no Microsoft software" and such are outweighed by the immense support offered by the community and the huge number of powerful applications available for free and easily using the package manager.
If any Linux environment is going to gain serious market share away from the Windows-only non-experts of the world, it's going to be a free and easy-to-use system like Ubuntu.
Student Manager - Take control of your education!
aha! i'd heard of this but had no idea what the terminology was called my knowledge on networks is quite weak. i thought it was bridging. confused the buggery out of me. will search for an ap that can do client mode. more expense but worth it if i can get win2000 of my pc permanently.
thanks much, you're a star!
moylan
1) No sudo required to burn CDs or DVDs. It just works, out of the box using gnomebaker. .Net WTF?
2) It's
3) XP is only even close in terms of performance when it's using the "classic" interface.
4) Again, wireless worked out of the box, All I had to do was give it the ESSID and encryption key. System->Administration->Networking.
5) 20,000 packages in the Debian/Ubuntu respository alone. How many Windows packages are there?
6) You have a slight point about windows video codecs, but there are reasons for that and I'm using totem with all my videos, no problems, no choppiness.
Ubuntu is no lightweight contender, it's a capable, powerful and flexible. Moreover it's easy enough for my mother to use, something that can't be said for Windows.
Deleted
It is also called bridging mode, FYI.
/etc/network/interfaces (Comment out all lines but "auto lo" by putting a # in front of them)
Also, the:
'hdc: ide_intr: huh? expected null handler on exit'
'buffer i/o error on device hdc, logical block'
Are normal errors, it's simply the device telling your kernel there is no media currently.
NetworkManager barely made it into dapper in time. It allows you to list wireless networks using gnome and work with the dbus to manage all of your connections. It was going to be the default in edgy but it was pushed due to some other issues that I believe are fixed now. I'd be willing to bet that it will be the default in the one in 7.04, and I'd encourage you to try again then.
Honestly, network manager isn't that hard, but as of right now (with 6.10 and 6.06) you must have dynamic addresses on all interfaces you want it to manage.
sudo apt-get install network-manager-gnome
sudo vi
Then in a terminal type "nm-applet" to get your little network icon up by the clock and click on it. It should give you options for available wireless connections and a wired connection (if it's available as well).
Assuming this all works, add nm-applet to your startup by going to system->preferences->sessions and in the startup tab, add nm-applet
Do them a favor and download AVG Free (or one of the other good, free (as in beer)) anti-virus programs for them.
The registry is a piece of shit compared to plain text config files, there are several reasons for this, but two of the big ones are:
1) Comments, you can actually add comments to text config files.
2) You can use a normal text editor, normal version control (ever tried putting the registry in subversion?) and other well-honed text tools to work with text based config files.
-- To dream a dream is grand, but to live it is divine. -- Leto ][
CD burning on Ubuntu is trivial.
/dev/hdc
I have no idea why he requires sudo, but I have no problem using GnomeBaker to burn CDs without sudo.
The permissions look correct to me, out of the box. I've never touched them.
cdrom:x:24:haldaemon,colin
brw-rw---- 1 root cdrom 22, 0 2006-12-27 14:07
Deleted
Now that this article has been tagged with both "yes" and "no" all we need are four more subscribers to add:
maybe
idontknow
canyourepeatthequestion
yourenotthebossofmenow
Won't someone please think of the children?
My first response would be: definitely. But I would say that for all of the top mainstream Linux distributions. I have been using Ubuntu full time for the last four months and I use it for writing, designing and editing documents, answering and writing emails, accessing my websites and editing PHP files, play some music in the background, edit screenshots, burn my DVD's etc. etc. There are no issues, none whatsoever. In all honesty, Ubuntu Linux is very boring when you use it every day. No surprise glitches. Nothing.
I agree with the issue of updates, most notoriously FF2.0. Dapper Drake still doesn't have it and -as far as I understand- will not have it in the foreseeable future. That could be a security risk but since most companies still run IE6 even Dapper Drake with FF1.5.x should be a major improvement. I do understand that the choice for stability comes at a price. If you want to stay current with all innovation (and there are major innovations under way in Linux) Dapper Drake is not the distribution to use (nor is Debian for that matter, but only few complain about that).
Dapper Drake is a stable, secure and solid desktop distribution perfectly suitable for common office tasks. Will it still be around in five years time? That will depend on it's actual use. If the home endusers continue to follow the upgrade trail and move away from Dapper Drake and the number of companies rolling out Dapper is minimal, I can see the LTS version being dropped prematurely and replaced by another stable version. Canonical is a business like many others: young, but with a lot of traction. We should give it the benefit of the doubt and start pushing adoption of Ubuntu in our workplaces.
It's stable, secure, and -- with Xfce -- pretty responsive.
From my own experience, I've been trying different Linux distributions for the past 10 years: mainly Slackware, RedHat, and Caldera. I used Caldera for a couple of years as my primary OS, then replaced it with Win2K when I bought a new computer. Now I've moved back to Kubuntu 6.06 as my primary OS. I don't have a lot of free time, so something that is simple and quick to set up is very important, and Ubuntu provides this.
You know why Apple only runs OS X on Apple hardware - so they can preconfigure all the hardware & drivers to play nice together. Why do the DELLs & HP's always work out-of-the-box? Because the OEM spent months making sure that the drivers for the various components work together and burning all the drivers to the install image.
I've had Linux driver issues w/ old hardware - mostly sound cards with a NIC problem thrown in for fun. You know what my solution was to each of those problems? Dig out the code for the last known working driver & recompile it. Know how I solve the problem when an 8bit audio card from a Win95 box doesn't work in an XP box? I buy a new card.
Up until my October upgrade, my Linux box was running a 15yr old JVEC NIC with RJ45 & BNC connectors - something my Win2K box decided it didn't want to do (the NE2000 clone drivers install & say they are running fine, but no data transfers). The 8MB S3VIRGE card I use for my 2nd monitor? Linux loves it. Windows let's me use the default of 640X480.
Linux makes a great desktop for people who have a high level of computer "know-how" or programmers but lacks the consistency and polish need to be anyone's desktop.
What GNU/Linux needs in order to be truly desktop ready is consistency between distributions, specifially (in no particular order):
- A common pacakage format. RPM and DEB are both nice but the Linux Standards Base (LSB) has decided on RPM so let's all just use it. RPM is open source software, if it doesn't have something that DEB does, suck it up and add it.
- A consistent configuration layout. I should be able to log onto Gentoo, Fedora, RHEL, Debian or Ubuntu and find that the configuration files for a given application or system feature are the _same_ format and exist in the _same_ places on the system. Why does every distro need to do something this simple in 10 different ways?
- A solid set of GUI configuration tools. Following the previous point about a consistent configuration layout, there should be a common API for manipulation of said files and a set of GUI applications that can do common tasks without requiring a user to drop to the command prompt.
- A package manager capable of installing software that the user downloads from the internet. Users of Mac OS and Windows expect to be able to go to Evolution's - for example - website and download and install the latest version of that application. This _has_ to work.
Actually, I could go on but these are the main things that are missing. However, progress is being made in a number of places. For example, FreeDesktop.org and the consistency it is setting for Gnome and KDE is great. Other things like HAL and DBUS are excellent as well. I think we'll see a desktop ready Linux by 2010 when the distros realize that consistency of the base system is the most important thing. Competition should be based on target audience rather than everyone reinventing the wheel.Your post demonstrates the whole different strokes for different folks idea.
But it's ironic since you most certainly threw a little tantrum when you decided to type it out and tell the parent how wrong he is.
Frankly, I'm totally sick of Linux (on the desktop.)
I administer *nix servers and will openly sing it's praises there, but going on 12 years of desktop use now, I no longer find it challenging and fun. It's just bloody exhausting. Even today there is always something I need to Google endlessly for. Maybe you enjoy that but I don't.
On the subject of Ubuntu as a desktop contender, this is the wrong question; it's addressed to the wrong person, maybe even by the wrong person. The question, as asked, is "no". There's too many hardware support holes, multimedia support conflicts, and rough edges to justify Linux for everyone. Until I can reccomend Ubuntu without saying something along the lines of "that depends on what your computer has inside it," it won't be a serious desktop contender. Instead, the first, and tragically hardest, hurdle is whether Ubuntu is a contender for OEM's hardware. Ideally, they should be the one asking the question, because offering choices improve their customer's choices, and put price pressure on software suppliers.
This is the first hurdle, because most of the computers on the market go through the OEMs. They already spend effort and money ensuring their hardware works with Windows, and add support software of dubious quality (who doesn't remove most extra software from an OEM install). Getting OEMs interested in making Linux work on their hardware would be a significant step forward, and, unlike targeting specific chips or chip makers, would be a long lasting ally.
This is also the hardest, because OEMs preciously guard their shitty software as intellectual property and something that can differentiate them from competitors. Truth is, I'd rather have window's built in wifi management than D-Link's confusing software, or Toshiba's. Open source scares them. They worry not only that by spending money on software, their competitors will use it, and spend money on better hardware design instead, effectively burying the software authors, but also that making software source will allow new competitors into their market. Mix into this natural fear a strong incumbant who bullies its customers, and its no wonder that OEMs are afraid to even touch Linux publicly.
Unfortunately, while there's tons of schools and classes on how to design computer chips, write software, or built out a PC, there's not much information on how to custom design a laptop and get it made. Currently, the best Linux enthusiasts do is order laptops from OEMs / ODMs intended for sale to Windows users and see what sticks. I hope someone soon steps up from reselling hardware other people requested, designed and made. That's probably the best way to approach the OEM hurdle. I suppose Apple either discovered or stumbled upon this.
