Ubuntu vs. Everyone else

I like *buntu distros.

I'm debating on whether to wrestle with putting other distros on my other boxes...or just going to Kubuntu that I know works like a champ.

I'm with you there man...Ubuntu and it's cousins are all winners to me.

except the Gnome desktop, tried to get Kubuntu to work, but it still relied heavily on the Gnome libraries. Once I removed all the Gnome libraries, much of the system wouldn't work.

I found two issues with Ubuntu I didn't like:

1. The password for the Superuser was the same as the general password,

2. Some of the functions I often used in file and disk management were harder to get at and use.

I tried SimplyMEPIS, and went out and bought SimplyMEPIS 6. It has all the advantages of Ubuntu, even uses some of the same repositories, but has a nicer (in my view) desktop, and slightly stronger security.

I recently tried the latest Ubuntu release and went back to SimplyMEPIS 6, just a cleaner working environment for me. And a few friends who don't know anything but Windows 98, have tried it and find it easy to switch over to,

I am using ubuntu for few month i want to know how to install my modem and
how can i connect to internet using dial up connection

Is the potential security hole they have created with the primary user essentially being admin. (ie you can sudo everything, no elevated priv password required).

If someone should obtain remote access to your primary user account, they basically own your system at that point. Doesn't leave me feeling very warm and fuzzy.

I had a very simlar experience with my wife. She has taken to Ubuntu very quickly. She likes the fact that Firefox is lightning fast, much faster than our Windows install, which used to be on the very same machine. She only really uses the machine to access the web, but if she can read her e-mail and print she is happy.

I have used a number of different Linux distros over the years, including Mandrake and Suse. I always had a problem to either get the printer/scanner working in older distros. If it wasn't the printer it was something else.

I found Ubuntu installs very easily. And here's the thing: Everything JUST works.

I like the way that Ubuntu works. Whilst I am running the "desktop" verion of Edgy, I am actually running Apache, MySQl, PHP amongst other things.

My latest achievement is to get MythTV working. For those of you who don't know, MythTV is the Linux equivalent to the Windows Media center. It works very well indeed.

I think that the Ubuntu team has brought out a distribution that can help ease the transition for users from Windows to Linux. In doing so, I think that Ubuntu has accomplished a major step. It has made it much easier for the general public to adopt Linux, and in some way to go head to head with Microsoft.

I don't work for Ubuntu, nor do I have any affiliation with Ubuntu. Whilst I have played with Linux distros, I have still kept using Windows XP. However, I have now made the full transition to Linux.

Ubuntu has set the standard. You don't need to know much about Linux to run it, but if you are a real Unix "geek" (I use this word in a positive sense), you can still "hack" to your heart's content.

I played with it a bit more for other things. PCLinuxOS is becoming more of a favorite of mine as well. However, I did not use Kubuntu very long so I cannot compare the 2 distros.

An interesting thing that I found out yesterday. Beryl, which is not supposed to work properly on ATI cards, seems to be working well with PCLinuxOS. I accidentally clicked on it, the screen flashed for a moment, and then while moving windows around I noticed that it was functioning.
I cannot say how stable it is right now, but I have not had any problems with it yet (including flipping to other desktops). Notes online suggest that with ATI cards, it either does not work, or works very slowly. Not in this case, it is just as fast as without it. And the best part, I did NOT have to edit driver files, etc..

This post was posted using PCLinuxOS 2007 Beta3

Hi all,

At my work everyone is given both an XP and an ubuntu machine. We are a software development house so we have a lot of fanatical nut cases who refuse to do anything on windows. That is OK about 95% of the time. The mail client is weak. You have to jump through hoops once and a while. But it works.

This is about as hard as switching from one version of windows to the next. In my experience most of the gotchas can be solved with Google and I have only had to download things which were not supported by default once or twice.

The only bad experience that I have had is with the upgrades. Sometimes they overwrite my configuration files. Because I configure a lot of custom stuff this is a pain. The device support has been great. My dell PC and HP laptop worked perfectly. I even dual boot the laptop and I can mount the C: drive while running Linux. This is much better than the last distro I used which was red hat.

In summary Ubuntu is great. It has sensible defaults and UI which are suitable for novices and it lets old hacks like myself do what we want directly via sudo.

