Ubuntu Linux is #1 on DistroWatch.com for the last month

[user1234]

Ubuntu is now the most popular distribution based ranking the number of hits to its information page at distrowatch.com during the last month. Just 3 months after its official first release, this debian based distro has attracted a lot of attention, due to its simplicity, ease of use, clean design and being based on 100% free software. But it's also one of the most powerful distos, with 64 bit support, and multiple processor platforms. A six month release cycle guarantees it stays up to date, and you can also download the preview release of the next version. The online forums on their website are full of useful information, and are more active then almost any other distro, due to the fact that it has attracted so many enthusiastic users. Ubuntu truely makes Linux as easy to use as Windows, and without all the strings and proprietary tools that come with the commercial ditributions.

Link

 

[drag]

DEBIAN ROCKS!!!!

I hope that Ubuntu doesn't try to go off and do it's own thing... I would like it to remain as Debian-compatable as possible. Let the Debian maintainers do the work of creating the packages, and the Ubuntu people concentrate on getting the GUI and everything nice and easy to use.

 

[djdrastic]

The text installer needs a little work IMHO , but other than that I can really see why they have such a huge user base

 

[purpledemon]

what does ubuntu add to a vanilla debian install ? I've started using debian recently and I'm very happy with its ease of use.

any ubuntu users/evaluators care to comment?

 

[BlueWeasel]

I installed Ubuntu this past weekend and really the simple interface on my laptop (Celeron 1.5Ghz, 512mb RAM).

However, last night I installed Mepis on the laptop (I'm new to this so I'm trying many distros) and I like what I've seen so far. I like the included packages and the KDE manager, but it just feels so bloated compared to Ubuntu and Gnome.

At one point, the system was using 490mb of the RAM in an idle state (this is after opening up Open Office, Konq, and Mozilla). Oddly enough, it didn't feel sluggish and I didn't notice any swapping even when the system reported I only had 3mb of RAM free.

I'm debating to stick with Mepis+KDE or go back to Ubuntu+Gnome.

 

[Nothinman]

The text installer needs a little work IMHO

In what way? AFAIK they took a beta or RC snapshot of the new d-i Debian installer and used it, so it's possible there are still some bugs.

 

[user1234]

After reading the article below, I decided to try Mepis, so I installed it in a virtual machine running in a window under Ubuntu (using VMWare). My conclusion is that I don't like KDE.


http://osnews.com/story.php?news_id=9305

 

[brjames]

Originally posted by: BlueWeasel
I installed Ubuntu this past weekend and really the simple interface on my laptop (Celeron 1.5Ghz, 512mb RAM).

However, last night I installed Mepis on the laptop (I'm new to this so I'm trying many distros) and I like what I've seen so far. I like the included packages and the KDE manager, but it just feels so bloated compared to Ubuntu and Gnome.

At one point, the system was using 490mb of the RAM in an idle state (this is after opening up Open Office, Konq, and Mozilla). Oddly enough, it didn't feel sluggish and I didn't notice any swapping even when the system reported I only had 3mb of RAM free.

I'm debating to stick with Mepis+KDE or go back to Ubuntu+Gnome.

How much ram the system says you're using can be misleading. Lots of programs share memory (especially in KDE), but the system just adds up how much memory each is using so shared memory gets counted multiple times. I believe NPTL helps, since before I used NPTL gkrellm2 said I was nearly always using all my memory (490 sounds about right), after NPTL I'm at under 180MB several days into a session.

 

[djdrastic]

Can you tell me from the top of your head , how I would be abl e to install lilo instead of grub during the text installer ?

 

[Infohawk]

Doesn't ubuntu just access testing repositories? I didn't find testing stuff to be that stable...

 

[Nothinman]

Can you tell me from the top of your head , how I would be abl e to install lilo instead of grub during the text installer ?

No, because I've only seen the installer once and it was on PPC. But I would assume that you need to run the installer in expert mode to decide something like that, it's not a decision most new users want to make, not that I can even imagine why you would want to use LILO over GRUB anyway.

