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Mad Penguin on Ubuntu 5.10 Preview 319

Posted by Zonk from the frothy-birds dept.
atrebuse wrote to mention a preview of the Ubuntu 5.10 Preview release, on Mad Penguin. From the article: " Every community has its heroes. From the beginning of time, we've all needed that special something to grasp onto and worship in one way or another. The Linux community is no different. Sure, there are a handful of people known as leaders or visionaries that people look up to, but what other altars do they worship at? The Altar of the Distro. That's the one I'm referring to. According to the DistroWatch page hit ranking sidebar, Ubuntu Linux has held the title of '"most worshiped distro' for quite some time now. So why is that? Is it because Ubuntu is just that good? Is it because the Ubuntu followers are just sitting there hitting their browsers refresh button on the DistroWatch Ubuntu page? What is it about Mary? "
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Mad Penguin on Ubuntu 5.10 Preview More

Mad Penguin on Ubuntu 5.10 Preview

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  • Naked People (Score:4, Funny)

    by nmb3000 ( 741169 ) on Monday September 26, 2005 @12:03AM (#13648479) Journal
    I liked the cover on the old version. You know, the one with the half-naked people [nyud.net]

    Can't go wrong with naked. Well, you could I guess, but I wasn't on the cover.

    • Re:Naked People (Score:2, Insightful)

      by Stevyn ( 691306 )
      In a corporate setting where everyone's afraid of a sexual harassment lawsuit, you can go wrong with even an image like this. It sucks, but you got the play by other people's pretend rules they've established through verdicts.

      • Re:Naked People (Score:5, Insightful)

        by Erik Hensema ( 12898 ) on Monday September 26, 2005 @01:30AM (#13648719) Homepage
        Damn uptight americans. What exactly is harassing about that photo? :-/

        • Re:Naked People (Score:2, Insightful)

          by Anonymous Coward
          I believe that the grandparent post is incorrect and that the image wasn't changed to keep American Corporations happy but that Ubuntu is extensively marketed as having very good internationalization and in many cultures other than our own, the amount of flesh exposed would have been considered obscene.

        • Re:Naked People (Score:5, Insightful)

          by Omicron32 ( 646469 ) on Monday September 26, 2005 @03:59AM (#13649056)
          I always find it amusing how American's call us British people "reserved", yet they freak out at a nipple on TV, or, gasp, a few "naked" people showing nothing but a bit of skin and hugging each other.

          Then again, I've seen some American TV, and it's awful. "Reserved" isn't the word for us Britons, it's "not making a tit out of ourselves" that is. :p

          (I'm not painting all American's with the same brush here, btw. I'm already OT so getting modded troll as well...)

    • Re:Naked People (Score:2, Informative)

      by Frankie70 ( 803801 )
      The only half naked person in your link was the dude.

      I preferred the full naked picture [nyud.net].

  • Refresh Button (Score:5, Funny)

    by hawkeye_82 ( 845771 ) on Monday September 26, 2005 @12:04AM (#13648483) Journal
    ...... Ubuntu followers are just sitting there hitting their browsers refresh button on the DistroWatch Ubuntu page......

    You mean just like we do here on Slashdot?

    • Re:Refresh Button (Score:2, Informative)

      by LnxAddct ( 679316 )
      In a slight aside from your joke... DistroWatch gets those numbers by pretty much whichever distro is making the most buzz in the geek news world at the time. It in no way reflects actual download counts or user counts. For instance, if you run Mandriva, Suse, or Fedora and click on Ubuntu on distrowatch, the Ubuntu number goes up. So I guess what that number represents is the number of folks who are interested in reading about it, or reading a review about it.
      Regards,
      Steve
    • Im almost finished reading your reply but I can only get one word in per refresh.

    • Re:Refresh Button (Score:5, Informative)

      by CuriosityKilledWHAT ( 883721 ) on Monday September 26, 2005 @03:41AM (#13649006)
      Seriously, from Distrowatch's FAQ:

      What is this "Page Hit Ranking"?

      It is a lighthearted way of looking at a popularity of any given distribution. Since each distribution has its own page, I decided to track the number of visitors viewing individual web pages. The HPD figure represents hits per day by unique visitors, the emphasis being on the word unique; the uniqueness is determined by the visitor's IP address. This prevents those visitors, not disciplined enough, from rigging the results by reloading the pages multiple times. The idea is to identify which distributions attract most attention and to rank them accordingly. This also introduces an element of competition and competitions are fun, aren't they? Admittedly, the page clicks by themselves may not always reflect the popularity correctly. They are also "seasonal", meaning that distribution currently in beta testing will often receive much more clicks than the one past the stable release. All in all, these numbers should, over time, provide an indication about the popularity of Linux distributions.

