On Mon, 09 May 2005 21:10:18 -0400 Kanwar Ranbir Sandhu <m3freak@xxxxxxxxxx> 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.. -- -------------------------------------------------------------------- * Charles Taylor <tomalek@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx> * Chemistry instructor / Mad scientist / Linux enthusiast! -------------------------------------------------------------------- * Web: http://home.mindspring.com/~charletiv/ --------------------------------------------------------------------
