Re: OT: What's the deal with Ubuntu?

From: Charles E Taylor IV (tomalek_at_mindspring.com)
Date: 05/10/05

  • Next message: Rahul Sundaram: "Re: OT: What's the deal with Ubuntu?" 
    Date: Tue, 10 May 2005 12:29:17 -0400
To: For users of Fedora Core releases <fedora-list@redhat.com>

    On Mon, 09 May 2005 21:10:18 -0400
    Kanwar Ranbir Sandhu <m3freak@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@mindspring.com>
*  Chemistry instructor / Mad scientist / Linux enthusiast!
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*  Web: http://home.mindspring.com/~charletiv/
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  • Next message: Rahul Sundaram: "Re: OT: What's the deal with Ubuntu?"