      These rules have been implemented to prevent various counter reloading schemes:

      Repeated page and counter reloads in short or regular intervals are not allowed. If you are inclined to set up cronjobs to repeatedly wget your favourite distro's page counter, then please do yourself a favour and go to see a psychologist. You need help.
      All suspicious page hit counts will be investigated and any regularly reloaded counts will be deducted from the total count.
      The repeat offender's IP address will be banned from accessing all areas of DistroWatch, including mirrors, for a period of 30 days.

  • Good (Score:3, Interesting)

    by Wolfier ( 94144 ) on Monday September 26, 2005 @12:04AM (#13648484)
    But does it support booting from SATA CD drives? It is 2005 and almost no Live CD can boot off a SATA-only system...

  • Mary (Score:2, Funny)

    by BeesTea ( 580793 )
    For $40, Mary will show you what it is.

  • Why Ubuntu? (Score:4, Informative)

    by jbellows_20 ( 913680 ) on Monday September 26, 2005 @12:08AM (#13648494) Homepage
    I like Ubuntu for a few reasons. The first that I found nice was how fast it installed. It takes me about 15 minutes to have it all installed. Fedora and the others take much longer. I like the apps that come packaged with it. And oh yeah, the naked people were cool too.

    • Re:Why Ubuntu? (Score:5, Interesting)

      by dedazo ( 737510 ) on Monday September 26, 2005 @01:24AM (#13648705) Journal
      Maybe the next version will ship with a sane list of enabled sources in /etc/apt/sources.list so I won't have to fiddle with Synaptic just to get vim-gtk and whatnot installed. Oh, and maybe I'll get a warning from the update manager about critical patches available when I first enable it, not three days later. To this moment I don't know what I did to see the updates - running apt-get manually did nothing. I ran Firefox 1.02 for like two days before I saw the icon on the GNOME tray.

      Having said that, I like Ubuntu because like Knoppix it rocks at detecting and setting up hardware. I've never installed a distro that got everything right, but 5.04 did. I just had to fiddle a bit with the Xorg config file to get my LCD up to 1600x1200.

      • Re:Why Ubuntu? (Score:5, Interesting)

        by zootm ( 850416 ) on Monday September 26, 2005 @07:00AM (#13649535)

        Maybe the next version will ship with a sane list of enabled sources in /etc/apt/sources.list so I won't have to fiddle with Synaptic just to get vim-gtk and whatnot installed.

        I don't think they have plans to change the default-enabled repositories, but Breezy comes with an "Add Applications" frontend to Synaptic (and by association APT) which gives a tree view of apps you can install (mirroring the structure of the menu). This includes apps which require other repositories (they are greyed out), and help is given (along with there being a not-as-simple-as-it-should-be-but-quite-simple "Repositories" menu) to add the repository parts that you need to install the other apps.

        It's not perfect, but it brings things forward a long way, particularly for novice users.

    • Re:Why Ubuntu? (Score:5, Informative)

      by LnxAddct ( 679316 ) <sgk25@drexel.edu> on Monday September 26, 2005 @01:29AM (#13648716)
      Ubunutu is nice, but installing Fedora or others takes no longer if you do a standard desktop or workstation install (which only requires the first and possibly second cd). If you do a full install then yes you'll need 4 cds and an hour or so depending on your system, but your getting a hell of alot of more software then with Ubuntu (arguably a good or bad thing depending on who you talk to). Fedora is designed with both the server and the desktop in mind and so it caters to both crowds, Ubuntu however leans far more toward the desktop crowd (but being based on debian is usually just a few apt commands away from a good server too).

      Fedora from a security point of view though is significantly better. Fedora implements SELinux, execshield with NoExecute and PIE (position independant executables), and programs compiled with FORTIFY_SOURCE. Those features greatly increase security while also helping to prevent future unknown attacks.(Note, I dont believe all programs use those features for performance reasons, only those likely to be attacked like public facing services) Fedora also gives you easy access to XEN (virtualization), GFS (Global File System), and the Fedora Directory Server. Both Ubuntu and Fedora are nice, and people must choose based on their needs, but in many environments Fedora offers, what I feel, are certain benefits. Fedora also tends to get out security updates as quickly as 4 days faster then the others in some cases. Just my 2 cents on the issue.
      Regards,
      Steve

    • Naked people? (Score:2, Funny)

      by tsager ( 196659 )
      Naked people?! OMG, you have not yet seen pr0n?
      Virgin troops, rescue him..