Doesn't ubuntu just access testing repositories? I didn't find testing stuff to be that stable...

Ubuntu has their own repositories, but you can enable universe and multiverse to get access to more of the Debian stuff that they don't officially support. But I have no idea if they're just sarge mirrors or if they're rebuilt for Ubuntu.

And I can say that sarge is stable and so is sid, I use sid on 2 desktops and sarge on 2 servers and have had virtually no problems with any of them.

 

[calyco]

Does acpi work out of the box in Ubuntu? I would prefer to use a distro that uses apt for updating instead, the only reason I am using Suse is for the power management features.

 

[Nothinman]

I believe so, but even if it doesn't it wouldn't be hard to enable. As I said, the only Ubuntu install I did was on PPC so the hardware support is going to be different. Stop by #linux on irc.arstechnica.com, a lot of people there are huge Ubuntu supporters, they'll help you out with whatever you need.

 

[Infohawk]

Originally posted by: Nothinman
Ubuntu has their own repositories

Do you know how expansive they are? Do they have most common packages or just stuff that comes with a default install?

And I can say that sarge is stable and so is sid, I use sid on 2 desktops and sarge on 2 servers and have had virtually no problems with any of them.

Discussed in another thread so I'll not address it here.

 

[Nothinman]

Do you know how expansive they are? Do they have most common packages or just stuff that comes with a default install?

http://www.ubuntulinux.org/support/documentation/faq/package-list

 

[Randabis]

Here's another good place to get a good idea of what packages ubuntu has.

http://higgs.djpig.de/ubuntu/www/

 

[drag]

Ubuntu uses the Debian Testing installer. Most of Ubuntu's packages are almost taken directly out of Debian Testing, and most third party packages (such as libdvdcss) work fine in ubuntu as long as you choose the 'debian testing' or 'sarge' versions.


The thing that Ubuntu does vs Debian that is so magical is that they provide a single default configuration. It's designed for desktop usage and it has a base setup that is easy for most users to grasp and get working quickly. They subtly modified the Gnome desktop to make it more user friendly and and have a desktop-friendly OS setup. Also for my Laptop they have a special 'laptop mode' that include much laptop-specific packages that got installed by default. Pretty nice.

Debian on the other hand had a default 'desktop' setup that left out most of the packages that I needed. This is normal for Debian because it aims to be a very generic and customizable Linux distro, but is troublesome for new users.

I used Ubuntu for a bit, but then made the mistake of upgrading to Hoary to get the X.org stuff, because I wanted to play around with it.

Hoary is NOT like Debian Ustable/Sid. It's more like Debian's various Experimental developement groups. Debian Sid is made up of packages that are eventually going to be included into Sarge, currently, because it's the current testing version. Hoary seems more setup to be the next version and is a more radical change. Most of the packages are still Debian Testing, but the GUI related and end-user releated stuff is all very beta.

At least that is my impression. For instance with the Gnome packages are all from Gnome 2.9 development snapshots.

I did learn some interesting things, though. People are now rapidly moving towards a FreeDesktop standard for doing Menu entries in a special XML formated file. This means that programmers can make software that can use a default way to set menu entries for end-users, which will be nice and help out making 'universal' linux packages and install scripts, which should make it nice. Pretty much like what Debian and Mandrake's 'Debian-style" menu managment already does, but in a form that most everybody can agree on. Yay for Freedesktop.org

 

[purpledemon]

Originally posted by: drag
Ubuntu uses the Debian Testing installer. Most of Ubuntu's packages are almost taken directly out of Debian Testing, and most third party packages (such as libdvdcss) work fine in ubuntu as long as you choose the 'debian testing' or 'sarge' versions.


The thing that Ubuntu does vs Debian that is so magical is that they provide a single default configuration. It's designed for desktop usage and it has a base setup that is easy for most users to grasp and get working quickly. They subtly modified the Gnome desktop to make it more user friendly and and have a desktop-friendly OS setup. Also for my Laptop they have a special 'laptop mode' that include much laptop-specific packages that got installed by default. Pretty nice.

