OT: What's the deal with Ubuntu?

[Charles E Taylor IV]

On Mon, 09 May 2005 21:10:18 -0400
Kanwar Ranbir Sandhu <m3freak at rogers.com> wrote:

> There's a lot of talk around the Linux camp about Ubuntu: why? I've read
> some reviews about it and a few snippets here and there of users
> opinions on it, but I still don't get it.

Well, it's based on Debian (so it shoukd at least have decent package
management :) ).  It's modern.  It comes on a single CD, so you can
get a basic working system without downloading/burning four ISOs
(*ahem*Fedora*ahem*).  And it's focused to the desktop - which is how I
use Linux.

I've acutally installed it on an old Thinkpad 570.  It came with ltmodem
drivers, so I didn't have to actually *download* the drivers separately. 
This was a nice touch, though they didn't quite work out-of-box with the
supplied 2.6.10 kernel.  (I had to add a boot parameter to get them
working - didn't have to do a download).

It was quite easy to add repositories with Synaptic, and from an ethernet
connection get pretty much everything I use with Fedora (basically stuff
similar to what you'd find on the freshrpms.net repository) in a few
minutes. Downloading the software was much less painful than on Fedora,
and I have virtually no experience with Debian other than an install on an
Alpha some years back.  I even found some chemistry software that I hadn't
tried before.

The Ubuntu kernel had software suspend enabled - a nice touch for laptop
users that hasn't made its way into official Fedora kernels.

The bad points:
* The install procedure's a little ugly, and a few of the questions it
asks are a bit misleading with regards to partitioning.  I was installing
on a clean hard drive, so at least I didn't have to worry about it wiping
anything important if I answered incorrectly.

* The install is a bit long for a one-CD job.  It took about as long to
install one CD of Ubuntu than it did to install from 4 CDs of Fedora.

*ltmodem problem, but at least this was easily solved. 

* I'm used to
Fedora/Red Hat, so finding out how to configure some things took a bit of
looking.  The network configuration GUI doesn't work as well as Red Hat's
(but it DOES work for basic configuration, at least.) 

* Haven't tried the printer config in Ubuntu, but I have a sneaking
suspicion that it might be another sticking point.

Depending on how Core 4 stacks up to the next Ubuntu release, I may switch
my main machine, which is currently running Core 3..

-- 
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*  Charles Taylor <tomalek at mindspring.com>
*  Chemistry instructor / Mad scientist / Linux enthusiast!
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*  Web: http://home.mindspring.com/~charletiv/
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