  • The reviewer sucks... (Score:4, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday September 26, 2005 @12:09AM (#13648496)
    The guy doing the review needs a swift kick in the nads, because while he goes on to complain about the lack of professional style in Ubuntu his review is rife with opinions and little information - about as unprofessional a review as can be made.

    He's a whiney little hypocrate and it's sad that something that poorly done got published on any website, let alone became a headline for Slashdot.

    • Indeed (Score:4, Insightful)

      by Chuck Chunder ( 21021 ) on Monday September 26, 2005 @12:57AM (#13648638) Journal
      It seems a tad stupid to be going on about horrible branding and how "developers make horrible marketing people" when discussing the phenomenon that Ubuntu has been in the linux distro "market".

      To me the whimsical code names just seem another indication it really is "Linux for Human beings". It's personable and if there's a need for a more 'corporate' then a simple 5.04 or whatever is right there.
    • I finally finished reading the article (damn slashdot effect) and I have to agree. It seems like the guy is spending two pages whining about all the little things he doesn't like about the distro and then gives it 9 of 10 stars? I don't get it either.
    • He's a whiney little hypocrate

      Bastard doctors. They've never been able to write a proper review!
    • He's a whiney little hypocrate and it's sad that something that poorly done got published on any website, let alone became a headline for Slashdot.

      You must be new here!

  • I don't use Ubuntu... (Score:5, Insightful)

    by RiotXIX ( 230569 ) on Monday September 26, 2005 @12:18AM (#13648527) Journal
    But, the impression I got, through reading forums to help me get some obscure devices to work (ubuntu it seems comes shipped with a patched X11 for enablding evdev -> logitech MX700 mice, even though it hasn't made the xorg official release stream yet), is that ubuntu seems to have a really decent and helpful community base of users (with some pretty sharp ones too), & the community you share a distribution with can be a sincere reason for picking it. If mandrake's TOO newbie & gentoo's too zealot or redhat's too coorporate then pick one you like - a distro is just a kernel with apps.

    • Re:I don't use Ubuntu... (Score:4, Interesting)

      by XXIstCenturyBoy ( 617054 ) on Monday September 26, 2005 @02:38AM (#13648885)
      I have to agree too (sorry I don't have any mod point). Ubuntu is the only reason I decided to (and I know this is bad and blah blah) stop using pirate version of Windows. I still use Windows, but only OEM copies that came with my Laptop.
      My 2 desktops are using Ubuntu and even my girlfriend loves it.

      I mean I am programmer by trade, but I don't have interest being a hardcore linux guru. Ubuntu detected everything, from my wireless kb/mouse to the USB key I use to do backups, the community helped me setup NTFS partition reading quite easily. I installed Netbeans and I was coding withing the hour of installing Ubuntu.

      Only thing missing is a useable UI for the Gimp. I hate the thing. Its like a russian whore, it does everything you like but its ugly as hell :( Its the only reason I never tried to install Ubuntu on the laptop, I wanna keep paint shop pro somewhere.

  • IMHO (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Vermyndax ( 126974 ) <vermyndax&galaxycow,com> on Monday September 26, 2005 @12:22AM (#13648535) Homepage
    IMHO, Ubuntu is scoring well because of the QA efforts they are making. Even the preview release of Breezy Badger had less bugs that most pay-for-released versions of Linux that I've used. The community is also outstanding... brimming over the top with help, suggestions and just plain good nature. They really are doing an oustanding job to make the Linux experience as painless as possible.

  • I use Ubuntu at home. (Score:4, Interesting)

    by miffo.swe ( 547642 ) <daniel...hedblom@@@gmail...com> on Monday September 26, 2005 @12:25AM (#13648545) Homepage Journal
    Its a very neat desktop distro. Since its debian based you can always find debs for whatever obscure app you want, and get it working in seconds. I have it on my laptop and my desktop and i have only good experiences from it. For a server i use RH because of SELinux.

    • Ubuntu versus Debian (Score:5, Interesting)

      by typical ( 886006 ) on Monday September 26, 2005 @01:50AM (#13648759) Journal
      I'm curious as to how well Ubuntu stacks up versus Debian for a competent CLI/non-GNOME-and-KDE user.

      One nice thing about Debian is that there seems to be emphasis on making the config utilities all available via a text UI, and I'm a little suspicious that Ubuntu might drop that.

      On the other hand, I am vaguely interested in the more-frequent-release concept. It's really great that Debian stable exists, because it means that there's a Free real, stable, server-class distro out there. But all my friends that use Debian on their desktops seem to frequently bemoan how out-of-date the desktop software in stable gets, and how unstable/testing isn't really suitable for day-to-day use.

      I currently use Fedora, but after a brief stint with Debian in a router that I'm building, I was quite impressed and considering, for the first time in about seven years, making my main desktop machine run something other than a Red Hat distribution.