Debian on the other hand had a default 'desktop' setup that left out most of the packages that I needed. This is normal for Debian because it aims to be a very generic and customizable Linux distro, but is troublesome for new users.

I used Ubuntu for a bit, but then made the mistake of upgrading to Hoary to get the X.org stuff, because I wanted to play around with it.

Hoary is NOT like Debian Ustable/Sid. It's more like Debian's various Experimental developement groups. Debian Sid is made up of packages that are eventually going to be included into Sarge, currently, because it's the current testing version. Hoary seems more setup to be the next version and is a more radical change. Most of the packages are still Debian Testing, but the GUI related and end-user releated stuff is all very beta.

At least that is my impression. For instance with the Gnome packages are all from Gnome 2.9 development snapshots.

I did learn some interesting things, though. People are now rapidly moving towards a FreeDesktop standard for doing Menu entries in a special XML formated file. This means that programmers can make software that can use a default way to set menu entries for end-users, which will be nice and help out making 'universal' linux packages and install scripts, which should make it nice. Pretty much like what Debian and Mandrake's 'Debian-style" menu managment already does, but in a form that most everybody can agree on. Yay for Freedesktop.org

thankyou .... that was exactly the kind of commentary I was looking for

 

[Davegod75]

ubuntu is great. very clean and only includes the most used applications on initial install which i like. Any others you want are a quick sudo apt get install ______ away.

The unofficial starter guide is great as well. http://ubuntuguide.org/

 

[rotarychainsaw]

I <3 Ubuntu. Using the Hoary repositories aren't so bad. Granted I don't really do anything with the ubuntu box besides mess around, but stuff doesn't USUALLY get borked when updating. Once in a while the devs will put up a new kernel without updating the modules, thats the only time stuff really gets messed up. They stopped messing that up though for a while now.

 

[Tullphan]

Originally posted by: Nothinman

Can you tell me from the top of your head , how I would be abl e to install lilo instead of grub during the text installer ?

No, because I've only seen the installer once and it was on PPC. But I would assume that you need to run the installer in expert mode to decide something like that, it's not a decision most new users want to make, not that I can even imagine why you would want to use LILO over GRUB anyway.

I'm presently using Suse 9 on my dual-boot machine. If I delete Suse, will I have to delete Grub since i'm assuming Ubuntu uses it?

 

[Nothinman]

If you want to replace SuSe with Ubuntu, don't delete anything, just run the Ubuntu installer and install it overtop of the SuSe partition.

 

[Wolfsraider]

I d/l and installed it last night ( Ubuntu ) and I am really liking it.

Its easier than suse and more stable on my hardware

p-4 3.2 prescott
sata drives
sata controllers
TV Tuner etc...

It recognized everything right out of the box..

In addition I loved the walkthru... just what I needed to get rolling

This is the first time I have gotten video drivers to load properly.

I love the games (same as suse but playable).

My memory usage (even running d.c). has been max 132 mb out of 512 mb

It took me a bit to get the updates as they take a bit before kicking in (only some)
but all installed no problems.

Mandrake (tried 10.1) and suse 9.2 pro I liked but this one is much nicer and easier to work with..

I ordered a server and can't wait to test it out with Ubuntu. lol
Mike

 

[MGMorden]

Originally posted by: Nothinman
not that I can even imagine why you would want to use LILO over GRUB anyway.

Well, some of us are stubborn to adapt. LILO is simple. I'm used to it and can make configuration changes quickly. I've used GRUB on occasion, and while I can tell it's more powerful, I was at a loss when something went wrong. Better to use what I know for now .

Of course I'm still running Slackware and Gentoo on my two Linux systems. Never even heard of Ubuntu until I came here a few weeks ago after a LONG (year or two) hiatus from AT :laugh:.