“Various reviews I’ve seen about Ubuntu have attacked the release names (Hoary Hedgehog, Breezy Badger and upcoming Dapper Drake), or the ‘ugly’ brown GNOME screen background (which is easily changed). I consider such “flaws” to be trivial. When push comes to shove, I want my operating system to ‘just work’, and in this department Ubuntu delivers.”
I don’t find their theme ugly but it’s a non-issue for me since changing themes is trivial. In fact, I enjoy taking the time to customize the look to exactly what I want it to look and feel.
The biggest reason I keep using (K)Ubuntu is because it really does just work like it should. Hardware support, software support, stablity are all top-notch with this distro.
When it comes down to it, it’s just another debian that has a mediocre installer and hardware detection, and various Gnome tweaks.
For all the money that is invested in Ubuntu, kanotix does a much better job at hardware detection…windmodem and wireless work right out of the box.
And frankly, I’m done with the whole freeze/development cycle. I’ll stick with Sid.
kanotix does a much better job at hardware
Intresting. Since month or so, in every Ubuntu theread, I can read few anons that mention that Kanotix does a better job. Hope you guys getting paid for that effort. 😀
Actually, it’s the same guy.
And it’s not any better in my experience. I use some pretty “out-there” hardware, and niether distro does a better job.
Intresting. Since month or so, in every Ubuntu theread, I can read few anons that mention that Kanotix does a better job. Hope you guys getting paid for that effort. 😀
Oh, I’m getting paid the big bucks, but it doesn’t change the facts that Ubuntu is mediocre at best when it comes to hardware detection and driver support.
Oh, I’m getting paid the big bucks
So, if you’re finiancaly stable, maybe take some time and write Kanotix review. Then you will have a place to post comments on how Kanotix rule. You’r not smarter than a guy who posted his CFlags into Ubuntu thread month ago:
a) it was off topic
b) his flags was b0rken
change the facts that Ubuntu is mediocre at best when it comes to hardware detection and driver support.
There’s a problem with your fact. It’s opinion. Your personal point of view based on your own experience with unnamed hardware. My experience on this is totally different. I’ve installed +15 PC with Ubuntu.
So, if you’re finiancaly stable, maybe take some time and write Kanotix review. Then you will have a place to post comments on how Kanotix rule. You’r not smarter than a guy who posted his CFlags into Ubuntu thread month ago:
Here’s my review: It’s knoppix with its own repositories with some extra bits in it, compatible with Sid, and great hardware detection and driver installation.
There’s a problem with your fact. It’s opinion. Your personal point of view based on your own experience with unnamed hardware. My experience on this is totally different. I’ve installed +15 PC with Ubuntu.
Sorry, but it is fact that many distros do hardware detection much better than Ubuntu. OpenSuse and kanotix just to name a couple. The biggest challenges for people that won’t to dick around with getting their systems up and running is getting things like wireless an winmodems up and running right off the bat. If Ubuntu can’t be bothered to detect the winmodem and slmodem drivers and also can’t be bothered to detect very common chipsets like rl8180 and install the drivers like OpenSuse and kanotix then its mediocre at best for something that proclaims itself to be some great desktop distro.
But don’t worry, once the Ubuntu hype has died down and something else comes along to replace it, then you can be a fanboy of that distro too.
Here’s my review: It’s knoppix with its own repositories with some extra bits in it, compatible with Sid, and great hardware detection and driver installation.
In other words: nothing news.
If Ubuntu can’t be bothered to detect the winmodem and slmodem drivers
You shouln’t buy such HW. It’s like complainging that your Fiat Panda motor won’t run in Ferrari. It’s crippled.
then you can be a fanboy of that distro too.
Yay! Calling people fanboys! How mature! I fan your adultness.
In other words: nothing news.
In other words, it works out of the box better than Ubuntu
You shouln’t buy such HW. It’s like complainging that your Fiat Panda motor won’t run in Ferrari. It’s crippled.
Nice moronic car analogy – like that hasn’t been played out a million times before. But yeah, you prove the point that linux on the desktop will always be a hobbyist toy when people have to buy hardware to make sure its linux compatible, or supposed great desktop distros can’t be bothered to detect and install drivers that are already there.
Yay! Calling people fanboys! How mature! I fan your adultness.
I know the truth hurts you people.
Mr.Noname.
Come up with links to documentation for your claims. I know Knoppix has great hardware detection, but so do several other distros. Support your claims with evidence or stay quiet.
Buying linux compatible hardware is no different than buying windows compatible hardware.
When buying hardware you have to make sure, it actually works with you existing hardware and software. This is not always the case.
My old Riva TNT card never got to work under Windows. However, Linux and DOS and no problem using it. But Windows just couldn’t.
All systems seem to be mediocre
It is interesting to see that with many astroturfers and (paid) supporters of Ubuntu there is someone that dare to say that kanotix ones are paid….