      What I'm wondering is whether Ubuntu swings more towards Debian (but with more frequent releases) or Linspire (but based on Debian). The former is more what I'm looking for.

      • Re:Ubuntu versus Debian (Score:5, Insightful)

        by falkryn ( 715775 ) on Monday September 26, 2005 @02:41AM (#13648890)
        There's not a lot of difference between regular debian (sid that is) and ubuntu. Ubuntu is more focused however on providing an up to date gnome-centric desktop system (kde for kubuntu). So for instance, xorg is the X server, gnome 2.12 is in breezy, etc. Debian is more supposed to be the 'universal' OS. I've come to like both personally. That said, on my current home system (a dell laptop that's pretending to be a workstation, hooked up to a monitor and all), I switched from ubuntu back to regular debian. I was having trouble with some of the funkier hardware on the system, and found a good site someone made with instructions and debs to work around the problems using debian. If you're not interested however in gnome/kde, I might suggest staying with debian (testing or unstable). There's still more packages available in the debian repo (I think), and less hoops to jump through to get interesting software installed. I wouldn't pay much attention to those saying that testing/unstable is unsuitable for day to day use. I wouldn't put it on a server, but for a desktop who cares? Plus keep in mind that ubuntu itself is based off a frozen snapshot of sid anyhow.
        • I for one would welcome an Ubuntu server edition. Not something that is updated every six months but maybe once a year and of course concentrating on server software. I suppose one could think of it as a red-hat enterprise version kind of distro.
      • Well, if you don't want a graphical desktop, then just use debian. The config tools Ubuntu incorporates are nothing you won't find in Debian, apart from some graphical interfaces you just said you didn't want.

        I doubt Ubuntu would drop the CLI config utilities, especially since most of the graphical config apps are just wrappers around them (this might change, but you'll still be an apt-get away from what you want, won't you?).

        On the other hand, if you don't want the pain of testing-unstable (especially righ

  • Why doesn't distrowatch include Windows pagehits? (Score:5, Funny)

    by Associate ( 317603 ) on Monday September 26, 2005 @12:26AM (#13648548) Homepage
    My opinion is that it would be a little more tale-tell of who's visiting their site. Granted the intention is to indicate which is the more popular Linux distro. But still, it might show how many wannabees like me there are. Actually, I had SuSE and RH running here at work for a while. But the local IT manager got pretty pissed when he couldn't log into my machine as administrator. They reimaged my machine shortly thereafter. :(

  • What is it about Mary? Mary's Mother. (Score:5, Informative)

    by jgaynor ( 205453 ) <jon@gaAUDENynor.org minus poet> on Monday September 26, 2005 @12:30AM (#13648561) Homepage
    What is it about Mary?

    Mary's genes. I (and Im sure Im not alone here) use ubuntu primarily because it's essentially Debian.

    Ubuntu should just rename itself to debain-desktop, and not just for the 'under the hood' reasons. A base debian system is just that - a very basic linux install (plus SSH); Ubuntu has done a damn good job of doing the same thing in desktop form. Office apps, gaim, not much more. My mother could probably figure out how to do basic email/internet/word processing with ubuntu without much coaching. Just compare the program menus on ubuntu with those of say, knoppix and you'll know what I mean.

    Besides the good base app choices there's solid driver support, ease of install, damn good UI, and great marketting. Only thing I would change is out-of-the-box in-browser media support (vlc-plugin or mplayer-plugin that works).

  • I am above my own review (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Zed Lopez ( 123988 ) on Monday September 26, 2005 @12:31AM (#13648568) Homepage
    If the author is so immune to hype, and into telling it straight, why is a full page of a 3 page review about the release names?

  • People on the street... (Score:5, Interesting)

    by realbadjuju ( 870896 ) on Monday September 26, 2005 @12:32AM (#13648571)
    I have no idea if this is why, but I was walking down the street two weeks ago in Cambridge MA and some guy just handed me an Unbuntu cd. Two actually, one live cd and one install. I didn't even realize what it was until I had walked 50 feet past him. That's never happened to me with any other distro...
    • I heard they're talking to General Mills and Quaker about getting them included in the breakfast cereal boxes, too -- people are quite willing to stick whatever they find in a cereal box into their computer. That's how AOL made it big, isn't it?

      Hmmm, Breezy Badger Berry Crunch? Sounds delicious...

    • And as soon as you install it, the specially built apps will start emailing me any username/password you login with or enter into a password field of the web browser. Or did you personally compare checksums of all the programs?

      (Hypothetical, of course, but an interesting scenario nonetheless.)
       