I Browse at +4 Flamebait
Open Source Sysadmin
will not be on updates or user satisfaction... In terms of market share, you can be successfull without them (please don't make me give the obvious example). Sure those are factors, but there are many factors that will play into whether or not Ubuntu will be able to make money. Shuttleworth himself said it may be years before he knows if this will be a good business or not. I know, it's not all about the money and I'm sure the project will continue because its been so popular, but to really make an impact, it will need to make money. A hommie's gotta eat, yo.
the more miserable you are now, the funnier the story will be later
A few months back I got completely fed up with Windows. My son managed to download something he shouldn't have and got a virus on his PC despite my best efforts to secure it (and considering the fact that I administer Windows networks professionally, those are fairly good efforts). The virus spread through our home network overnight, and by morning I was looking at a complete reload of every PC in my house.
So I decided to install Xubuntu for myself and switch over to that...no more Windows headaches, at least not at home. It worked very well for the first few weeks. I had no trouble with any of the Internet or productivity software. I liked the amount of choice available and had no trouble finding software that met my needs. I really liked the GUI as well. WINE worked like a charm and I was running the few Win32 programs I need.
The problem came when I had a long weekend and wanted to do some gaming. I'd been playing WoW through WINE with little trouble...but it was too laggy in large raids. So over the long weekend I wound up installing Windows on a spare HDD and playing WoW through it. The first day or two wasn't too bad...but I quickly grew tired of constantly rebooting my computer - Windows for WoW, Xubuntu for useful stuff - back and forth, back and forth. Towards the end of the weekend I found myself moving some basic stuff (contacts, Firefox bookmarks) back into Windows so I wouldn't have to reboot quite so much. The deathblow was when I realized that I hadn't booted into Xubuntu long enough to check my email in days, and it seemed like a chore to reboot just for my email - that's when I realized that Xubuntu just wasn't actually making my life easier.
Here at work we've actually got Ubuntu installed on a couple machines and it works quite well. We have no trouble with them, they're integrated nicely into our domain. They do their job and I wouldn't hesitate to recommend Ubuntu (or some flavor there-of) for a business/professional PC. For your average home user though...I just don't think it's quite ready. The problem continues to be mainstream software support... Until your average user can go buy a copy of WoW or Sims 2 for Ubuntu, or load up the software for their new Kodak digital camera under Ubuntu...I just don't think it's going to catch on.
"Work is the curse of the drinking classes." -Oscar Wilde
And a million times over not yet. No matter how many boxes I have running Ubuntu, that does not mean it is in anyway a market competitor. There are two major reasons for this, a.) There are no major companies using it as a primary desktop replacement, until a major company with millions of workers begins the switch we won't see it. Why? because people like what they work with to work at home (the average Joe atleast). Because of the fact that most office environments because of the RDP (gui based remote desktop protocol built into windows) and the User friendly (much more so than linux, sorry but no one likes to the DOS prompt, they were taught in school that it was a scary tool that only the 1337 folks used). The GUI that windows provides with its less than efficient wizards are what people like. The ability to click next and forget it is wonderful for folks
Add this to the fact that the one feature that negates windows security, its bending over backwards so that a program will run (although almost never well). Because there are so many developers and its so easy to develop for (I mean come on Visual Basic...) there are products, and the cooperate world loves products
Add this to what they have been taught to use (people don't like change) and you have a winning combination for at least another five or so years. People don't use Linux not because it isn't amazing OS, but because it isn't user friendly, because it doesn't have developers, and because it isn't being used in the cooperate world. Until those goals are met Ubuntu, and any distro for that matter is not a market level competitor
Did someone say cake?
They're still getting their updates out 6 months faster than Microsoft.
http://isorecorder.alexfeinman.com/isorecorder.htm is free and works quite nicely, right click and burn.
Plato seems wrong to me today
There's that old saying "you catch more flies with honey than vinegar". When most people think of Linux...well...most people to be perfectly honest don't know what it is, and more importantly, they don't care. Most who have heard of Linux have the impression that it's kind of like a treefort for the geeks who still havn't outgrown their victim complexes. Now while I don't think this is true for the majority of Linux users (after I waded through and became more accustomed to the culture), it is simple to see how a vast majority of users would not want to be anywhere near a culture so hostile. Most people are accustomed to being able to call a number, wait on hold for an hour or so, and then slowly work through their problem with a technician, some of whom are more polite and or better at communicating than others. Getting help for their problem with a technology does not involve having to learn a new technology (IRC, Froums, etc. And yes forums can be new to people). It involves picking up a phone and dialing a number. For those who have read Neal Stephenson's "in the beginning there was the command line", you will recall the analogy of the vehicle dealerships. Remember how he described Linux as a tank with people who were building them for free and yelling "if it doesn't work we'll come fix it for free! while you sleep!" to which the response from the prospective buyer was "stay away from my house you freak!"?. That's not really the case anymore. The tanks are still free, but the "free support" if you will, lives in a system of caves and revile the surface dwellers; insulting them for asking questions unless they do the secret handshake first.
Now obviously not all, not even a majority of linux people are going to do that to new folks, but enough do that we have the unfortunate reputation to most folks of being the caricature of the jackass IT guy best described in the "Nick Burns, your company's Computer Guy" sketches on Saturday Night Live.
One of the responses to this is "well I learned this the hard way! I read all of these man pages and read all of these forums and spent a year learning to code!". Congratulations, that is a great accomplishment, and no one is trying to lessen it. Those methods might not work for everyone, or even most people who are trying to learn. I, for one, found the man pages to be horribly inaccessible. Most of them don't even have examples.
Time to open the treefort, people learn a lot better when you're nice to them.
Happiness does not come from having much, but from being attached to little.
I've had no problems using an Apple Powerbook wireless connection with Ubuntu. Think it's been working since Breezy days. *However* there are lots of "helpful" sets of instructions out there that have not been updated since the pre-supported days when it was necessary to use ndiswrapper, etc.
Now, I may have needed to explicitly set the wireless speed which defaulted to 1 Mb. So maybe that's one problem. But I'm not sure it was actually necessary either.
I have had problems with getting the laptop to sleep when the lid closed. I've read that this is due to the use of an nVidia graphics card, where the interface details to restore the graphics card after wake-up are proprietary and have not been reverse-engineered. So the graphics card cannot be restarted after sleep, so Ubuntu disables the function. A pain, would like a better warning notice, but understandable.
I don't find Ubuntu is quite up to the level of OSX yet on that hardware, due to these little niggles. But it's not far away, and getting closer. And many applications works better or at all under Ubuntu rather than OSX, so I keep dual-boot capability.
And to keep the trolls happy, Ubuntu works far better than Windows XP does on this laptop - since it has a PPC processor.
Andrew Yeomans
And my experience (about 3 hours worth of tries) to get the latest version of Ubuntu (Edgy Eft?) to install on my Satellite failed miserably. I'm not an expert with Linux, but I *did* run a second Linux system for development and testing purposes back in the Red Hat 6/7/8 days. For the last 4 years I've been working with Macs -- which have been outstanding.
So I'd have to say... no. Unless the requirement is that everyone use Thinkpads or something, where perhaps it works better.
I see it as the sort of thing that one would want for people who you ordinarily would like to get on some sort of an Apple product. My sister was banned from her teenage son's computer. She allegedly had a knack for picking up viruses and malware. Ubuntu on her son's castoff crummy old Emachines computer seems to have solved the problem. Not having to try to find the pirated version of Windows for the month (I don't know if they ever had install disks) has made my life a lot nicer too. Automatix makes it so she can engage in viral video distribution with her friends with little effort on my part. She seems to have no particular problem using the Gnome desktop that comes default with Ubuntu with the notable exception of needing a tutorial on how to highlight text in the browser with the mouse. The Freecell comes with it. What more could anyone want?
So... Ubuntu, the distribution for the rest of you... :)
Having said that, the next time I need some software for a computer illiterate I am going to try what seems to me to be the up and coming Debian based distribution for the desktop. It's, err, Debian. Debian Etch (testing) to be exact. I've recently done a default desktop from the working Etch installer disk and it was very slick. The Gnome desktop that resulted from mostly pounding the enter key was quite complete and usable. All that is needed is Debian Etch support for Automatix and my life becomes simple. Debian for pretty much everything...
Bruce
Pay attention to that.
Most of the computer users are using Windows. Therefore, that caricature is about a Windows support person and Windows users.
And "most people" are not going to try Linux because "most people" use whatever OS was installed when they purchased the computer from Dell or HP or such.
Very few people will even try Linux. Those few are (aside from the trolls) the few who understand how the system works (hardware / OS / apps / etc).
The trolls simply want Microsoft Windows
Phone support for Linux is available to those who need it. Red Hat provides it. Canonical provides it. The reason you don't hear about it that much is because the people who use it are usually supporting corporate servers, not home desktops. The people who run Linux on their home desktop already know how to use the Internet to find the answers they need.
Phone support for home users of Linux will be necessary when Linux is pre-installed on machines sold to home users by Dell and HP and so forth. And when that happens, Dell and HP and the others will provide the phone support.
But that is a long ways away. Look for Linux to gain in the corporate/government desktop market first. And the phone support for those will be the same as it is today. They will have their own IT staff trained on Linux and the specific apps that they use.
Ubuntu on the desktop is ready, today, for those people who have requirements that are met by Ubuntu.
Other people have different requirements. It's as simple as that.
My main complaint has been the sluggishness of gtk2 apps. Mainly text rendering is 20-50x slower than it ought to be, as though glyphs aren't being cached or something silly like that, making apps like gedit feel like they're running on a 486.
Wine works pretty well for some Windows apps and games, but I use the latest version from Wine's deb repository, not Ubuntu's. I haven't needed to use Wine recently, as I don't play a lot of games anymore.
I've avoided using the Firefox in Ubuntu because in the past it has always been much slower and more problematic than the official builds I download from mozilla.org.
