Ubuntu Linux - a superb new distribution

[user1234]

I tried this cutting edge distribution which is based on debian, but is more user friendly than refhat/fedora, and I like it a lot. It has the newest gnome 2.8, comes with the latest kernel (2.6.8.3) and uses firefox as browser. The desktop is clean, and the taskbars and application menus are well laid out (unlike other distros). And the best thing - it has this superb package manager "synaptic" which allows you to search, download and install packages with ease.

The installation was good, although not as polished as fedora, but still very straight forward. The only caveat I had is that I didn't notice the message about using the first user's password to perform adminstrative tasks, so later I tried in vein to change user to root. The new trend for system administration (like OSX) is to use sudo to become root when neccessary, but you cannot login as root to begin with. Of course you can change that if you like.

Otherwise, all my peripherals were detected and configured straight out of the box, including hot pluggable external drives. I haven't tried wireless lan yet. Nvidia graphics drivers installed with ease. Only gripe here is the use of the older XFree86 instead of the newer Xorg X-windows server.

Bottom line, this is really great - much nicer than fedora. It also gets great reviews. Did anyone else try it ?

 

[groovin]

im torn.... i like having so many choices in which distro i use and what i can do with them, but at the same time i get lost in the sea of new distros.

 

[drag]

"synaptic"

I used that on both my Fedora boxes and Debian. Although I still do prefer the old-fasion apt-get stuff. There is also aptitude which is a debian thing, it's pretty nice.

The new trend for system administration...

that's the old trend. You never log in for root unless you have to.

I think much about not being able to log in as root. Just not being able to log in remotely. having it disabled when your at the actual machine seems mostly pointless from a security percpective, maybe it's nice to force new users to adopt good practices though.

Having it based on Debian seems to be a good thing though. It's a nice start.

 

[justinian1978]

It looks promising so far. I haven't even THOUGHT about dual-booting with Linux on my new system yet. It's been hell just trying to get RAM that's isn't crappy

I don't have much experience with Debian, but Knoppix is a blessing--it's Debian-based and I use it as a boot/rescue disk all the time. I look forward to trying Ubuntu.

 

[drag]

Debian isn't for everybody, but it's designed so that it can be easily modified by third parties, and even remain backward compatable with Debian with a little work.

Knoppix, for instance, can be used as a installer for Debian. You install it, you change the sources over to Debian's official stuff, and do a dist-upgrade. There are a few snags, but it's nothing that can't be delt with. That's onen of the reasons that debian is the "universal OS", that and it works on dozens of different computer platforms + is used with kernels other then Linux on many of them, too.

I am downloading Ubuntu as I type.

I'll probably use it, at least till Fedora core 3 comes out, on my laptop.

 

[user1234]

It's also comes on a single cdrom disk ! why bother with 4 disks when you can download all the rest ?
Man, even the default screensavers they put there are amazing and work without a glitch.

On the negative side, yhey also included this special gnome vnc sever called "vino" - it works without problem
but is horribly slow. I installed the regular vncserver package, but it only works if I start it as root..... I will try
again later. But as root, it does work great and fast.

 

[Barnaby W. Füi]

Originally posted by: user1234
It's also comes on a single cdrom disk ! why bother with 4 disks when you can download all the rest ?

Can't you do that with pretty much all of the major distros?

 

[NuNuNYC]

hakuna matata!!! ubuntu 4 life...

 

[drag]

I tried it.

Does everything it promises. Mostly seems like Debian unstable with Gnome updated to 2.8.0. Still uses XFree 4.3 instead of the Xorg stuff, like debian. Even uses debian's Firefox 0.93 with the 0.10pr security backports. Edited the /etc/network/interfaces stuff and managed to setup a wireless card correctly for the first time in my life. Was hoping for X.org... I was running the very latest release that I compiled over Fedora's Core2 X server. Oh, well.

Debian isn't going to upgrade to X.org until they get that Debrix modular X server going successfully. Once they get that down then X.org will be mostly divorced from the monolythic-style XFree86 completely.

My laptop is mostly for experimentation right now. I think I am going to try Yoper. which is mostly targetted at the Gentoo people. High performance OS and all that. It uses KDE as the default setup, which sucks. I like Gnome now since 2.4. Didn't like either before that.

 

[user1234]

I also like the out-of-the-box it-just-works-well paradigm of this distro
Next I will try to compile the kernel.

Originally posted by: drag
... managed to setup a wireless card correctly for the first time in my life.

...game...set...match!


BTW, what's so special about Gentoo/Yoper anyway ?

 

[drag]

How I setup my card:

read "man interfaces"
edited /etc/network/interfaces

added these lines (... represent tab):
iface eth1 inet static
...address 192.168.1.12
...netmask 255.255.255.0
...gateway 192.168.1.254
...pre-up /sbin/iwconfig eth1 mode managed key "whatever" essid basement

Then created my resolv.conf:
echo "nameserver 192.168.1.254" > /etc/resolv.conf


A lot easier then the GUI monstrosities that people think makes things so easy.