    • Re:People on the street... (Score:5, Interesting)

      by bheer ( 633842 ) <rbheerNO@SPAMgmail.com> on Monday September 26, 2005 @03:23AM (#13648966)
      Probably because Ubuntu encourages users to give away CDs (and the liveCD+installCD in one package thing is pure genius, it encourages people to give it a try). Get your own [ubuntulinux.org] and spread them around.
    • I have no idea if this is why, but I was walking down the street two weeks ago in Cambridge MA and some guy just handed me an Unbuntu cd. Two actually, one live cd and one install. I didn't even realize what it was until I had walked 50 feet past him. That's never happened to me with any other distro...

      It won't happen to you in any other city, either...

  • Whee (Score:2, Insightful)

    by LarsWestergren ( 9033 )
    atrebuse wrote to mention a preview of the Ubuntu 5.10 Preview release, on Mad Penguin.

    And I guess this is the preview of the real Slashdot article coming tomorrow... and the day after that.

    According to the DistroWatch page hit ranking sidebar, Ubuntu Linux has held the title of '"most worshiped distro' for quite some time now.

    Oh whopee, another article that thinks page hits on a single site is significant. Can we please have some hysterical "Redhat is dying" stories now that they are beaten on Distrowat

  • Mad Penguin's (Score:4, Funny)

    by OneArmedMan ( 606657 ) on Monday September 26, 2005 @12:33AM (#13648576)
    Armed Dolphins...

    The Sky is burning the end is near .. /Run away Run away.!!!

  • Nothing to see (Score:5, Informative)

    by 2Bits ( 167227 ) on Monday September 26, 2005 @12:40AM (#13648598)
    There's nothing to see here, he spent a whole ranting about naming things with Ubuntu, a second page ranting about the bongo sound and some crash, and by the time I clicked on the third page, the server is in smoke.

    Here's the summary of the first 2 pages:
    - project code name is not good. So? What does "Longhorn", "Vista", "Chicago", "Darwin" .... got to do with desktop? Gee, some people just need their daily of injected humor.
    - installation went fine, except that the HD partitioning does not give a lot of options. Well, nothing new here, everyone knew that already. I thought Ubuntu was supposed to make it as simple as possible.
    - he doesn't like the earthy theme. So? And that's supposed to make it not worthy? And does he like the default WinXP theme?
    - annoyed by the bongo sound. Why the fuck can't he turn it off, or turn off the freaking speaker then? I mean, I hate the beep made by stupid apps too, so I unplugged the beep wire in the box, so no more beeping.
    - some crashes here and there. Yeah, wake me up when you find a system that does not cost you a leg and an arm and does not crash. And he admitted it's a preview release. File a bug, tell the developers how to reproduce it, isn't it more productive that way?

    I guess there would be more ranting on the third page, but good thing it's already /.ed, so I don't need to read it.

    Move on, nothing here.
    • The ranting ends with the aesthetic properties. He does go more in depth and is actually quite pleased by it. The summary was something along the lines of 'it's great, if they keep this up commercial distros will have a hard time'.
    • project code name is not good. So? What does "Longhorn", "Vista", "Chicago", "Darwin" .... got to do with desktop?

      he doesn't like the earthy theme. So? And that's supposed to make it not worthy? And does he like the default WinXP theme?

      Do you realize you're using competing operating systems' bad practices to justify ones in the distribution? When one start bringing up XP's theme in the sense "it's not good either, right?", it's really reason to start worry about Ubuntu's theme.

  • Works on PPC, too (Score:2, Insightful)

    by TheCarlMau ( 850437 )
    One reason I like Ubuntu is because it also works on Macs (PPC). It's possible to have the same desktop experience whatever computer I am using.
  • Or rather, I know it works from SCSI, but this is the issue I had when I tried to install to my SCSI drive from my SCSI CD-ROM.

    Tell the BIOS to boot from SCSI, tell the SCSI card to use the CD-ROM to boot. Put my CD of Hoary in, and it happily starts the detection process and all that. However, fairly early on, it tells me that it can't detect the install CD please insert it. YOU JUST BOOTED FROM THE DARN THING! WHADDA YOU MEAN YOU CAN'T FIND THE CD!?! I sit there re-inserting the CD for a couple of t

    • Most distro installers are hopeless when faced with mixed IDE/SCSI systems. However in your case I suspect what happened was you installed GRUB on /dev/sda1 when you ought to have installed it on /dev/sda. It sounds like you don't have any other OS on your SCSI disk so it should be safe to do so. In fact, if you install GRUB there, you will be able to select Linux or Windows without touching your BIOS settings and without altering your Windows installation. If you were to remove the SCSI disk, your syst
    • I understand your situation. Ubuntu is incredibly overrated. Although while I say this I haven't tried any distro, but I have to hope some are better. Ubuntu does NOT like non standard PC setups, and by standard I mean only IDE disks and optical drives, 1 video card, a rather generic and well supported audio card, etc. If it runs into anything even remotely out of the ordinariy it screws up all over the damn place. With me it was a minor issue of having onboard video and a pci video card and not having t
      • Ubuntu disables the root account. If you need to run root commands, you use sudo from your user account. This operation will ask the password for this user account.