I refuse to use any adapter without it; and I understand that most Linux distros adapt to them well because they use tried and true communication initiation methods.

As was previously mentioned in another post - external modems commonly fit in this catagory, I believe. Although any software- based modem not written for Linux is probably a nonstarter anyway.

In my experience you can just re-run vmware-config.pl (that might not be the right file name, exactly, and I don't have a system in from of me to verify, but it should be in /usr/bin, and definitely starts with vmware- and hase config or configure in it). It will go through the interview process again, but will have as defaults the answers you previously supplied.

I haven't use vmware-server much, but the above seemed to work okay for me.

I started my Linux experience with Red Hat 7.2 and have tried most all the other Live CDs, however I find Ubuntu to be the easiest yet.

Ubuntu is for the new to Linux user. If you are a Linux power user Ubuntu may not suit your needs.

Great for a disgusted Windows user too!

FXEF

I really hope it's temporary, but I've been noticing a little less stability in the software I get from the Debian archives. In fact, earlier today I moved all my email archives and email access for my main account off a Debian machine and onto a FreeBSD machine because a recent software update seems to have killed my ability to mail to certain (important) mailing lists in some inscrutable manner. Similarly, I know someone whose Wine install has become broken due to a software update. There are occasional GPG key errors surfacing when interacting with the Debian software archives -- not critical, but annoying. Finally, the archives seem to be getting overwhelmed by traffic during peak times of the day, which I had not encountered prior to the last few months.

This seems to coincide with the accelerated release cycle for Debian recently, and I wonder if some things are being glossed over or otherwise less well tended in the software compatibility and stability testing. The GPG key authentication and update process definitely needs to be ironed out a little bit, and whatever's causing the servers to respond more slowly during peak hours needs to be fixed up a bit -- it may even be due to the new GPG key package authentication scheme used by APT.

All of this adds up to Debian probably still being slightly more stable than Ubuntu, and years ahead of Gentoo on that score, but it may only be on par with Fedora these days.

Based on my experience, all of these things (still) well eclipse the stability of the general MS Windows software ecosystem, but it's still disappointing to see this take place with Debian.

Would you consider writing a 101 (or similar) on how to change the default security in Ubuntu/Kubuntu?

I, like many others, really like these distro's, but the security issue does bother me and I would dearly like some "hand holding" in how to get this system back to the default Debian security way ie. a separate password for root and user.

It did strike me, that once the system is installed, I could create another user (me) and give it a new password, then delete the original user, thereby creating two separate accounts. Is this over simplistic, or would root then disappear and leave me in trouble?

Mind you, the last time it really stung me was on a Red Hat box long ago. I had the RH distro install plus a bunch of roll-your-own compiles. These days I just stick to what the distrobutions package manager offers unless it's something I really have to have and can run from my user or root's ~/bin directory.

I'd like to run the latest X.org or KDE release but I'll stay away from them until they come in through my package mager's updates.

The VMware rpm installs and uninstalls cleanly along with reconfiguring after install or on a whim.

It sounds to me like they are working from a tar.gz and having to compile the source but in that case would there be a "make uninstall" they can use if they keep the original tar.gz files handy?

If there's a native package for Ubuntu/Debian then it shouldn't be any more the checking or unchecking the box in add/remove program.

"[i]If I'm reading this right, too much choice means too many projects and too thinly spread developer resources.[/i]"
Open source projects can, in general, crib ideas from each other with impunity -- and they can examine each others' source code to see how things were accomplished. As a result, multiple projects going in different directions actually create fertile ground for innovation and for the rapid spread of ideas that have proved themselves worthwhile.

Of course, some open source licenses are less compatible with this idea than others (I'm looking at you, GPL), but overall that's how it works -- better with more projects rather than fewer.

edit: You mention the example of browsers. That's actually a good one for me to comment on directly.

I'm considering creating a new web browser, rather than jumping into development of a current browser. While Firefox has some characteristics that make it basically the only browser that is not so bad that I don't want to use it at all, it is merely the least bad of an awful lot. None of the current browser projects I've seen are in any way suitable to guiding down a better path (toward something with the positive characteristics of Firefox, but without the incredible bloat and complexity of the code base, memory leak, and other issues that have arisen in that project). As such, a new browser seems to be the only solution to providing what I want and need out of a browser. If I find the time, I'll create what I need.