Ubuntu Edgy for me has been less reliable than Dapper, in exchange for more experimental features, hence the name Edgy. Everything so far has had a workaround though.
Totem is a surprisingly good DVD player, when playing discs that don't require libdvdcss.
I use MPlayer for playing most videos. I naturally had to get the win32 codecs from a third party source, but otherwise it works well.
On one system I had to configure grub to boot with the noapic kernel option to prevent Ubuntu from freezing at random times. It's a hardware related problem.
I was able to add kubuntu (kde) and xubuntu (xfce) to my ubuntu system without much difficulty, apart from them overwriting each other's artwork. Even with all that, I was able to upgrade from Dapper to Edgy without losing anything, though it took some careful work.
DosEMU runs dos programs natively in a window with better performance and compatibility than Windows could ever offer, though I think it took some extraordinary measures to get it installed right on Dapper. I can't remember what though.
At home I have Ubuntu on my main desktop (which I bought with no OS) and Windows Server 2003 on my second (cheaper) desktop for the sole reason that I got a free 1 year msdn subscription a few months ago. If being a serious desktop contender means you can use it professionally as your primary (or only) desktop, then Ubuntu has been since its first release. But having been previously comfortable with Visual Studio, I must admit I've been less productive than I was before, lacking a good (imho) alternative, even though Linux solves the main complaints I've had about Windows. Linux is less stressful and easier to administer at least. I don't curse at it every hour. And I don't plan to give MS another dime after all they've done in recent years.
My 15 year old son just installed Ubuntu Edgy Eft on his laptop and loves it. He says it is much faster and more responsive than Windows. He uses OpenOffice, FireFox, and the native Ubuntu email client (couldn't convince him to use "elm"). He also uses Sites as his text/programming editor although he mainly does HTML and PHP.
He had some trouble with his wireless card. He could get the neighbor's open access WiFi single, but not ours which we have WPA active. He was able to go to the Unbuntu forum and find someone who could recommend software and a drive he could use, so now he is able to get on our wireless network.
He also has trouble in his school because their network has multiple WiFi access points, but he simply set each of them up as a separate WiFi point, and as long as he isn't walking around school on his laptop, he says it works.
He still has Windows on his drive, but no longer uses it. I showed him how to download and compile packages that aren't available as RPMs, and he's busy. He said the software he was using for webpage development on Windows just was not as capable as the software on our Mac, and since it is all Unix OpenSource software, he's happy he can now use it on his laptop.
That's at least one happy Unbuntu customer. Is it ready for releases to the masses? Needs some work, but for a semi-technical person its great.
Linux is going to have problems becoming desktop software until some computer company decides to start pre-installing it just like the way Windows is pre-installed on computers most people buy. Hardware vendors are going to have to be responsible for the drivers Linux needs for their equipment -- just like they do for Windows. Otherwise, Linux won't be able to compete with Mac OS X and Windows.
Remember that Windows works as "smoothly" as it does because Microsoft designs the PC that everyone uses for Windows and the manufactures follow Microsoft's design. Apple controls both hardware and software, so they can make sure everything works smoothly.
Linux, on the other hand, has to work with hardware that wasn't custom built for it. That means Linux has to keep adopting itself for the hardware which means Linux is always going to be behind Windows and Mac OS X.
I have an older laptop provided by my employer - P3 1 GHz, 768 Mb RAM, running Win2000.
.tar.gz or .mpg file. I can literally go get a snack and a drink, downstairs, before it responds if I click on a full 700 Mb .iso file.
The supplied DVD software is Mediamatics DVD Player and it can't really handle DVD playback with the stock configuration. Every minute or so there is a slight hitch in the video. This may be due to McAfee AV, the required-and-I-can't-disable-it-by-policy AV software, but I don't know. I can disable the autoscan for 5 minutes at a time and that doesn't help, but I don't know if it is the resources it consumes in the background causing the hitch.
Kaffeine under Kubuntu using Xine as a backend has no such problem. It plays DVDs back with less CPU usage, less RAM usage and no hiccups.
My kids play Runescape, an online game that runs in Java. Ever since I changed the laptop to dual-boot they play using Linux. It is noticeably faster under Linux (Firefox/Sun Java 1.5008) than Windows 2000 (IE or Firefox/Sun Java 1.5009).
I can't upgrade to XP, since this is the stock corporate image. New laptops are coming out soon, but they have such high specs, I doubt anything I run under any OS will cause a hit. The hiccups under Windows could very well be the security crap (mostly McAfee) pushed down by Corporate. I *know* McAfee's on-access scan makes a BIG difference when I click on a large
As far as using SUDO to burn a CD, use K3B. The first time you use it the wizard should notice that and offer to fix it (SUID ROOT) for you. Then, never again will this crop up.
Charles
Learning HOW to think is more important than learning WHAT to think.
Ubuntu is on the desktop, heck I have people aged 70 and above using Ubuntu having moved them away from Windows and they love it.
We need companies/OEMs which won't back down in preloading Linux on new computers for sale, who will report any money waved their way or strong arm tactics to the FTC, EFF, etc. and make a stink about it in the media until Linux is commonly rolled with new systems as an option. In other words, we need people with a spine who won't bend like Gumby when blockheads approach.
The Firefox NYT ad has shown how important marketing is to open source. Perhaps if we all worked together we could continue to contribute to marketing efforts like the Firefox NYT ad, rather than fragmented blog posts here and forum posts there. When Linux is loaded on enough devices and accepted by a majority, how much longer then will anyone continue to complain about a lack of drivers. It's an uphill battle, but isn't that always the case when it comes to freedom?
I am using it on 5 machines, and it is great. It has the best installer (finds the most hardware), and it usually just works. New users have an easy time too. I am particularly fond of Linux Mint, which is Ubuntu 6.10 with codecs, java, flash pre-configured.
I only have one gripe. I wish it had better wireless management for my laptop - travelling back and forth from work to home is a little bit painful.
Assuming Ubuntu/Canonical still exist five or more years from now, then I would say they would be plenty capable of supporting Dapper Drake (6.06 LTS) for five years. Ubuntu/Canonical is not out to compete with anyone but themselves. If you require a certain level of patch support, then choose an OS that will meet your needs.
I think it's time people just abandon such high hopes with this Debian-derived Linux. We have read recently how Debian developers were stalling once again...And Ubuntu depends on Debian. Good luck with that.
Besides, Linux distros, as a whole, are a sort of a mess. If you ever had to buy proprietary software for Linux, you know what I'm talking about - unreliable. You better pray that on your next upgrade your expensive software will work. There are too many differences between distros for ISVs to keep up...
Right now, it seems the best choice for an open source desktop would be PC-BSD, with its install as easy as a Windows or a Mac OS install. PC-BSD, fortunately, is based on FreeBSD and is not a fork or a distro. Just a solution on top of FreeBSD. BSD developers work on the system as a whole. Linux is made of bits and pieces. Some say that it's what makes it evolve faster. I'm not so sure. Of course, we have to keep in mind what firms like IBM invest in Linux development...Apparently, the fallacy that GPL protects your business investment seems to hinder BSD devlopment (20th-century limited material resources type of thinking...)
I've used Debian for over 5 years. I tried Ubuntu. Ubuntu has has too many problems for my taste, like problems in upgrading, documentation problems, etc. I thought the whole Ubuntu experience was disorganized, in fact, and I thought PHP web forums for support was the most pathetic you could get (hey, NNTP is nice!). SuSE and RedHat have per seat licenses, so where do you go for a decent Linux? We're not in 1996 anymore, we expect shit to work.
The whole typical Linux experience that made me switch to OpenBSD, FreeBSD and Mac OS. I am not going back to that ever...
Main difference between the BSD license and the GPL license: one is from California and the other is from Massachusetts
My only problem with Linux, in general, is the hostility of the community based support. If I have a problem with Windows, I can Google it and find a number os repsonses. The overwhelming majority of the threads that are returned have solutions or suggestions that are non-hostile. I Try that with Linux and most of the threads don't have solutions, they have flaming A-holes yelling about how the solution is so simple that a retarded monkey can fix the problem. That tells me that they themselves don't know or that they are retarded monkeys. Eitherway the hostility that the majority of Linux community has towards those who are trying to learn more or figure out a problem with Linux is so discouraging that most "users" are scared off. Until the community and moderators Linux forums actually start encouraging and supporting the unknowing masses Linux as a standard OS will suffer. It also doesn't help that every distro has it's own "standard". Example, Ubuntu uses GZ and Red Hat uses RPM. A given GZ or RPM might not work with the distro you currently are using but might work with others. Additionaly there is also complexity when it comes to installing software/apps/packages that general users do not/can not take time to learn. Windows on the other hand is easy, double click on the executable and bang your done. It doesn't require 3 pages of instructions to do an typical install. In my opinion this is why Linux has had problems taking over as the mainstream in desktop OS.
"...a civilian some of the time, a soldier part of the time and a patriot all of the time." -Brig. Gen. James Drain
What makes Ubuntu so much better/different than other distros who have not managed to make any serious dent in Windows.
Stop comparing apples to oranges to penguins! On one side you have a monopoly and on the other there's a community driven effort. I can't stand to see people complain about something they paid nothing for and know nothing about.
What could be LESS empty about evangelizing FREEDOM?
If work was switching to linux on the desktop I would say, "Eh, whatever". I used Gentoo at my last shop and let me just say that was NOT a very nice operating system to use daily. It was ok, but I always felt like I was walking on pins to not break something very simple. Truth is WinXP + Cygwin (properly configured for X and rxvt) can do anything I really need a Linux box to do and quite well.
Now at home, no way Jose.... Why? What can WinXP do that Linux can't? Games. The message, as I'm sure other will emphasize, it's all about what you need your computer to do.