Paid supporters and others use his real names and post ON topic. While you are anon and post off topic. See difference?
Paid supporters and others use his real names and post ON topic. While you are anon and post off topic. See difference?
Oh yeah, because we can trust posts with real names like “anonymous penguin”. Idiot.
Another balanced post from you. Calling me idiot. Well, whatever you say mr-anon. I’m using my real name, because I stand behind my opinions. If you can’t that’s not my problem.
“Oh yeah, because we can trust posts with real names like “anonymous penguin”. Idiot.”
You are the only idiot here. As if taking a random name fom the the telephone directory would make somebody more believable.
At least I am a register user, regardless of my chosen nick. You on the other hand are an anonymous coward and troll.
At least I am a register user, regardless of my chosen nick. You on the other hand are an anonymous coward and troll.
At least with a nick like anonymous pengiun everybody knows that you are a zealot troll.
“At least with a nick like anonymous pengiun everybody knows that you are a zealot troll.”
Start by learning English spelling. Otherwise everybody will know that you are an illiterate 13 years old.
Anonymous Penguin, you and the other linux troll zealots have ruined OSNews like you ruin other forums.
rotflmao, mention another forum where you have seen me posting. People like you on the other hand have been ridiculed or kicked out from any forum which counts.
I have seen this muppets IP address on numberous occasions here. Each time he is trying to start a flamewar. He stay anonymous just in case it gets personally attacked by email.
I vote we ban his IP address.
“I vote we ban his IP address.”
I second that.
Raver, you and the other insane linux trolls are powerless to ban anything.
It is interesting to see that with many astroturfers and (paid) supporters of Ubuntu
If you had any evidence of paid Ubuntu astroturfing then you could present it and your ideals would gain traction.
But I guess you don’t, and you just assume its that way because so many people like Ubuntu and you can’t figure out why. I’ll give you a clue- its no one single reason. Its a bunch of reasons all together. For me it was the first distro based on Sid where I could do dist-upgrade and never have it break and good Gnome support when most distros are KDE based.
If not enough apply to you leave it alone. Stop acting bitter and petty without and evidence to back it up.
If kanotix weren’t completely broken that’d be nice. The Debian version change messed up Kanotix’s apt system.
Ubuntu’s detection is pretty decent, everything with hotplug seems to do well anymore. (Although not with winmodems, but hey, buy actual hardware).
Ubuntu’s problem for me was always speed. This makes me wonder though if my problems wouldn’t have disappeared by simply installing the 686 kernel…
The 486 kernel on slack is significantly snappier…
“If kanotix weren’t completely broken that’d be nice. The Debian version change messed up Kanotix’s apt system.”
I have never broken anything in Kanotix. The only way to break it is to blindly perform a Sid dist-upgrade.
Just don’t dist-upgrade at times of major changes (which BTW are very rare), or simply do an “apt-get upgrade” or even better, use pinning and pin your system to Etch.
On top of that use apt-listbugs.
or the ‘ugly’ brown GNOME screen background (which is easily changed).
To nothing? They don’t provide *ANY* alternative wallpaper. Unlike KDE. Even WindowsXP has a wallpaper selection > 1
i’ll tell you a secret: there are wallpapers in the ubuntu website and http://www.gnome-look.org/, right click and set as wallpaper, voila!
What still find most disappointing about ubuntu is the lack of polish in some areas:
Look at the icons, they look all diferente like they were made by 20 diferent persons, each one with their particular taste and in a hurry!
The colors are all so dim, come on put some color on it!
Installing software is not quite ready: main restricted security updates universe multiuniverse. What the hell is this? it’s too confusing for the average user…
What still find most disappointing about ubuntu is the lack of polish in some areas
This is a perfectly normal situation for a young distro. Look at what they have reached in a single year.
Uh, sure. Then here’s a distribution for you that “just works”. It’s new. It’s called “Oonty Goonty”
The lasted version, is called “Silly Dafodils”. The last one was called “Slimy Silkworm”. We’re working on the next one, called “Butterscotch Butterbeans”.
It’s installs with a blinding yellow blinking background and no others.
Good grief. These stupid names are one of reasons I’ve never bothered with that silly distribution. Dismissing the weakness of the “naming” convention and the color “scheme”, with reduction logic like “I just want something that works”, reveals a lack of understanding.
I think the color and their names are their “thing”; just like how Source Mage has ‘spells’ that you ‘cast’ and general magic-themed names for standard distro behaviors, how Puppy Linux has dog-themed programs (pup-get, dotpup, chubby puppy), how Mac OS X is always blue-themed, named after cats, and full of iNamed programs; and how all releases of Microsoft Operating Systems these days are called “Windows” even though it’s an OS and not an actual window.