For Gentoo and Yoper they say they are very quick because they use compiler optimizations and kernel patches to make things quicker. For instance Debian compiles everything to work on a i386 machine. (could be i486) That's the default way of doing stuff. That way it works on all x86 machines no, problem. All of them from the ancient i386 machines, thru the weird cyrix and early AMD setups, on thru Pentium 4 and AMD64 platforms.

Buy allowing gcc to break backward compatability it allows you to use the improvements in the x86 platform that have developed since then. With Gentoo you use whatever you feel like and Yoper is compiled for "i686". It's a bit of a misnomer. First PC was the 8088 platform. That was all new and stuff, but it didn't work well with the earlier apps made for 8bit computers (I guess), so they came out with 8086. 8086 caught on well, so then they made 80286 computers that were faster and bigger. (80186 never existed I guess). After that they just added i to the front and dropped the 80 to signify intel's dominance and design.

Then came i386 and with the i486 the modern PC computer pretty much solidified. The 486 is mostly the same with all computers from then till the pentium4 and amd althon platform. The AMD64 was the first realy big step away from 486.

Of course the performance and efficiency of the platform increased when Intel released it's Pentium line of proccessors. So most people refer to pentium platform as "586" to signify the step. Then again intel increased the capabilities of x86 platform again dramaticly when they released the Pentium-Pro, and later the Pentium II setup.

Those added new instructions and such and are refered to as i686. Now people like to fall for marketing and beleive that the newer chips again offer significant increases and such and call them i786 and such, but they are smoking crack. There are other optimizations specificly to take advantage of the Pentium4 design and Althon design, trying to get the last ounce out of the newer chip designs. But mostly i686 will give you 98% of the improvement (which we are talking mostly single digit percentages or low teens in improvements over compiling for 486, except for specific cases), and compiling specificly for, say Pentium-4, may actually degrade performance.

So that's one thing that is good about Gentoo/Yoper. For Gentoo you have portage and all that. You compile your own OS on the fly for maximum flexibility, performance, and whatever else they think of. Mostly a waste of time, IMO, but you do get all the newest stuff first.

Yoper tries to be fast thru being clever with the setup and execution. It's like Ubunto, were it's designed to be a "Usable out of the box" desktop-centric type distro.

Stuff like Gentoo and Debian try to be a overall "everything you can possibly use it for" universal type distros. So with both you end up doing a lot of setup to get what you want.

 

[user1234]

Sounds good, I will try Yoper, I like the idea of high performance, especially now that I'm upgrading my Linux box from Athlon XP 1500+ to Athlon XP 3200+. I have two partitions on the 160 GB disk - FC2, Ubuntu and also another 1GB partition with a minimal FC2 installation for "rescue" situations. I guess I will nuke the Fedora partition and install Yoper.

Thansk for the wifi tips, I'll try it soon when I get a wifi card for this machine. Which card do you use ?

 

[drag]

I use a prism54-based card. It's a 802.11g card (the higher speed protocol).

It's supported by the vanilla kernel since 2.6.5 (around that), and I was using patches before that. The only gotcha is that you have to download the firmware to /usr/lib/hotplug/ directory in order to get it to work (and have hotplug support setup, which should be on by default for most modern distros and rename it to isl3890).

check out prism54.org, they have a model compatability list. I like it because they support all modes, so I use a PCI version in a old PC that doubles as a mythtv box as a wireless bridge (wireless access point in other terms,). You need to have support for "master" mode, which lots of other types of cards don't support.

Not to be confused with prism2 prism2.5 or prism3 cards.

 

[user1234]

How do I download the firmware ? I just installed Netgear WG311v2

 

[drag]

Well you can extract it from your windows drivers for the most part.

But you can go to the internet and to here

Download the latest version (1.0.4.3 as of this writing) and rename the file isl3890
If your already runnning from computer that has internet access you can simply copy and paste this command if you have wget installed:
wget http://prism54.org/~mcgrof/firmware/1.0.4.3.arm

once you get it downloaded and renamed copy it to /usr/lib/hotplug/firmware

You can tell what is going on buy using the dmesg command. The first time you run a iwconfig eth# command (were eth# corrisponds to the correct ethernet device. (mine is eth1 for the wireless, and eth0 for my built in lan. on my laptop. For my desktop it's the other way around.) or bring the interface up then it should load the firmware into memory and report what is going on to the dmesg output.

Also a copy of the kernel messages are stored in /var/log/messages, this will help show you that it's working correctly.

skip down to the firmware section in the driver's readme file for more details.


ps. If you get it working e-mail the people at prism54.org or mention it on their forums. People have been having issues with those netgear (as told in the beginning of the compatability page) WG311 cards because netgear has apparently released a some that use a different chipset.

 

[user1234]

After trying both Yoper and Mandrake 10.1, and having more time with Ubuntu, I can honestly say Ubuntu is clearly better. I agree, Yoper is really fast out of the box, but has no support or good GUI tools, and Mandrake..... well is kind of like Fedora on KDE (by default), and has some powerful tools, but still very cluttered. They both as are lacking in one of the most important aspects - online updates and installing additional software. Ubuntu comes with this gigantic online repository of anything you could ever want, which is what allows the initial install to be so small. It's a great platform with all the basics to begin with, and you can easily add anything else that exists. I managed to compile the kernel, with the awesome kernel package, which takes care of everything and makes it a snap to install the new kernel, and third party modules.