This will draw on the examples of many other already existing browsers for ideas, and it will benefit from the lessons of mistakes made elsewhere. It'll also get a huge leg up over any attempts at a clean-room closed source browser implementation by leveraging a lot of already existing code (at the moment, I'm thinking I'll probably use the Gecko rendering engine and Tamarin ECMAScript VM, same as Firefox). That's a big chunk of the beauty of open source software development.

Is anyone familiar with, or has anyone tried Linux Mint? My understanding via some reading about it is that it is amazingly easy to install, finds nearly all hardware, installs a variety of proprietary codecs, and is a derivative of Ubuntu in some way.

I'm hunting thoughts and opinions re: all of the above along with tales of experience with this distro.

Thanks!

But I wouldn't use browsers as an example. To me that is higher up the stack (ie application). I am really referring to lower level; GUI API/libs, package management and the like.

Windows 3.1 actaully suffered some similar grief, as did 95 and 98 and even (though to a lesser extent 2000 and XP and probably even Vista, though it seems much less common. I think the phrase DLL-Hell sort of defined it. Different people would code to different shared libs or even different incompatble versions of the same shared lib. Much of that has been eliminated by either moving key elements of those APIs directly to the OS, or by developers moving their specific API components in with their application.

Linux seems to have more difficulty in this area because first, you have a choice of several API's (yes , they have achived great interoperabiity in at least the major ones from on DE to the next but...). And then you have rpm's and deb's and... scattered across the universe (you can even build your own if you want). Open office, for example provides an rpm of their latest release, right on their website, which the redhat crowd can (mostly, there are still potential dependency issues) install (yes, there is alien, but again, it adds another potential glitch-point to the install process).

You make a point, windows has problems as well, but they don't seem as obvious (well, except for right after the release of the new version, but often that is because the developers didn't follow the 'rules') in large part due to the fact that there is only one core system, and therefore some limitations on the way you can do some things.

That homogeneity has (IMHO)some great benefits, but ceratinly also major drawbacks (like me having to call MS/VALVE/ and beg for permission to run the program I just paid for and installed).

The linux paradigm also has many pluses and a few minuses (of course there is the adage you can't please everyone). But it just seems to me that somewhere between 1 choice and 1 million choices, there might be a nice, friendly, happy medium.

Ok, I'll shut up now.

I've been here three years, and only just getting over the grief - the last place I was at I had a 1024MB/512MB Broadband.

Got here and the flaky line wouldn't take data at all. A cable check, they swap some wires, and I can get dial-up. The exchange is so far away I can't get DSL and the ISDN doesn't work on the line - faulty and the Telco won't fix. The exchange is microwave to microwave to microwave to fibre optic.

When they did get me on-line, I was lucky to get 28.8 kbps. Two years and some hardware upgrades at the exchange later, and I can now average 36.6 kbps, and up to 44 kbps when none of the neighbours are making phone calls. They get on the line, I lose microwave bandwidth and the connection drops - aaaggghhh.

From 1024/512 MB down to 28.8 to 44 kbps - dial up pain doesn't even begin to describe it.

Aggghhh I need a fix, I need a fix, where's some broadband. I need a 1GB shot of download.

edited to add a n't I missed at the start.

Yes, this is a case where the proper pluralization is "mediums", and not "media".

1. You could just set a sort of heuristic lower threshold on how much attention you're willing to give to the choice of a given piece of software. Basically, as you consider what GUI environment to use (KDE, GNOME, XFCE, IceWM, Fluxbox, WindowMaker, Sawfish, Enlightenment, et cetera), you just look into them until you get tired of looking, then choose from among those you've already examined. If you later find out that there are some things that annoy you, you can revisit the issue.

That's really the practical way to handle it, and it's pretty much what everyone does. Nobody (sane) actually examines critically every single window manager and self-proclaimed "desktop environment" in great depth, seeking out every obscure little side-project in the world, before making a decision. If you really [b]really[/b] don't want to think about it, just pick a major distro and use the default. That's usually the best option for someone brand spanking new to Linux. Eventually, you'll start wanting something more specifically suited to your own proclivities, and at that point you'll be grateful for the additional choices.