        To enable root, just do sudo passwd.

        More information here: http://www.ubuntuguide.org/ [ubuntuguide.org]

        I find highly incredible someone willing to compile an entire os and apps; can't figure something this simple. Its just like knoppix, but sudo in ubuntu asks you the user's password.

        The rest of your problems might be addressed in the forums, chat or wiki.
        IMO the

  • Bubuntu is good because (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Ceriel Nosforit ( 682174 ) on Monday September 26, 2005 @01:16AM (#13648682)
    Ubuntu is good because it took me a moment while reading the replies here to remember that I'm using Ubuntu Breezy. Tech is usually only noticed when something is wrong, so the hallmark of good tech is that it goes unnoticed.

    Ubuntu can do eveyrthing Windows did, and thanks to programs such as Cedega, I an even play Guild Wars. The era of Linux on the desktop is NOW.

  • I Switched recently (Score:5, Informative)

    by asv108 ( 141455 ) <asvNO@SPAMivoss.com> on Monday September 26, 2005 @01:20AM (#13648693) Homepage Journal
    I moved my laptop from gentoo unstable to Ubuntu development for a few reasons. [alexvalentine.org] First off, Ubuntu seems to adopt new releases quicker that any other distribution, yet somehow manages to have excellent Q&A even on their unstable releases. The second major reason was that Ubuntu has made an effort to adopt many of the latest mono based applications. If you look around for the most exciting new desktop applications being developed for Linux, most of them are mono based. F-spot, Banshee, and Beagle are in Ubuntu's packaging system.

    Thirdly, Community based distros make it so much easier to find support answers. I deal with RHEL systems at work, good luck finding support answers on the web. How sad is it that its the year 2005 and Redhat still doesn't have an online support forum? Ever search for a Redhat support issue on google? Most of results that come are rh9 issues.. Its so much easier to use online resources with community based distributions, when I'm scouring for Redhat answers I find myself asking a simple question, "What the hell are we paying for?"

  • it's all about timing (Score:4, Informative)

    by sdnoob ( 917382 ) on Monday September 26, 2005 @01:29AM (#13648717)
    ubuntu came around at a time when (a lot of) people were getting frustrated with the delays in getting sarge out the door. ubuntu took what was in testing, mixed in a little sid, switched over to xorg & the latest desktops, and got a (good) product out the door before debian could even turn around.

    even though sarge is stable now, it's still rather dated compared to ubuntu. if you're wanting a debian-based desktop, just the time savings of having a single-cd install, is worth looking at ubuntu.

    and, ubuntu's going to really give debian stable a run for it's money, the april 2006 release is set for 3 and 5 years (desktop and server, respectively) of updates. http://lists.ubuntu.com/archives/ubuntu-devel/2005 -September/010876.html [ubuntu.com]

    ubuntu deserves the attention and popularity it's been getting: "it's debian done right".

  • It's simple (Score:5, Interesting)

    by foreverdisillusioned ( 763799 ) on Monday September 26, 2005 @01:49AM (#13648758) Journal
    For many people (though not all), Ubuntu *just works* out of the box. That's something else that few distros can claim. Before Ubuntu, I never gave Linux a chance because I wasn't willing to spend hundreds of hours just to get it to the same state of usability that XP gave me right out of the box. It's tough being only semi-geeky. I'm pretty proficient with computers when it comes to day to day tasks (I include "reinstalling Windows" under that heading), but troubleshooting a Linux box takes a much higher level of expertise, and to be honest I just didn't want to fuck with it. I loved everything that Linux stood for, but I just couldn't stand trying in vain for hours to make it work properly.

    Then Ubuntu comes along and everything just magically works with the default install. Well ok, I still had a few things that didn't work 100% right, but I didn't mind tweaking with those on my own time. Every other distro I've tried--including SuSe, Red Hat, Mandrake and Knoppix--were somehow broken out of the box (usually, a key piece of hardware wasn't recognized), and I could never find an easy solution. I'm sure there were solutions out there, but I wasn't patient enough to find them--I wasn't satisfied leaving my computer in a halfway-usable state until I managed to find them.