It's hard to rationalize why companies spend 100-300 a license on Windows when Loretta can get her mail in Thunderbird, Leon can make charts in OOo with a slight learning curve from Excel, Tommy can draft the documents in OOo as well, and I can run Eclipse to code in any language I choose on a free OS. And it's not just Windows that costs. There's butt load of ancillary programs on my pc to set up NFS drives, anti-virus, novell for app deployment, exceed X-Server. All of this stuff could have been done by a clever Linux Admin and guess what, by a clever Windows admin as well.
However in the CYA world we live in it's companies spend the money as a scapegoat when shit goes wrong. Why do we use Weblogic instead of JBoss? Why do we use Oracle instead of a free or less expensive alternative? Why do we use Exceed instead of installing cygwin? Why do all the servers use Red Hat instead of Fedora or (insert distro here)? Because just like my aim on my home PC is to play games the managers of IT have aims to cover their asses. When it doesn't work they can say they used the "best" software and dump the blame on vendors.
Until Linux is willing to assume that risk, as Red Had did in the server world, desktops are out of the question.
Ever done a `man` on `top` ?
Comment removed based on user account deletion
There's no technical advantage to ubuntu its just that all the apps that most users will want are all there by default and configured the ways users want them by default.
Have you tried it? It sounds like all the things you are complaining about have been solved by ubuntu like a year ago. Decent text editor? yep... and strangely enough its called "Text Editor" There is one Media Player, and strangely enough its called "Movie Player". If you install all the codecs, it will play everything you throw at it. Oh, I guess there's also rhythmbox, but it is more focused on organising your music and doesn't play movies at all. GAIM Internet Messenger gives access to Yahoo, MSN, ICQ/AIM, Google Talk all in one client. Thunderbird is there for email, or you Can use Evolution if you want something more like outlook. What else do you want?
Yes there are a few little solitaire like games there, but they're easily removed and take up hardly any space. You can't say "I want a desktop with everything I want and nothing else" can you? You can't please everyone. Anyway just go to Add/remove uncheck all the boxes under games and click apply.
A few of my personal experiences with running Ubuntu:
My personal pet peeve with these distros, and it's something that Ubuntu does well, is the naming of the applications. No one who isn't a uber-geek knows what GIMP is, but if you call it "Image Editor" in the application menu then at least people can use it. Likewise with "Word Processor" (OpenOffice), "Instant Messenger" (GAIM) and "Webpage" (HTTPS).
And don't get me started on all the K-foo names for anything ported to everyone elses favorite desktop.
I've been a big linux/bsd user for about 7 years now. I took a year-long break because I got a job developing on windows systems. Last night I installed ubuntu for the first time. I was very impressed. Things I liked:
. html
-Quick install process with the option to install or just run from the liveCD
-All my hardware worked without any configuration
-Firefox came pre-configured with the mime-type associations to open pdf documents, word files, ppt files, etc.
-Simple but powerful interface. Two icons on top: one for web, one for mail. There's 99% of stuff most people do.
The only problem was this: when I tried to change the screen res on my 17" monitor, I could only go up to 1024x768. Using Eclipse at this resolution is difficult. So, I did some googling, and found this cool, thorough HOWTO:
http://ubuntuforums.org/archive/index.php/t-83973
Of course I needed to manually adjust my xorg.conf to have 1280x1024 & 1152xwhatever, but honestly how many newbie's / windows converts are gonna figure that out easily? Now, I've configured XFree & XOrg before, and I'm familiar with the process. However, I think this process should be GUI-fied to make it easier on new users and old users alike. Besides this issue, I think ubuntu is totally a contender for your mother's operating system.
I know that Edgy is supposed to be the desktop distro, but before it came out I used Dapper on the desktop for about 2-3 weeks to see what all the hype was about, and it has a long long way to go to compete with RHEL and SLED in the enterprise. The only distro out there making any real headway specifically against Windows in usability on the enterprise desktop IMHO is Suse. I know everyone all of a sudden hates them because of "the deal". But those prejudices aside Suse makes a very slick, very user friendly Windows replacement. For years I have tried converting co-workers to Linux on the desktop and have failed over and over with Fedora Core 2-5, RHEL3, and Suse 9.3-10.0. But now with SLED10 I have 3 people using it as the primary desktops now and 3-4 more using it on a daily basis on dual boot or secondary machines in my office.
These are people who just don't have any prejudice against M$ or Linux. They have heard of Open Source but don't know about or care about any of the philosophical aspects of the community. They have all used Windows exclusively for years. All they want is a desktop that will allow them to get their work done more efficiently. They all have Windows licenses for their machines but have chosen to either run SLED exclusively or dual boot it because it helps them do their jobs better. To me that is the strongest argument one can make for a "Windows-killer".
"All those moments, will be lost in time...like tears in rain..."
I tend to hand out on the Ubuntu channel and I don't see that.
No. Linux is free (as in speech, as in beer).
Accomplishing a specific task in Linux takes effort, the same as it does in Windows or any other system.
But most people have already invested the time to learn how to accomplish that task in Windows and they no longer remember the effort it took.
I've taught people who have never used a computer before. I know the effort it takes for them to learn. My best example was a woman who could not double click with a mouse. She had to hold it still with one hand and click the buttons with her other hand.
A week of playing solitaire and she had mastered the double click and fine mouse control.
Compare apples to apples, okay?
Again, those are the ones who already know how their systems work and how to do research online. Those are the ones who switch to Linux and stay there.
Well, that's a pretty good example of what I was saying. Linux is a kernel. Even a whole distribution is just an OS.
Who would hype it (and who would believe that hype) to the same level as "the second coming of Christ"?
What is inaccurate?
That most people use Windows? Nope, the facts contradict you.
That most computer support people are Windows support people? Nope, the facts contradict you.
Therefore, the caricature is of a Windows support person. Whether you want to accept that fact or not.
Nick Burns isn't supporting their Linux boxes. He's supporting their Windows boxes.
No. If he was doing Linux support he would be a lot less amusing because far fewer people would have experienced that type of Linux support.
Which is the reason you don't see "Nick Burns, jet engine mechanic" as a comedy routine. It wouldn't be funny because very few people would have any experience with that situation.
Nick Burns is funny to so many people because so many people have had similar experiences with Windows support personel.
Not with Linux. With Windows.
Trolls complain about Linux simply because it is different from Windows and they don't want to re-learn their "computer skills". But the reality is that they don't have "computer skills". All they have is "Windows skills".
I use Dapper every day on a Dell Latitude laptop. For the most part, my experience is that the system is stable and responsive, and the apps are there to do what I need. However, video playback is still the Achilles' heel of Linux in general and Ubuntu in my specific case. It's not a codec thing -- it's issues with the interfaces. First I tried gmplayer, xine, totem-gstreamer, totem-xine, VLC, and Kaffeine. All of them had one or more of the following issues:
Eventually on a lark I tried mplayer from a shell and lo and behold, it displayed the correct length, figured out the aspect ratio on its own, and has useful forward/reverse skipping and scanning with dynamic video update during the process. It also handled a file that none of the others would play -- maybe a corrupted data stream. But that's not something a typical user will be able to figure out how to do (especially since Ubuntu's menu item for gmplayer is called "Mplayer"), nor should they be forced to.
These are decoded Tivo files, so we're talking MPEG-2 with aspect ratios ands timecodes embedded in the data stream (verified by the console vomit from mplayer) -- there's no excuse for any player that can do MPEG-2 to get either of these wrong by default.
Then there are the occasional packaging issues. Last night I got clever and decided to install mythtv's frontend to watch videos so I could maybe use closed-captioning. After the synaptic install of mythtv-frontend, I had no menu item for MythTV under Sound and Video, so I ran "mythtv &" from a shell. After much wrestling with a database error that turned out to have a simple fix, I finally got mythtv to launch, at which point it told me I shouldn't run "mythtv" but "mythfrontend" and terminated (so maybe I didn't need mysql after all?) I ran mythfrontend and after a little configuration I was watching video. Three problems here:
Yeah, this is all the mythtv package maintainer's fault, but why has a package with major deficiencies like these persisted without a fix for long enough for there to be months' worth of posts in dozens of forums complaining about pretty much the exact issues I had? Somebody should have taken over (or been assigned) this package to fix it long ago.
-- Old Man Kensey
I have the 1680x1050 resolution widescreen. The default drivers finally started supporting 1200xsomething by default, but that's pretty far from the resolution I want anyway. It's nice that the first screen I see is in true color and 1200xsomething, but that's not really what I want.
Also, last I knew, they didn't support GLX_EXT_texture_from_pixmap (exact name?) extension last I knew. This is a requirement for Xgl. Last time I wanted to try beryl, nothing supported this. Now that nVidia's proprietary driver supports it, I haven't had the chance to try it out again, but at least it's there now for when I want it. No dice with the free driver.
Also, the new nvidia-settings program provides easy drag-n-drop, point-n-click setup of additional monitors, which is great for laptops that are only occasionally docked.
To sum it up: nvidia drivers support my resolution, a GL extension I want, and support dynamic monitor configurations. None of these are supplied by the default nv driver.
I want to be clear, though: it pains me that I find myself in this situation. I would much rather use the free version, but it just plain isn't keeping up. I have a nice graphics card and high-res screen that I don't want to give up. Bad enough I can't use my fingerprint scanner and bluetooth radio under Ubuntu, but my video card is non-negotiable.
I tried Ubuntu for awhile and found it to be an impressive piece of software for the price. The thing that really motivated me to take it off my machine was the lack of higher resolution levels. Everything was huge and I had not room to do anything. They will need to fix that issue before I try it again, but still I was impressed that free software has made it this far.