If you're at all like me, you'll start branching out into other options, testing them against your preferences, quite quickly. Some people just stick to their first as their permanent favorite, however, and they're welcome to it.

I've found a happy sort of middle ground between ultimate configurability, truly lean and mean, and productivity enhancing. I've pretty much abandoned any pretense of "desktop environment" integration, however. That's me. You don't have to make the same choices.

If you're a rank newbie, I recommend you make as few choices as possible at first, but let your comfort level guide you. That's really the trick that some habitual MS Windows users never quite grasp when they take their first steps into the land of open source software: they see that there are millions of choices, and they somehow think they [b]have to make a choice from all those options[/b]. They don't. Go with whatever's initially convenient, and don't think about it too much.

2. You could pick a smaller software ecosystem, to help narrow things down comfortably. For instance, if you just take Ubuntu as the Linux poster boy, as one choice, and add to that the three primary *BSD OSes (FreeBSD, NetBSD, and OpenBSD), then you have a nice spread of options laid out before you. Compare them with one another, make a decision based on their relative merits, and go with a default desktop install. Voila, you're in business.

Then, as before (in the first idea for how to handle it), branch out into other options if and when you find that you're curious and perhaps in search of something that more closely suits your personal proclivities.

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I, personally, just kinda jumped in with a Linux distribution that was available and convenient. I bounced around through a few, finding things to like and dislike about each of them. Ultimately, I was introduced to Debian by some people I knew who figured I'd probably like it, and it turned out I really, really did. Once I got the hang of APT, I figured out that to really [b]really[/b] make things work best for me, I could just do a minimal install and use APT to build up from that to a fully functional desktop/workstation system that suited me exactly. This all happened before Ubuntu was even available.

While I've played around with other distributions since then (including Ubuntu), I've never found another Linux distro that I liked more than Debian. It's among the most stable, among the most secure by default, among the most easily managed via the standard toolsets, among the most standardized at its operational environment foundation, and the one operating system with the single most extensive software archives, period. In fact, the next-biggest official software archive for any major Linux distribution is less than one tenth the size.

Then . . . I discovered FreeBSD. It's more stable, more secure by default, just as easy to manage for a skilled sysadmin, more configurable, easier to configure in some surprising ways than any Linux distro I've ever touched (though plagued by the occasional counterintuitive default for "historical reasons"), and has damn near as much software in its archives as Debian. That is [b]very[/b] hard to beat.

That may or may not provide you with some ideas of what others may find useful for their own progression through the free unix learning curve. I offer it in case it might help provide some idea of how one might more easily just go with the flow. Don't think of this as something you have to get Exactly Right, Right Now; just take it a step at a time, and have fun with it.

The choices aren't all there because you have to make them all right this instant. They're there because eventually, if you like what you're getting yourself into, you'll almost certainly want to explore them as you get comfortable with what you've already experienced.

I've got one article to finish now (actually, to basically rewrite/refactor), two more ideas for articles that I'm going to pitch to the editor because they recently occurred to me, and that one to pitch. Out of those four, it'll be the last. Assuming all goes according to plan, it'll probably be published in, say, about a month -- there's also the TR publication schedule to consider -- but I do intend to get it done.

If I feel really motivated to write it soon, I may move it to the top of the heap and do it next week (assuming the editor is receptive to the pitch -- which he probably will be). Even so, it'll likely be a couple weeks more before it gets published.

In the meantime, if you want to research the matter yourself, a google search for:
[b]ubuntu root password[/b]
. . . should prove somewhat helpful.

The fact you're interested in such an article is making me more likely to write it sooner rather than later, though. I'm already itching to start making notes about how to structure the thing.

I haven't really been keeping up with the high-end graphics side of Linux at all, since my systems have primarily been pressed into service as development platforms and general-purpose workstations, rather than multimedia boxen. I didn't realize SDL version played into NWN support, or that there was an issue with old versions of SDL still being standard on some distros.

Thanks for the update, jmgarvin. I can always count on you to fill in the gaps in my knowledge, re: graphics and gaming on Linux, in these discussions.

I can number the games on which I've actually spent money on one hand. Ever. Considering my age, that's not very bloody much.