    I've often heard the "hood welded shut" analogy when comparing open source to closed source software. It's a good analogy, but I guess my problem was I didn't want to be FORCED to go underneath the hood because my car only turns left and I can't go over 40 MPH without first turning on the windshield wipers. Being able to tweak is wonderful; it's only been a few months now and I'm already doing a lot that I couldn't do on my Windows box. But being forced to basically finish building the car yourself is a royal pain in the ass, at least for those of us that aren't quite ubergeeks. Ubuntu still has a ways to go (e.g. the latest update has actually broken Firefox for many people, including me), but as long as it stays true to its motto, I have confidence that it will continue to remain at #1.
    • I investigated Ubuntu on the recommendations of Planet Gnome [gnome.org] when it came out. I had problems with Ubuntu detecting my video cards, on 2 out of my 3 computers. Not sure why. It just gets to X, and then reboots. (Lather, rinse, repeat.) I lost interest.

      I'm not sure if it's a better Linux distro. (I think Knoppix CDs are cool, because they've worked on all of my computers.) But they get points in my book for being friendly and marketing themselves well, like Firefox. Something kind of overlooked in general.

      • I investigated Ubuntu on the recommendations of Planet Gnome [gnome.org] when it came out. I had problems with Ubuntu detecting my video cards, on 2 out of my 3 computers. Not sure why. It just gets to X, and then reboots. (Lather, rinse, repeat.) I lost interest.

        If it's useful for (your own personal) statistical purposes, I've not had a problem on any of my 3 computers :).

        I'm not sure if it's a better Linux distro. (I think Knoppix CDs are cool, because they've worked on all of my computers.) But the

    • Simply MEPIS works right out of the box too, at least for me, a Linux noob. Totally painless install. I'm using it right now.
    • "For many people (though not all), Ubuntu *just works* out of the box. That's something else that few distros can claim."
      "Every other distro I've tried--including SuSe, Red Hat, Mandrake and Knoppix--were somehow broken out of the box (usually, a key piece of hardware wasn't recognized), and I could never find an easy solution."

      Well, for many people (though not all), $distro *just works* out of the box. Maybe not for you. I've tried Ubuntu and found it not bad, but... meh. Some tools could be easier to use

  • I installed preview 5.10 it last weekend (Score:5, Informative)

    by mrjb ( 547783 ) on Monday September 26, 2005 @02:29AM (#13648857)
    This is my third Ubuntu install now, before that I ran RH9.

    One of the main reasons I switched to Ubuntu was because I wanted a distro with 2.6 kernel with proper package management. At the time, there were 2 realistic options; Gentoo and Ubuntu. Gentoo seemed to be too much of a fuss.

    The breezy preview installed pretty smoothly. The majority of the work however comes after the install. I keep an install log to make it easier to tweak the install to my liking.

    I took out my soundcard in favor of the one that's on the mainboard. I found that the
    MIDI device was not detected properly 'out of the box'; because of this, amidi --dump did not find the default MIDI device. This was solved after making a symbolic link (ln -s midiC1D0 midiC0D0). No big thing here; by what I could tell this behaviour was present in the previous release as well.

    The main difference I found with hoary is that GCC 4 is the compiler of choice now, as
    x.org instead of xfree86 can be considered the 'main difference' to the version before hoary. This is actually a bit of a fuss, however being on the leading edge is why I went for Ubuntu in the first place.

    To allow realtime capabilities in userland, recompiling the kernel is needed (as it was before) to allow running the realtime-lsm module. This requires pointing the Makefile of the linux sources to gcc 4 rather than 3.4. I find this a bit odd.

    I found the kernel sources initially didn't compile on gcc 4; In one instance, a filesystem function declaration in the header file (.h) differs from the source file (.c/c++), which is a matter of things being declared 'static' in one place and not
    in the other. I fixed this by letting the function declaration in the source file follow the declaration of the header file.

    After this, the kernel compiled and things seem to be stable. I have the impression it runs slightly smoother than hoary, but this is subjective.

    The main thing I haven't gotten around to buidling yet is mplayer. I did notice that it complains about GCC 4 because it hasn't been tested on it. It will refuse to build unless forced. When forced, GCC 4 will give some errors. I'll still have to figure out how to complete building it properly. I've heard some people run gcc 3.4 alongside 4 for cases like this. YMMV.

    Main question I have myself is, will the 5.10 preview automatically upgrade to 5.10 once it is released?
    • "Automatically" - as in without you clicking anything? No. You'll still have to click System> Administration> Update Manager, then choose to install the updates. (Or you could use System> Administration> Synaptic.) Then you'll be running Breezy/5.10 as if you had installed it from an install CD.