I am running a small Austrian based IT firm. We are currently in the process of actively marketing Ubuntu 6.06 LTS for small firms that cannot afford to:
... entry in the Applications menu, which AFAIK is unique to Ubuntu, correct me if I am wrong). Sure, for enterprises, a RHEL (or a SUSE, which I wouldn't recommend no more because of the Novell-Microsoft deal, but this is not the topic) is better, they (or one of their partners) can provide 24/7 call center support, for example. To me, Ubuntu is the first Linux distribution that is end-user ready (meaning non-technical persons).
:: "Ubuntu" which means humanity towards others). The latter - to me - is the core philosophy of OpenSource in its origins. So, Ubuntu is (one of) the distributions that are consistent in the "philosophical" part of the distribution. Ever since the first commercial distributions came out (DLD, SuSE in Germany back in '95 or so) I've wondered how these both worlds should go together. As we know today (at least for SuSE/Novell) they do not (again the Microsoft/Novell deal). Seems to me that RedHat is the only big commercial Linux distribution vendor that is still independent and can survive. I really hope they will, because Ubuntu (and other similar distros) cannot, IMHO, penetrate the enterprise desktop market. On the other hand, communities (like the Vienna city administration) are starting to build their own distros (see http://www.wien.gv.at/ma14/wienux.html, in German), maybe for enterprises this would be the way to go ...
/. user ...
*) upgrade their operating software everytime Microsoft decides to "invent" something new (like Vista)
*) maintain an infrastructure for virus protection (the firms do not have an in-house IT dept.)
*) upgrade their hardware to display fancy 3D desktop gimmicks (like Vista should have, we all know who brought this first to market)
Comparing to RedHat/SuSE: I honestly don't know these distributions (I've once used Fedora for some days). But the neat thing about the Ubuntu desktop is that it is suitable for the average user (they focus strongly on usability of all the everyday tasks, see, for example, the Add/Remove
Sure there is much to do, so if you are worried about the security fixes, why don't you just join the ubuntu security team and help them to get the fixes out more quick? Also, for quality assurance, there is demand (then it won't happen so frequently that the X server doesn't start after an update, which happened once and was corrected in some 2-3 days or so, I can't tell I didn't have the problem). What I can recommend to everybody who uses and loves Ubuntu (or is about to start loving it) is *not* to use dist-upgrade. In most cases, it is broken.
When upgrading to a new Ubuntu release, reinstall it from scratch.
To me the main difference between Ubuntu and "commercial" distributions (RedHat, SuSE) is the intent: while all reach for "world domination", the reason is completly different (maximizing profit
Just my Euro 0.02.
- thesmorf
PS: Sorry if the comment was a bit long, I am a first time
Absolutely not. Ubuntu is the most over-hyped Linux ever. I see all these posts that say it's the greatest thing since sliced bread, and frankly, it's just not. It's got a lot of window dressing (pun intended), and sure, it's fairly easy to use. Now let's look at the downside. It's based on debian, which is the "take-our-sweet-time-but-get-it-right" distro. That's great for debian fanboys, but the fact is debian-based distros are slower to be patched, and there are some serious advantages to running a rpm based system, especially in a work environment. Yes, I know Debian and Ubuntu can support rpms, but the fact is that support is not native (meaning that rpm is not the native package manager). The fact is, there are just more enterprise applications available pre-packaed as rpms, and and Enterprise Desktop will need to run some Enterprise applications (like an oracle client for example).
Ubuntu is a sweet Cinderella story, where some rich guy invests a bunch of money and the community profits with a great product with a funny name. It's great for home users and newbies, but i don't think Ubuntu is half as great as the windbags who sing its praises do. I've used it, and it's OK, but it's not about to supplant Windows, or even another version of Linux anytime soon. RedHat and SuSE are established players, and offer support safety nets that even the most disconnected board members can be sold. The same just can't be said for Ubuntu.
Change is certain; progress is not obligatory.
1. Drop the naked people from the logo and graphics. That has to go.
2. Drop the tribal African bullshit. The vision of Voodoo witch doctors and 419'ers conjuring up a distro don't fill me with confidence.
3. Change the name. See number 2.
No offense to anyone but be realistic.
You want to be mainstream in the professional world then be professional and not tribal.
And what you had said before (in reference to Linux) was
No, that caricature exists because it is common amongst Windows support techs.
Yet it hasn't seemed to hamper Windows adoption.
And, as I've stated, the people who will try Linux (except the trolls) are the kind of people who know more about their systems than the average user. So they will be less likely to need any "help" from offensive individuals such as "Nick Burns".
My experience with Ubuntu seesaws back and forth between pleasant surprise and absolute frustration. Installation was relatively painless and only a little complicated because I decided on a dual boot system. But, once I figured out I had to reformat the blank space I set aside for Ubuntu as ext3 the installer did its thing and I ended up on the Ubuntu desktop. Once I got over the turd brown color scheme and general unfamiliarity things were easy. Instead of /Users/Me it's /home/Me, but that's not a big deal. Got me a Desktop folder, so that's the same. Got /etc and all that jazz, with which I am familiar from OS X. Figure out that, as a GUI, Gnome is much more dependent on right click than OS X, so I go around right clicking on everything and find all sorts of useful options. Nautilus works pretty well, and I find a shell and fire up top to see what's going on deep down.
But it's slow. I mean the screen: redraw is slow and there's a lot of tearing, which surprises me, as I had expected the system to fly compared to OS X on six-year old hardware. I boot back into OS X and am surprised that Quartz is much faster on this machine than X/Gnome. Hmmm. . . After some googling I find out about glxgears, which runs somewhere around 40 fps. Not good. Some more Googling and a visit to Ubuntu's forums learns me that 1) the stock ati driver sucks ass and that 2) out-of-the-box video support on this machine is pretty bad, too.
So here's the frustrating part. What follows is about two weeks of googling and digging through Ubuntu's forums to find a series of solutions to make as full use of the machine's built-in card as possible (it's an 8 meg ATi Rage Mobility 128 AGP 2x). Eventually, through a combo of loading the right kernel modules and modifying xorg.conf, I am able to get direct rendering and full AGP support going, which results in a much, much faster desktop and glxgears scores of over 600 fps. But I also discover one of my big gripes with Linux: there is no centralized source for info. I found the answers my video questions in five different places. Now, the cool thing about this is that I learned some stuff, which I like. But I can't think helping that someone less inclined to root around in his machine's internals would've given up and ditched the OS. I know part of this is just a numbers problem: Apple has a very small number of machines to support using paid developers. The Linux community has a huge number of machines to support using, for the most part, people working for free and it's not surprising that some older hardware would be low on the support totem pole. But it is an annoyance.
I decide I want to be able to talk to my G5 running OS X from the Linux machine and vice versa. So, I turn on "Windows File Sharing" on the OS X machine, and share my home folder on my Powerbook. I am pleasantly surprised. Try to mount the Linux machine from the G5, but there's a problem: it's not taking the username and password. More googling reveals I have to 1) edit smb.conf and 2) set the Samba password from the shell. So, another few days of Googling and futzing are required for me to do something which can be done with three clicks in OS X. Frustration, but I eventually get it working. Yay me.
I like the Add/Remove software option, which makes finding programs a breeze. I like Update Notifier, which makes keeping the system up-to-date as easy as anything in OS X. I get comfortable with apt-get, which turns out to be pretty easy. And so I go along, merrily installing software. I find conky, which gives me a nice system monitor and practice installing software and using the shell to edit flat files, but of which are useful. I find that Ubuntu has a smaller memory footprint than OS X, which doesn't surprise me. And I dec
I am a believer of momentum and curves.
To clarify, I avoid Windows/OSX on principle and am satisfied with what Linux offers me.
I'm not sure whether Ubuntu is the best distro out there. I moved from Fedora to Ubuntu a year back because of the ease of installation and more importantly space constraint! Things like network, hibernate etc worked by default on my Thinkpad unlike Fedora. (maybe Fedora has fixed all that now!)
But Ubuntu has disappointed me for the following reasons:
1. In the last few months my nautilus has crashed many times. Firefox 2.0 reminds me of the old IE days crashing almost everyday.
2. My ubuntu consumes as much space as fedora used to do.
3. I might be silly but I would like a plain 'easy on the eye' desktop which works. Cant find one such desktop theme! Ubuntu apparently is now obsessed with the glossy looks which I don't want anyway and is sacrificing stability.
4. Automatix is cool but why can't Synaptic get me the same job done?
5. Edgy has been a huge disappointment! If people are ready to skip a version altogether, then its apparent people at Canonical are not doing a good job recently.
In summary, Ubuntu impressed me with the installation and failed after that!
Seems to me everyone has got off topic from the very start, since the question wasn't can it compete with Windows but will it be able to compete among other linux distros. And, from what I can tell without a singular vision for the desktop, delivering a consistent experience to the user is almost impossible. Ubuntu as a desktop has many, many frailties that will seriously cripple it for anyone not willing to put alot of effort into configuring their desktop distribution. My experience with Ubuntu was that it assumed alot about my computer after installation, like that I wanted all kinds of software loaded for HP printers, IBM thinkpad keyboard shortcuts and that I had an nVidia card in my machine. The default installation crashed several times in a row, once during partitioning which caused further headaches. What I found upon inspection was that it was due to the fact that it used the ATI driver, which has a bug causing random crashes on my version of the ATI 9700Pro. Lastly there seems to be these large blocks of dependencies in the ubuntu package archive. I assume that they do this to make a persons life "easier", when in reality it has only caused alot of troubles. I don't have a CD-Burner on my desktop, but in order to have the ubuntu desktop installed I must have CD-Burning software constantly running in the background, causing not only uneeded load but wasted memory. If a person even notices this and goes to uninstall those one or two, or more most likely, pieces of software that don't jive with their desktop then you're going to be told you don't need the rest of your desktop?! huh! I have had a hard time finding a reason for a corporation, or even a user, to use the Ubuntu distribution. If a person must have the ubuntu label, Xubuntu is a better solution than the vanilla Ubuntu. Better even yet is just to stick with Debian, which makes none of the assumptions ubuntu does about your hardware or software needs. -Nathan
Until the geeks get lost.