I liked the partition resizing tool that comes with Mandrake, I wonder if I could get it in Ubuntu. Also I would like to try out Reiser filesystem, but I really don't want to re-install Ubuntu from scratch after all software I installed.

 

[Spencer278]

Originally posted by: user1234
I also like the out-of-the-box it-just-works-well paradigm of this distro
Next I will try to compile the kernel.

Originally posted by: drag
... managed to setup a wireless card correctly for the first time in my life.

...game...set...match!


BTW, what's so special about Gentoo/Yoper anyway ?

I like that. It feels so nice out of the box you get to recomplie the kernel right away. I think most linux distros just seem unfinished and kind of done half assed. I will have to try this one out and see if it is the same.

Nice torrent tho downloading at 800 Kb/s Make that 1200 Kb/s

 

[Spencer278]

I installed Ubuntun linux but I screwed up my home directory is there any way I can recreate it?

Edit: and by screwed up I mean deleted.

 

[EmperorRob]

The cool thing about Debian (and Debian-based distros) is that they are a living beast. You really only ever have to do 1 install and it just evolves over time with all of your apt-get's. I'd started using Debian 2 years ago and I'll never go back to an rpm-based distro.

But Yoper has my attention. Mainly b/c I'm wanting to see how much of a performance boost I would get from using their tweaks.

 

[skene]

I duno about Ubuntun...I mean the login picture on their site is pretty scary! Anyways, I might give it a try. Fedora 2 is OK, but there are still too many issues with it. Right now I'm running Gentoo, but it's getting somewhat annoying having to compile stuff everytime I wan to get a new app. It is a *great* way to learn how to a linux system works though and is fast once it's setup. The support forum for it is also the best I've found so far.

 

[user1234]

I think it's not practical to have to recompile everything from scratch just to install new software. If the Linux world wants to compete with Windows, we should be able to download, install and configure applications with a few mouse clicks. Pre-compiled is much better than sources because not having to compile simplifies the process, and it's way faster. The only advantage of compiling is that you have more control, but basically you have to deal with someone else's source which is like dealing with a bad interface. If I have to spend an hour to figure out how to compile and install an app, then it's probably not worth it. This is the 21st century, and spending so much time on each app is just pure inefficiency, and it doesn't scale (your time is limited).

Having said that, Ubuntu's Synaptic package management tool is superb - I just installed a bunch of apps and tools to handle multimedia. The default music and movie players which come with Ubuntu are not the best, so I installed XMMS and MPlayer, and all the codecs to handle every possible format, including WMA, WMV, DVD playback, and streaming internet radio. I followed the Multimedia HOWTO document, and although MPlayer is available pre-packaged, in this case it recommended compiling it (not sure why l), and it worked like a charm (I think the pre-packaged version should work just as well).

Again, I am very impressed with the ease of use of Ubuntu Linux. It's a superb multimedia platform.

 

[drag]

Synaptic isn't something Ubuntu made up, it's been around years and years. I used it in Redhat 9.0 with apt-get for rpm. Fedora currently supports apt-get by default, but has Yum installed by default. If you install apt-get for Fedora synaptic front end is aviable for install.

synaptic home page


Ubuntu isn't so much Debian-based as it is Debian unstable. The only real difference is that they setup Gnome 2.8 to run on it, rather then the current Gnome 2.6 that is aviable in the Debian unstable sources. Otherwise it's almost exactly the same.

For example the Firefox that they use is Firefox 9.3 with security patches backported from 10PR, exactly the same as Debian unstable.

 

[user1234]

Yeah, sure, I even remember installing Debian in the past, a long time ago, and it was not very easy to use back then. I understand that Ubuntu doesn't really introduce any new apps and tools, but just uses existing ones and packages the whole thing in a very easy to use and simple interface. So it's just a good way to try out a Debian based Linux, and for me, so far, it has been everything I could expect. I guess you could get the same result with other distributions, but many times the initial unfriendlyness can put people off. I also prefer the use of public software, especially well proven ones like those that Ubuntu uses, over proprietary tools (like xxx-drake, drake-yyy, etc) which are created by the distribution maker.

The only things I'm still missing is getting my wireless card to work (it's prism 2.5 based d-link) and tweaking the kernel configuration (this is slow because it seems to require a full clean recompile every time I change even a small option) so I can monitor my hardware (temps, voltages, speed) and optimize performance. Also, I would like to have a good CD/DVD burning app, besides the basic Nautilus burning functionality. Any ideas ?

 

[drag]

custom kernel creation with Debian's package tools.

installing and setting up Xcdroast cd burning tool under Debian. Don't use it much myself. I prefer to use cdrecord and other command line tools to master and burn my cdrom images.

Don't know much about the sensors stuff, don't know much about the prism2.5 stuff.

I beleive if you use the stock debian kernel you will have the wlan drivers aviable to install seperately thru apt-get and that will contain the drivers for your wireless card.

 

[user1234]

Thanks a lot !