  • Names? (Score:5, Interesting)

    by BenjyD ( 316700 ) on Monday September 26, 2005 @05:01AM (#13649197)
    Am I the only one that actually likes the Ubuntu version names? Warty Warthog, Hoary Hedgehog, Breezy Badger: they're quite funny, easy to shorten and memorable. And "Hoary" is quite a common word, at least where I come from (South East UK). Linux distros don't have to be dull and corporate - just use "Ubuntu 5.10" to management if it bothers anyone that much.

  • Ubuntu "just works"?? (Score:4, Interesting)

    by mgkimsal2 ( 200677 ) on Monday September 26, 2005 @06:57AM (#13649522) Homepage
    I've heard this comment for a year or so now, and finally tried Ubunutu two weeks ago. I'm coming from years of monstly Mandrake, but have recently tried Xandros, Yoper and a couple other distributions, and have installed Suse and RedHat as recently as 18 months ago.

    Ubunut does not 'just work' any more or less than other distros. I would actually say it works *less* than some other distros at certain things. I've known a few people that haved *raved* about Ubuntu "just working", and I could NOT understand what they were talking about. I realized at least one of them came from the gentoo/lfs world where getting a system running is days of work, so in comparison, yes, it's great.

    A few things Ubuntu didn't have which other distros had on the same hardware:

    1. Automatic mounting of available Windows partitions
    Mandrake (and I think Xandros and Yoper, can't remember others) would make /mnt/windows partitions and automount them for me. Ubuntu doesn't do that, at least not out of the box.

    2. Auto detect network printers. My wife has an inkjet shared on her eMac on the wireless network. Xandros (and I think the LE2005 Mandrake) auto-setup that printer and made it available via CUPS out of the box. No way of doing that in Ubuntu.

    3. My wireless card wasn't detected. Doesn't matter what distro, it doesn't work out of the box - I need ndiswrapper and custom setup. Not bitching about that, but Ubuntu didn't magically make it happen.

    A slight bitch about apt-get here too - it won't inform me of partially matching package names. In urpmi, if I run "urpmi ndis" it'll come back with a list of package names which match 'ndis' if there's more than one. Debian/Ubuntu, I have to use a separate command to search the 'cache', which is just frustrating. Again, for someone coming from LFS background, yeah, Ubuntu is a breath of fresh air. But there are distros that 'just work' out of the box - providing a much more robust environment - more than Ubuntu.

  • Adding to the "no, thanks" list (Score:5, Interesting)

    by whitroth ( 9367 ) <whitroth@[ ]ent.us ['5-c' in gap]> on Monday September 26, 2005 @09:31AM (#13650534) Homepage
    I have older machines on our SOHO. None of them has dual-cores or multiprocessors, and not huge amounts of memory, so I wanted to upgrade from RH 9 to something still fairly lightweight (I don't want bleeding-edge Fedora). A friend suggested KUbuntu.

    I d/l it, burned a live CD, and tried it.

    I have an old Logitech serial mouse. It refuses to recogize it. The menu doesn't offer a way to configure it, and not having used xorg, it took me a while to find the configuration tool. I used that, and when I finished, it said, "ok"... but Kubuntu *still* doesn't recognize my mouse.

    Had I built the distro, it would have expected it to also check your hard drive, and automatically mount the partitions under /mnt. Nope.

    In effect, it comes across as, "hi, try me, if I work, but you can't make any changes, even in memory." And yes, I *did* post to the new users' list, several times, and got zero responses.

    So no thanks, I'll pass. Now I'm looking at SuSE, esp. since it's now owned by Novell, and is moving up in the US market. Jobs, y'know, esp. when all the companies in the country are full of abysmally clueless HR folks, who think there are some mystical differences between, say, RH and SuSE (which just happened to an aquaintance).

                          mark

  • My 2c (Score:3, Interesting)

    by StarKruzr ( 74642 ) on Monday September 26, 2005 @03:35PM (#13653403) Journal
    I just want to throw my hat into the ring regarding Ubuntu - I installed it on my (unimpressive) 1.8GHz laptop with 512MB of RAM last week and have been extremely impressed with its usability, performance, and just plain prettiness (though I will note that the prettiness is largely a function of x.org and GNOME). I'll be using this Linux installation for real-time scheduler experiments so it's not terribly important how good the user experience is, but nevertheless, the overall experience with the distro is leading me to possibly install it on my desktop at home.

    One niggling peeve: No good wireless sniffer packages appear to be included in the default package list (correct me if I'm wrong). Guess I'm gonna have to install Kismet and gkismet myself.

    Also, this post is a test to see if that crazy loon apk is still stalking me.

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