I'm only just now about to modify a system to create a FreeBSD workstation with high-end graphics capabilities -- and it'll dual-boot Linux for gaming. Once I get all the current data transferred off it to another machine, I'll wipe that sucker, stick an nVidia card into it, and get to work on it. Until now, I've been doing all my online gaming on the Windows side of someone else's dual-booting Debian/WinXP laptop.

So . . . while I've picked up a lot of information on Linux gaming from people I know and from my own investigations in preparation for the upcoming creation of a Linux gaming system (dual-booting FreeBSD, of course), I'm not the most knowledgeable person at TR about the subject. I recommend you hang around [b]jmgarvin[/b] a bit if you want to know more, though of course I'll provide what help I can.

he does seem to be the more knowledgable on *nix game support in this conversation. It's about time I have another go at it though. Everytime I reinstall Linux, I learn a bunch of new stuff; games can't be any different, eventually I'll reinstall the game components enough to get them working.

JMGarvin, any tips on tweaking an ATI AIW Radeon 9600 under Linux? I'm lacking support for the onboard tuner chip and have yet to be able to really tune the graphic drivers.

My next video setup is definately going to be nVidia GPU beside a Hauppauge tuner board. After that, I'll see if I can get all boards to fit on the mobo alongside a second nVidia SLI. Maybe I got back to ATI the generation after that if AMD can turn itself around and fix ATI's version of supporting Linux.

My primary (and dearly in need of an upgrade) laptop around the house is a Panasonic Toughbook 27. Check Panasonic.com/toughbook for specs though it may take some digging.

Memory is below 128 meg (need to put more ram in until it retires) which limits what I can do. A few programs open at a time runs fine but my normal desktop workload of seven to ten user applications would kill the notebook.

CPU is a pentium around the 300mhz range (0.3Ghz for the younger kids). There's no upgrading it so that' my limit.

Sound was autodetected by Mandriva, Knoppix and Ubuntu though liveCD like Knoppix eat alot of memory causing chunky sound hickups. Mandriva native install runs sound clean though.

Graphics also detected flawlessly. My only complain there is that I've yet to find any way ot activating the CF27's touchscreen (works adictively under Windows).

PCMCIA wired nick pickup ok but I'm using old nic so that's to be expected (ah.. Tulip.. my old friend).

PCMCIA wireless nick functions once the Windows driver is installed through ndiswrapper. I say "functions" because it connects to the wifi router but doesn't provide complete and native hardware support. That's an issue with Broadcom not having the decency to release proper specs for the their chip running in Linksys 54gs nics however.

My biggest source of grief continues to be power management. Any time the lid is closed or the machine left idle for too long, it locks up because Linux continues to have trouble with Sleep and Hybernate modes. If there's a solution out there, I've yet to stumble across it though I keep looking. Currently, my solution is to reboot the machine, leave music playing or be on it constantly; I leave it to play music most of the time.

Notes about performance hits
- I'm running my normal install of Mandriva with pleanty of background apps.
- I'm using KDE where I should be using XFCE (maybe Backstep)

Notes about performance gains
- I use SSH to work on and run apps from my primary desktop when I can. This limits the load on my notebook's hardware since the remote app uses remote resources other than forwarding the screen GUI display calls to the local X session.

Other than freezing at sleep/hibernate and forcing me to use the mouse pad instead of touchscreen, Mandriva is running just fine on a pent 300 mhz with < 128 meg ram.

I know it seems silly, but the 9600 is pretty flaky in Linux anyway.

Also make sure to run glxgears (just type glxgears at the command line)

You should be over 1,000 fps or either you don't have 3d support enabled OR the driver isn't working properly.

With ATI, I'm going to say: The driver isn't working properly. This could be due to a couple of things:
1) Did you remove the community driver before you installed the ATI driver?
2) After you installed the ATI driver did you comment out DRI in the xorg.conf? (/etc/X11/xorg.conf) If you didn't just edit the xorg.conf and put a # infront of DRI.

Other than that, sometimes uninstalling and reinstalling the ATI driver works as well.

If you still have the Mesa drivers running, you don't have 3d support.

