Ubuntu Revealed
Most distributions in this choice saturated GNU/Linux community exist on a niche feature. They'll do everything at an average level, or even subpar, and then have one thing that sets them apart. For Arch it's simplistic minimalism, and Yoper's is prelinking and other speed enhancements. Vector and Deli are for various ages of old hardware, and Gentoo is for the hardcores with bandwidth and CPU cycles burning a hole in their hard drives. There's Debian for those who believe strong package management negates the need for releases, and RPM based 'user friendly' distributions for the people who prefer off the CD solutions with constant release cycles.
Canonical Software is a veritable all star team of developers, mostly from the Gnome and Debian projects, and it shows in their design goals. Ubuntu is fast, yet feature rich. It's up to date, yet capable of being run on relatively old hardware. They take a traditionally bulky desktop environment which is near to their heart and prove that it's reputation was due to years of misimplementation.
What's more is they plan to blend one of the best package managers in the community with a steady six month release cycle, and are doing so with their own package repository. With this they set the foundation for a distribution which could be perfectly acceptable to hardcore hackers, yet perfectly usable by your average user. Ubuntu may finally break free of the niche.
The Cost of Knowledge
Unfortunately all of this is moot if Canonical can not come through on their aspiration to just work. We must keep in mind that this is a preview release, and a well publicized one at that. After all, that's just a fancy way of saying public beta, so there are bound to be bugs, hunting them is the purpose. However, there are still a lot of them, and many quite serious.
The most common seem to revolve around network detection, and these are usually easily resolved by manually loading modules during installation. It also appears that many such cards are actually addressed by the detection routine, but simply slipped through glitches. I'm no developer, but that suggests to me that there's a good auto detection/configuration foundation in place, and that fixes will be fairly easy.
But that's not to say some bugs aren't more severe. An official kernel not finding /proc is simply unacceptable. Abnormal IRQ conflicts with parallel ports and empty PPPoE symlinks can't be fixed by your average user. Even a webcam not working properly or the aforementioned network detection problems will be deal breakers for many. If you're interested in more information I'd suggest perusing Ubuntu's bugzilla and subscribing to the ubuntu-users list.
But again, this is a public beta, it exists to find bugs, and that's what it's doing. It's true, the amount of configuration I had to perform is unacceptable for a distribution with Ubuntu's goals, but at this stage it's at least understandable. To be honest though, I am irked by the quantity of the bugs, and curious about Canonical's capability to fix the vast majority by late October. But then, that's practically overnight, and I'm perfectly willing to give them a year, as a new distribution.
Staying the Path
According to Ubuntu's website, their namesake means "humanity to others" in an African language. Just like this greater philosophy, I believe the desktop design philosophies behind the Ubuntu Linux distribution have been within our community for years. What Canonical has done, is to take an introspective look at said community in order to finally bring both the moral and technical philosophies, together, towards fruition. It's my opinion that Ubuntu, at it's root, is what Linux is all about as a whole. But then, I wear hemp too.
I'm not going to be switching to Ubuntu, as apt simply can not compete with Arch's package management. I am, however, still very much excited by the prospects for this distribution. It's amazing really, a week ago hardly anybody had heard of this nameless project, and now they're already beginning to set benchmarks with their very first public beta. If Canonical is successful with their graphical installer, and they manage to get this very serious bug problem straightened out without ideological compromises, Ubuntu could become the first distribution I feel comfortable recommending to the average user.
That's right, with patience and perseverance, Canonical might turn Ubuntu into the distribution which the mainstream has been constantly reminding us about, or waiting for, as it were.
Test System
| Component | Status |
| Asus P3V4X (VIA Apollo Pro 133a) | working, as detected |
| Coppermine Pentium3 800EB | working |
| 1GB PC133 SDRAM | working |
| Nvidia GeForce3 64MB | working, optional configuration |
| Hercules Game Theater XP (CS46XX) | working, as detected |
| D-Link 530TX 10/100 (VIA Rhine) | working in loopback, as detected |
| Jaton Com V.90 ISA (Ambient 56xx) | mostly working, heavy configuration |
| Acer 12x8x32 IDE | reading and writing, as detected |
| IBM Deskstar8 8.4GB IDE | working, as detected |
| Cornerstone P1600 monitor | working, as detected |
| USB Keyboard and Mouse | working, as detected |
| APM Power Management | working, manual configuration |
| A healthy dose of contempt for desktop environments | broken |
About the Author
Michael Salivar is a 22 year old student of Earth from Arizona with images of carbon fiber laptops dancing in his head. He is a recovering Linux newbie of two years who has forsaken life's complexities in favor of our planet's beauty.
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