It's very simple. Most people don't like geeks, and find them arrogant, and pathetic. In reality, the person next-door much rather likes a good ole Dell computer, if it has trouble, he dials Dell's 1-800 number, and gets things fixed. With Linux, he will need to wade through a bunch of IRC channels, and forums, having to deal with many not-so-friendly people.
Now, don't get me wrong; I don't have an issue with hotheaded geeks, but if we want to make Linux a product, which can compete with Windows, you're going to have to learn to put your g33k philosophies to bed. Ubuntu has been more succesful, partially because its community is quite friendly, plain and simple.
"Free software" is a matter of liberty, not price.
good point about the dependencies. i once removed gnome by mistake while trying to uninstall unwanted stuff!
is that there are certain software packages that don't have comparable alternatives. I am a consultant for website work and I use Dreamweaver heavily. I know what you're thinking. This is some Id10t that can't program a php script or html to save his life. If thats what you thought you'd be wrong. I'm as happy in vi as notepad. I'll gladly use lynx to browse the net remotely on my server if I need to. I love linux and I would love to use it as my dedicated desktop os. I use a dedicated linux server (CentOS) for hosting my client's websites. I have tried many different distros many different times. As a individual consultant, I realize that I need programs like Dreamweaver to be able to compete. I have tried as many website development applications as I can find and I even began working on my own, but until I finish it or Dreamweaver is released for Linux(not likely since I'm pretty sure it uses the IE engine to process some of it's javascript) I'm stuck with windows. I can do the same work in dremweaver that I can in notepad in like 1/4 of the time. When I'm meeting a potential client, I want to have a comparable price and time quote and Dreamweaver is how I can do that. For graphics I prefer Photoshop but I would gladly use the GIMP instead.
Mac OS X is the best OS out there but you can't throw it on just any PC out there. So, between Ubuntu and Windows, my question will be "how much do you loathe Windows". Ubuntu is easy to install so long as the stock kernel has all the drivers for you hardware. If your needs stay within a limited paradigm, Ubuntu is a satisfactory OS. However, if you want to do something like interface with an iPod, play the latest game, install a new card, do DV editing, etc, be prepared to put in some time reading how-tos, googling, and trial-n-error. Though I am not saying any of that can't be done, a few hours your time can pay for a new copy of Windows. With Linux, free doesn't come without a price. Windows maybe bloated, obtusive, annoying, infested with malware, and crippled by DRM but you can have it working out of the box and be reasonably productive with it with minimal effort. So,IMHO, you really have to be fed up with Windows to switch to Ubuntu or any other distro . Of course, you can always read the sig and take its advice.
You don't have to be smart to use a Mac, you just have to be smart enough to buy one
I just installed Ubuntu Saturday night, deleted it last night. I have built 3 of my own pcs, 2 for my sons and a PVR/Media Center for the living room. My husband is MCSE/MCSA, that pays our bills (Thank you Microsoft). I would replace Microsoft's Windows with Ubuntu, I just tried to this past week. 83 updates BTW, about the same for windows. But I have a slipsteam of windows with sp2 and a rollup. So actually Ubuntu had more updates. I could not get wine to work, so I couldn't use Incredimail, which I paid for, so giving it up is out of the question. Linux made me feel stupid, period. No easy way to say it. Imagine how an a normal user will feel. I already use Firefox, I use OpenOffice. I quit playing games so I was willing to give windows up. Still may. I need a beginners guide I guess. When more products are able to be used in it. It will be ready. I just can't grasp the install programs in linux.
When you get to the core of it, Linux is Linux. It's more dependant on which software packages/utilities you need to run, rather than which vendor you use. It also depends on what your sysadmins are trained to deal with. Personally, I'd go with RHEL because you're backed by a prominent North American vendor, not a dev team that could take up to four days to release a potentially urgent or business-saving patch. But if your IT department can handle the consequences of delayed patches, you may find Ubuntu to be the most cost-effective, and people-friendly, solution (It is free, after all.)
ATI (X700) support was apparently feasible with Drake, but rather involved. Haven't tried with Eft.
...
i .html
nvidia support was good with both a 6800GT and 7600GS, but widescreen resolutions (1680x1050 using either a Dell 2005FP or a BenQ FP202W) are pretty much a deal-breaker since they seem to require editing xorg.conf. and if you want to go with alternate timings, well
http://suif.stanford.edu/~csapuntz/rv280-linux-dv
Ubuntu may be a serious contender if they manage to continue simplifying linux adminstration without obfuscating the system beneath the gui. We don't need another massive yast-infection, we don't need insane, non-human readable scripts and overly complicated file system layouts. To train new admins and users we need informative, flexible and educating frontends for everything from package management to package creation and compiling and hardware configuration that for example has an option to display a usable command for everything the user asks the frontend to do. Don't take away the simplicity and joy of learning to admin a system over ssh from the other side of the world. We need a system with a sense of minimalism, which the ubuntu team sort of seem to understand as they have a somewhat usable system on 1 cd. As most of their documentation as far as installation of extra software and expanding the system is based on command lines that the new user needs to figure out how to copy and paste into a terminal, i can't keep myself from thinking that this really might be a good way of starting a new linux distro, at least much better than having bad frontends for these tasks. Might the lack of *bad*, slow config guis be why Ubuntu seems to be so hyped as a desktop Debian by many not all that noobish and often even expert users?
And I have to say that i neither believe in or like using gnome or gtk apps, so (k)ubuntu will continue to be my desktop distro of choice if the team continue to offer well polished ready to use desktops based on other environments and keep the package management more enjoyable to use than any rpm based system. And as far as minimalism and tendency to obfuscate everything is concerned, Ubuntu isn't exactly Slackware, but I'll be somewhat happy as long as nothing sodomizes my config files the way I have vaguely remember Suse's yast doing back in the 9.x days.
If the Kubuntu people can't even test their installs, the whole thing obviously isn't going to fly.
Their Live CD install doesn't work, because you can't get past the Change Mount Points Screen.
This means obviously that the ENTIRE INSTALL PROCEDURE WAS NEVER TESTED.
Corporations are going to put THIS on their desktops.
No way.
No to mention that every time I stress my Kubuntu system, I get a "Server overload" message popping up. Mostly harmless, apparently, but REALLY STUPID. FIX THIS, PEOPLE!
Also, for Linux admins used to doing su to root and/or their own sudo, and still be able to log on as root when they really want to, the default Ubuntu/Kubuntu approach of disabling root everywhere - including being able to su to root - and requiring every simply command to be run as "sudo blah" gets old fast. Yes, you can clean that out and go back to the old way, but it's an annoyance with no real benefits for the ordinary end user who isn't going to log on as root anyway.
When the Ubuntu/Kubuntu people get their act together and concentrate on making sure the install, software update, and desktops are rock solid, THEN they can consider being an Enterprise desktop.
The same applies to all the OTHER distros, by the way, each of which have their issues in this regard.
The Linux kernel is fine. And most of the time, the Linux desktop is fine for end users. The issue lies with the distros not doing enough testing due to manpower lacks and the emphasis on new "features" a la Windows eye candy.
Stop worrying about "wobbly windows" and "desktop search" and concentrate on making sure your desktop WORKS.
Richard Steven Hack - This sig is TOO GODDAMN SHORT TO DO ANYTHING USEFUL WITH! MORONS!
Yes.
...
That's my answer.
Simple, ain't it?
You can move along now.
You're still here?[pauses]
I'ts over! Go home.
[gestures as if to say "shoo!"]
Go on...
-- Post-Ending-Credit Sequence from Ferris Bueller's Day Off
This post © Copyrite Duggeek, all rights reversed.
Not an icicle's hope in hell. I run Edgy at home and in the office, but I work in IT and I can afford to experiment. We have enough problems as things stand with XP users who don't know their asterisk from their tilde.
Maintenance: this is my first Ubuntu (6.10) so I can't comment on earlier releases. So far it's been fine for me, but a 4-5 day delay to repackage a key browser is too long. Oddly, one of the reasons I moved from FC to Ubuntu was that RH were taking way too long to come out with updates.
The only downsides of Ubuntu (blogged here) were a)having to switch from KDE to Gnome (I didn't have time to try out KUbuntu first), but that's a personal thing: Gnome works, but it needs some serious usability attention; b)CUPS really sucks: it fails to find the shared printers on other local (XP) systems, it fails to honor the supported 11x17 paper size on my HPDJ1220C, it hangs after each job, and when using the parallel port it's as slow as a pig -- why it was written baffles me; c)the failure of the UI fonts to support even ISO 8859-1 (no accents) let alone full Unicode: it's embarrassing that a system could be shipped without this; d)the shipped TeX sucks (and I owe c.t.t details) so I ripped it out and installed from the TUG DVD instead, which puts things in sensible places instead; e)laptop lid suspend doesn't work: it brings up a screenfull of fizz and then reboots (but then no laptop suspend works under any Linux, IMHE).
Subsequent to installation, I find it won't play video except for some formats I've never heard of: certainly not the WMV, MPG, and MOV which are commonplace on the net, until you install MPlayer, and for some of them not even then (should be the default); none of the audio players plays Ogg unless you install the vorbis libraries (why isn't this the default?); the latest Flash update doesn't do anything, certainly not play Flash movies.
However, the real core of what I want to do "just worked", and worked perfectly. It's stable, wifi and wired connections worked straight off, it found all the stupid proprietary hardware on my Inspiron and on my antique Compaq rebuild, and so far it hasn't dropped a bit.