That WoW install I was talking about:

Fixing the "can't type in username and password" thing I mentioned was an absurdly easy fix. We just gave control of the game window to the window manager using winecfg. Unfortunately, now the compass/minimap is broken while indoors -- it's just blank white. There's some stuff online that suggests we should be able to fix it by using Wine versions greater than 0.9.28, but APT is being kind of weird about it and won't let us specify a version that new in the /etc/apt/preferences file. If we try to do so, it just gives us an error about the wine package not existing, and being replaced with libwine (which isn't strictly true).

Frame rates are better on the Linux side of that laptop than on the MS Windows side. Just don't have Firefox running, or you'll experience severe, increasing lag in high-traffic areas until the system locks up or crashes. It must be that memory leak whose existence the Mozilla folks deny.

Its concept may be neat, but it's not very original. It's just a rip-off and slight extension of the concept of the *BSD OSes' ports tree software management. Considering I don't want an OS install and initial configuration to take four days, I'd rather do the initial install using a *BSD base system and replace whatever I like using portsnap if I want it compiled from source rather than installed via binary.

. . . especially considering the far greater stability of something like FreeBSD.

So, basically, suspend to RAM is sleep, and suspend to HDD is hibernate. Gotcha. It seems like I can never remember which is which. I'll make more of an effort to recall this time.

I had some minor issues with moving to and from a docking station with Debian on a Thinkpad at one point. I don't recall how I solved the problem, but I know that I did solve it. I think the only problem that I had was related to screen resolution, though.

- Software compiled for only the hardware you have and running as efficient as that sounds.

- Watching my system compile for two days is actually a draw for me.

- Running a harder gauntlet than other distorbutions would mean learning pleanty about my machine I've not yet learned in passing.

I still haven't had a go at it though. Rumour is that Debian currently has the best hardware support and freakishly large repositories. Then I read that the Gentoo project is haveing more internal politics and squables between developers.

Perhaps this is how people that haven't looked at Linux feel; interested but turned away by the group dynamics.

Good point though. If you want a beast of an OS and just gotta see something compile; FreeBSD. The last time I looked at it, apps where installed by digging down a folder tree of possible programs then typing "make" in the program named folder after which BSD would download all required source and libraries then build the app you wanted.

S=S - Sleep is soft storage of the information, software record in the RAM.

H=H - Hibernate is hard storage of the information on the hardware, hard drive.

Just match the letter to the storage type.

Yeah, that's pretty much how it's usually done. You use the "whereis" command to find the program you want (if you're looking for something specific), or from the /usr/ports directory the "make search" command to find something that matches specific search term criteria. Then, you use the "make install clean" command for the directory specific to the software you want to install.

You can also install binary packages with even simpler commands.

You can also install tools that make it even more brainless to install either from ports (source) or packages (binaries), as you desire.

FreeBSD is much better at source installs than Debian (in fact, FreeBSD is designed with the assumption that compiling from source in the ports tree is the default), and is as good at binary package management. It's not only more stable than Gentoo -- it's more stable than Debian.

I should shut up now. I really like FreeBSD, and could probably go on for hours.

I mostly use my GUI environment as a place to store terminal emulators. I do like using Conky for displaying system data on the desktop, and I use Firefox (and, these days, GAIM) as well, though. My development work, writing, and so on, all basically take place in terminal emulators, with tools like Vim, irb, the OCaml toplevel, the shell itslef, and so on.

All of my software management -- APT on Debian and the ports tree on FreeBSD -- is done via terminal emulators, of course.

I've been coding since highschool put Turing infront of me;you know there's a line limit to how much the Turing editor will let you write? After that you have to use a text editor and the stand alone compiler.

Growing up on Windows machines and only being exposed to VB and C++ through Ms Dev Studio in school is a bit fo a hinderance. If it's not a graphic EDI layed out in MS like fashion, I've got learning to do. Create program form, add code behind each element; stupid easy.

Eclipse doesn't want to insall on my Mandriva. Everything downloads then I get some stupid package error half way through install. Far as I can tell, it's a JAVA EDI though with plugins to support other langauges.

Kdevelop installed clean with a few dependancy substitutions so I'll see if I can figure out how to make that go without buying a book.

Either of these is still limiting me to a hand holding EDI and pretty form creation tool to write code behind. I'd just open a text editor and "cc blah -o blah.exe" but I need some practice before I go back to writting form generating code without.

Actually, any recommendations on where to start with FOSS programming?