So the answer is clear: Ubuntu isn't ready for any kind of desktop except that of someone in IT who can find and fix the unevennesses. Ubuntu have done an excellent job, but they still need to tidy up some neglected corners. One of the most important would be to recognise and distinguish laptops from deskbounds, and install things appropriately.
The real problem (with all distributions) is that many of the people who do the key work are the same people who don't believe in Usability, and who don't envisage anyone except like-minded gurus using what they write. This makes it almost impossible to move a distro to a serious desktop position, where everything just works, and does so seamlessly and transparently, with appropriate defaults, because the people needed to make it so are those who don't believe that such refinement is necessary ("if it was hard to write, it should be hard to use").
I look after a small number of dual booted xp/ubuntu 6.10 home desktops for 3 families. Neither operating system has overall superiority. Windows has many superb applications (like photoshop) which Linux as yet cannot match. Ubuntu (and Linux) are ahead in Internet applications given the stable Linux base. Firefox, Thunderbird, Bittorent, Frostwire, Pan, Streamtuner/Streamripper, Gaim and many more run better and safer on Ubuntu. Also Ubuntu can be used to backup critical Windows files so as to repair Windows from Ubuntu (very useful when dual booting with Win98). The wise home computer user has both operating systems ready for use and the foolish just one....
Hence Ubuntu and Linux already have had great success on the home desktop!
The only thing you can accurately describe as "Scotch" is a sticky tape made by 3M. And it's
I'm a total linux newbie - yes go on, mod me down, and i fired my up dual boot ubuntu the other day to test if my wireless router would work. My previous one did not work out of the box/no drivers etc and i had trouble finding it any at all - in fact i believe i even trolled a few forums for the drivers. .gz2 easyubuntu source). And aMSN functioned horribly, lagged, etc - clearly not ubuntu's fault - but is the average home user going to care? The point is, while activities such as these may seem trivial to your average slashdotter, the average slashdotter constitutes a very small proportion of the population, and until things like the installation process for applications become as simple as that of the operating systems themselves (the build of ubuntu i installed was brilliant - im sure my grandma could figure it out) i think the submitters dream of desktop ubuntu ubiquity is going to remain exactly that.
My new router worked - but firefox wasn't functioning properly, and so i had to search around and change something in about:config. Gaim wasn't working nicely so i downloaded aMSN. Installing this was rather non-trivial and took me several grueling minutes of googling to figure out - at which stage i discovered that there are, indeed, various different installation processes for different file types (eg: my
Geekylinuxers just don't get it because they live breathe Linux code! I been fiddling with Linux back and forth since 1991, i'll be like "oh! Great Free OS - let me check it out - I started with Caldera OpenLinux, read 10 pages and had a headache formatting and mounting and setting the portion, then finally got it running - browsing throw all the settings like as if it was a calculus formula. Then time passed played around with other distributions out there, because there was nothing you could do at the time on the system, games where my thing. Came the day when Ubantus 5 was flashed on the scene, I was again exited - finally I said a Linux distribution where I could 1 2 3 install it and have everything Windows desktop has to offer but for free and much cooler, so i had it running great in the beginning, easy setup - but then i wanted all the codec's so i could play my movies and my streamed tv shows, watch my star trek movies in divx format - so what i had to do?! I had to search Google on how to install the codec's, here we go -wget- this - wget- that, the servers would stall, the servers would work, retry again and again because you would not have a clue if files would have been completed , so great u pass the part were you get your codec's and u test your video players , great it works its accepted, then u try your streaming tv shows, oh great it aint working, but u say ok its accepted will fiddle around later, then you say oh i need the Video driver cos its not detected my video card right and its not using its full potential, oh so go get the driver, installing it from the distributing package you find out that its not complete! What you mean it's not complete..."well you need to twick the nuts...what nuts?...the 3RD NUT (3D) ...so i play around and twick the nuts and read the instruction and compare instruction people write in calculus code out there and you complete the config file and you restart the system, and still you did something wrong but you tell yourself I did follow the steps and it should load the 3d driver - then u test your video player and you find out that the driver has f****** the codecs and now my star trek its f**** all "penalized" and its slow motion (damn no going minus warp speed LOL), so you twick the nuts again and guess what?? CRASH! Sorry Mr.Windows User-we have detected you are not our friend so we crash your Xserver, so you find yourself in this Universe where bad memories on past Blue Screen - so you try to reconfigure the x server throw this prompted screen..where I'm found back in MSDOS...aaaaaaaaaaa..after all the pain you get to the stage....where me say.....you know what? F*IT. You go look for that
CD that say XP boot it up format that crap and wipe all that coz you just
wasted all day trying to install Linux ....WOW! What a mental stress! Back to Windows for me!
I conclude that the day Linux would be popular on the desktop is the day i install
something and it f*************** works! I don't need to freaking twick it all day!
Give me all that i got on windows desktop but make that s****** work! I DONT WANT
to do calculus formulas to make it work!
So stop the insanity with all this fuss about LINUX Desktop, the simples things that should work on Linux are far from the casual Windows user that would like to try it out!
If they (linux distributors) would just experiment with a newbie, have someone - a developer stay next to a new to linux user and find out why he gets stuck in trying to install or config linux than they would realize that things that sound and are simple to a Linux experienced user need to be differently tough and coded. Simplify everything that people do today on the net and on their computer from music, to movies to games...etc - should be running out of the box once clicked and installed for the 1st time! If not there should be simple packages that I click and it f**** runs, not explode!
You know in America most people drive Automatic, I don't want to drive stick shift as Linux is! So you can comment with anything, my true believe Linux it's not ready yet!
Its like a beautiful exotic flower, it blossoms rarely and then it petals fade quickly and you have to wait for the next season to blossom again for a moment in time!
people who are using a Linux distro and running Windows in the same box (either via VMware Server or dual boot)
Tech Public Policy stuff
is trivial at this point. Use K3b, as I am doing right now. (I'm burning the second DVD-R of a 10-disk backup volume) I haven't had trouble with setting it up since Fedora Core 2.
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Anybody around here try both Ubuntu and the Debian it's based on? I'm running Debian Etch on what at best, is a midrange box. (Biostar GeForce 6100 AM2 motherboard, Athlon 3500+, 1G DDR2 533/dual channel) This setup is running fast enough that my planned next upgrade step, an x2 Athlon processor upgrade and another 2G of DDR2 is on indefinite hold, even with Opera for Linux with a couple dozen open windows and VMWare Server running Windows right now. Is Ubuntu that much slower than the Debian it's based on? If so, why?
Tech Public Policy stuff
Check around, there's probably an installer script for your distro that'll find and install just about everything, including the "forbidden" w32codecs, etc. Fedora Frog is very good, Automatix (Debian and presumably Ubuntu) needs a bit of updating.
Yes, it probably will take an hour plus even on broadband, but once you click the entries choosing what software to install, the computer will have no further need for your assistance during the install phase, find yourself something else to do that's non-computer related for an hour or two.
The bad news... I don't get to sell any more multimedia how-to pieces for Linux. But this is a problem I really prefer to have solved, especially if I am the one installing a new distro from scratch.
Why don't distros come with these scripts as part of the default installation, sitting on the Desktop ready for use?
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For me it's the not-so-little things. While I understand the reasons why, the fact that Ubuntu doesn't play MP3 and other common media format directly upon install is a *big* shortcoming for the average user, who doesn't want to have to find out how to locate, download, and install the appropriate CODECS. So, yeah, you can web browse, but forget about watching video clips on CNN or whatever your favorite news (or p0rn) site might be.
I've got an old P2/450 that I run Win98 on. I dabble in linux occasionally, but what I'd like to get out of a linux install on that machine would be:
- web browser WITH all the appropriate media support
- ability to share files with and access shared printers from my XP machines
- a newsreader comparable to XNEWS, including its binary handling features
I've no doubt someone can suggest a distro that'll give me that. But my main point, WRT the original question, is that while Ubuntu "just works" for a specific scope of things, that scope of things doesn't really cover the range of stuff that works "out of the box" on a WinXP desktop. So while I applaud their efforts, I don't think it really is a competitive desktop.
Sounds like your luck with this has been far better than mine.
I picked my Athlon 64 integrated motherboard based on a positive Linux review based on a slightly earlier version (my motherboard has an AM2 socket, it had a 939) I even upgraded from FC3 to FC6 (i.e. had to reinstall all the major apps) figuring that the drivers I needed would not be available on FC3. Well and good, until I actually installed the motherboard.
The motherboard would NOT run X on Fedora Core 6 after a week of trying and inquiries on various Linux forums. Though it ran OK with a vesa driver on Knoppix, and a Debian user who happened to see my post said "Debian Etch uses the same installer Knoppix does".
This system works perfectly now. . . on Debian Etch. This motherboard upgrade has cost me about a month in work time (remember, I had to reload my data files and reinstall major apps TWICE) I couldn't afford.
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It works better.
I don't have to waste hours of my time a week having to keep a Windows box crapware-free, my copy of Windoze is in a VMware Server cage, and I only run it continously because converting my 2G of Eudora mailboxes and folders to Evolution is more pain than I want to face.
Major apps take a lot less in the way of resource utilization than it does on a bloatware Windoze special. (VMware Server/Windoze + Opera for Linux with 20 open windows + a K3B DVD burn session in background = 7% CPU utilization) While dependency problems are fairly rare on Windoze, when they happen, good luck finding a copy of the library file you need on google. While with a Linux automated installer like apt-get, the program automatically searches for the dependencies and installs then in the right order. You prefer GUIs? There are generally at least a couple per major distro these days, and they work.
Multimedia? Find the install script for your distro, click the checkboxes, start it, and get lost for a couple of hours.
I believe that my level of convenience in using my desktop would drop if I moved to XP or Vista. . . and wouldn't change much if I moved to a Mac unless I wanted to install a new peripheral.
In general, anyone whose Linux desktop is less convenient than a Windows or even a Mac desktop hasn't figured out how to set it up correctly. If you're one of these people, spend some time learning how your setup works. Google is your friend.
The tradeoffs?
1. Much more difficult setup:
While in general, IF YOU HAVE A DECENT HOW-TO IN FRONT OF YOU, doing new things with a Linux box aren't much harder than on Windoze, though they tend to be a bit more tedious. Without that how-to, you've got at best, hours and sometimes days or weeks of research ahead, with the full confidence that most answers you find will be wrong for your setup.
2. Finding drivers.
The major multi-OS players who support Linux, i.e. IBM and HP should go to the major peripheral vendors and say "Support us or we'll tell ALL our customers that we don't support your hardware and that using it puts you in danger of voiding your warranty, even in Windoze."
3. You still need to have reasonably modern hardware to run a full-scale desktop. I'm running an AMD Athlon 3500+ with 1G of DDR2... this is the first Linux setup I've had where I'm really happy with the speed. Admittedly, I'm running a fully loaded KDE WM, but even though I think I'd use fewer resources with gnome 2, I really hate certain gnome apps... try the gnome screenshot utility vs the KDE equivalent... and see the difference.
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How many computer illiterates even go over 1024x768? I resisted going above 800x600 because I like the automatic zoom effect it has when doing detail work on graphics.
I had the same experience. It installed perfectly. Everything works perfectly. My mom who can't even figure out how to get a blank document in Word without opening a saved one and backspacing it all out uses Ubuntu. She has no problems with it. My brother and sister who can use a computer just enough to type a term paper or log into MySpace use it. Nobody has any problems. The hardest part is installing your apps-of-choice after install (mainly knowing what they are and the names of the codecs). I have a text file with a list of things to apt-get. I paste it in, hit enter, and it's done. That's how I set up the computer for them. It just works.
Some time in the next week or two I'm setting up a couple of my friends' computers with Ubuntu. They want to try it, and I can install and set it up and get all of their hardware going if it's not detected out of the box (I have yet to run into this situation). If I set it up, they'll have no issues because the hardest thing's over.
look! it's a bird, it's a plane, it's....a girl? yes, a girl browsing Slashdot on Linux
I've been using Ubuntu since v5, and v6.06 was impressive to me personally in that it was the only Linux at the time that booted up clean from LiveCD to installed version on my laptop (a Sony VAIO), but, as with quite a few users, I found Kubuntu just not up to the same standard (and adding it zaps what I like about GNOME, go figure).
:-).
However, I'm amused by people complaining about a lack of testing before release - I hope these are not the same people that accept a new version of Windows which will need months of patching before it's a bit mature..
If I compare the resources involved in Ubuntu (as far as I know) with those that are thrown at Windows I think the result is nothing short of impressive. As someone who has had raw end users run Linux (i.e. the traditional MS Windows users) I think Ubuntu will serve them well - it does the job. IMHO, of course - your users may differ
Ubuntu reps will be speaking and exhibiting at SCALE 5x in Los Angeles in Feb 2007.
- it can play DVD movies out of the box. I gave up trying to get it to work.
- it has decent fonts. Crappy rough fonts are not good enough.
- wifi works out of the box. Again, I gave up.
My time is precious. I have installed and used a variety of *nixes over the past 20 years and still have not seen a seriour contender on the home desktop. Linux will always be playing catch-up with the latest M$ offering.I suggest that all the distributions need new level of testing and fixing tools:
What I feel was revealed in the early Ubuntu 6.01 and 6.10 was a number of simple silly application configuration problems.
For instance, I discovered the printing was broken! (fixed by deleting and recreating all the printer drivers).
As noted in earlier posts: the Ubuntu self help wiki pages were completely overloaded with help requests. Every help request was formatted differently, used different terms and had a different subject line. I was fixing stupid stuff I have not dealt with in years. (Spoiled by meticulous time and labor intensive Debian excellence).
The problem: There is not enough manpower or management or bug-fix communication capability in the Ubuntu team to test and validate a distribution with 100 applications running on 100 motherboards with 100 video cards and 100 printer drivers and 20 usb wireless network adapters and 100 ethernet cards. A distribution faces an astronomical number of instances that may reveal another bug.
So here is what we need: A generic application test tool shipped with the distribution and that will run on every computer the distribution is installed on. Something developed like testing built into the Ruby environment. Have a set of simple tests that will verify an application is working OK. Something that will exersize an application, send a report to a server, and retrieve suggestions for changes, and repeat tests.
Whether the "distribution" is Red Hat, or Debian or Ubuntu, the software configuration and quality problem happens because there are an astronomical number of variant combinations of hardware and software. We need a test scheme that runs on every hardware instance. The scheme must test, document, report, work with the local owner, and enable changing software or hardware. On the host end, the test host needs to organize the reports, prioritize the problem, support the programmers and conceivably stage the resolution phase.
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The year of the Linux Desktop is happening in India and China with very little publicity.
I hear that large numbers of sites with large numbers of PC's are being rolled out in schools, governments and businesses in China and India. The management, installation and configuration are being done at the lowest possible labor cost by using the remote management and configuration software.
The remote management software is built around a program like webmin, a web administration server. But the granularity of the solution is still hung at administering but not viewing the actual running application.
The remaining problem in these rollouts is despite efforts at having large masses of identical machines, individual machines still develop differences because of specific tasks, added cards, and added hard disks,
Ubuntu is claimed to be better for desktop compared to many other distros.
Friend of mine uses Mandriva/Mandrake for about five years now as his desktop. And he is pure user - not admin/developer.
I use Debian for last four years. (Before that was 2 years of SUSE and year of RedHat)
I do not like Ubuntu because it uses that crippled thing called Gnome, but Kubuntu seems to solve the problem. I keep Kubuntu up-to-date live CD just in case I would need rescue system - though I rarely have need for it.
Uhm... Well, I do not know how to respond your question. I use Linux as desktop for many years. Several my friends do the same. None runs (K)Ubuntu. I think Linux desktop in general is Ok for many people. Especially for serious people: people choose outstanding reliability of Linux over bells'n'wistles of Windows.
All hope abandon ye who enter here.
I've been looking for a good application that automates checking my /etc directory into subversion. Something like Gentoo's dispatch-conf application, but for Debian?
Any recommendations?
Currently, I just rely on my rsnapshot backups, but that isn't really the most robust solution. Certainly has saved my hide a few times, though.
They don't grade fathers, but if your daughter's a stripper, you fucked up. --Chris Rock
I've been running Ubuntu for 2.5 years now and not once have I ever needed to sudo to burn CDs or DVDs.
1) I got sick to death of having to run CD burning software with sudo.
.NET hobbyist like is simply not there.
Uh, what? You stick a blank CD in, it mounts, and you drag whatever you want to it, then click burn. You don't have to be root. What are you doing?
2) A lot of software I as a
Well duh. But you can't criticize Linux for that really. If your goal is to mess with Microsoft stuff, of course you need Microsoft products.
3) I hate to say it, but Windows XP actually runs consistently faster under load on my laptop than Ubuntu. The GUI in particular is more responsive under load than GNOME or KDE.
Must be a hardware thing, cause I haven't noticed any difference on my two laptops, both of which have run Windows and Ubuntu.
4) Things like easily configuring wireless connections really do work out of the box better on Windows XP than they do in Linux.
That's somewhat fair. But to be even more fair you'd have to point out that there are plenty of times where wireless doesn't work at all in Windows, and it's not all that easy to get running. For the "average user", I don't see how scanning around Dell's site and finding obscure drivers is easier than using ndiswrapper.
5) Windows has far more good software options.
Now here, you have GOT to be kidding me.
You want software for Windows? You can either buy it, or you can search Google for keywords and hope to fucking god to find something that does what you want, is free, and isn't loaded with spyware and crap. Once it's installed you have to clean up after it and all the crappy desktop icons, systray garbage, extraneous start menu folders, and other nonsense it leaves behind.
Ubuntu? Add/Remove, or Synaptic. Type in something and you get a bunch of choices almost instantly. There are usually several choices so you're not locked into anything. Just pick whatever you like and click Install and a few seconds later, literally, it shows up in your Applications folder, installing only what was necessary to run the app, and already categorized into sane, organized menus. (Applications > Sound & Video > DVD Player, as opposed to Start > All Programs > Megatech > Megatech WinDVD > Run Megatech WinDVD).
mirrorshades radio -- darkwave, industrial, futurepop, ebm.
aha! i'd heard of this but had no idea what the terminology was called my knowledge on networks is quite weak. i thought it was bridging
Bridging mode is to connect two networks together for example a bunch of wired PC's in the house tied to broadband can be bridged to the shop so PC's in the shop can share the internet, printers and other lan resources. To bridge, both access points must be set up to bridge. In this mode, they are no longer access points that your laptop can connect to.
I mentioned Client mode. Client mode is for one PC to connect to an access point along with the rest of your laptops. Client mode does not bridge 2 networks together. It enables a clint to attach to a wireless access point.
I've used this mode to connect a Windows 95 laptop without wireless and laptops running a live CD while on the road.
Who wants to mess with trying to get a live distro to use a wireless card. It's much easier to connect and use the web interface on the wireless access point to configure it's client mode to connect to the hotel's free wireless. No hastles with trying to get a wireless card to work. The bonus is the access point has a better antenna and sensitivity and can be set anywhere with a good signal such as in the window to leach off the apartment nearby instead for better speed. (oops, I didn't recommend stealing a signal did I?)
The truth shall set you free!