It’s a gimmick. Fortunately, they got rid of the naked people in the default wallpapers gimmick.
Good grief. These stupid names are one of reasons I’ve never bothered with that silly distribution. Dismissing the weakness of the “naming” convention and the color “scheme”, with reduction logic like “I just want something that works”, reveals a lack of understanding.
Correct. Its hard to understand how some people can be so shallow.
Well, my Ubuntu breezy experience was not so good. Installation freezed 2-3 times and I had to restart the installation from scratch. Also, installer lacks progress bar in many sections: Is it doing something or did my system freeze? What’s going on? System is getting repository information for 10 minutes and does not give any feedback during this time. This really should be fixed.
I chose my keyboard to be “Turkish Q” but after installation, in Gnome it simply did not work and I could not type my passord correctly. Using setxkmap worked, but newbies do not know that. (Kubuntu worked perfectly in this area, generally KDE has better languages and keyboards support.)
Adding another keyboard layout resulted in an error box. So I removed it, but I got an error again on next login. The desktop is just full of errors. Booting is graphical, but shutting down is not, this is not coherent. GDM reloads in 10 seconds after logging out.
Distro has some serious bugs and they need to test it before releasing this. Hopefully this will change in future.
I like Ubuntu and switched from Fedora to Ubuntu when Breezy came out. I just found that I liked apt better than yum and wanted to try Ubuntu for a while. Honestly the differences are pretty small between it and any other distro.
I can still use firefox, openoffice, gnumeric, evolution, xsnow, gaim, gtkam, xfce, lifera, xmms, mplayer, gqview and a hundred other foss programs in just about any distro. I did replace the brown theme with a nice blue one in XFCE and installed the bluecurve mouse theme for Ubuntu and the background with a nice shot of the Pacific ocean I took last year.
Here is my point… GPL/FOSS is about choice. It’s because of this that I (or anyone else) can use Ubuntu, someone else can use Slax, Gentoo, Redhat, Mandrake/Mandriva, Linspire, etc.
As long as Ubuntu keeps building upon the GPL foundation I say we all should welcome it into community of Linux distrobutions.
>>…GPL/FOSS is about choice…
The choice is illusionary. Every Linux distribution serves up the same software.
Yes, an abundance of FOSS software exists. Much of it is in what amounts to perpetual beta testing, with enough annoyances and unresolved quirks to test anyone’s patience.
Most of the time, most users would forego the freedom to choose from several not-quite-ready applications that demand a lot of tender nursing and frequent resort to Google for the certainty of a single application of proven reliability and usability.
UBUNTU sucks PERIOD.
I have tried both Ubuntu and Kubuntu 5.10. Neither detected my monitor, which has been detected by every other distro I’ve tried. Plus, I am not able to get streaming video to play on either of them. Installing mplayer from the multiverse repository and the codecs did not help. Again a problem I have not faced with any other distro and I have tried several. This is not an example of a distro that just works.
The x86 hardware market is the proof that this is true.
All the “didn’t work on my PC” posts are related to un- or badly supported hardware. No distro has the resources needed to test every release on all possible x86 hardware combination and that’s why many people are doomed to encounter nasty problems when they install Linux.
Even if a driver for your hardware exists somewhere in Linuxland that doesn’t mean that your distro of choice will actually install it correctly.
For example the reviewer complains about a bad Raedon driver and he’s still on the lucky side. I’ve an SiS UniChrome chip and while their are Linux drivers for it you can forget trying to use it in Ubuntu. Of course if you’re willing to do some serious hacking which involves downloading CVS sources, compilation, manual X.org config etc. you can get it to work but that’s not something most people are willing to put up with.
This problem is universal and all the “my distro has superiour hardware detection because it works on my PC unlike your distro” are just ignorant because it’s quite likely that “my distro” won’t run on something “your distro” runs in return.
The free, big x86 hardware market is bad even under the MS monopoly with official vendor support, on linux it’s a f–king nightmare. Almost like a game of luck: it works or it works not.
And there’s no way to fix this unless Linux gets big-time vendor support and a stable
(i.e. binary-driver friendly) driver API. At least the second thing won’t happen as long as Linus and other people who value developer interests over user interests control the kernel.
That’s one of many reasons why Linux is still far from being ready for the desktop of most people.
That was well said without trolling anyone!
Still choice is good if you can find the OS that works for you. For some MS is good and for others Ubuntu is good. Just find the OS that works. Just like cars, that what choice with an OS is all about!
Hell a Yugo gets you from point A to point B and back.
X.org R7 will change that. Finally.
Quote: “The free, big x86 hardware market is bad even under the MS monopoly with official vendor support, on linux it’s a f–king nightmare. Almost like a game of luck: it works or it works not.”
I wouldn’t say it was that bad, but things could be better.
Quote: “And there’s no way to fix this unless Linux gets big-time vendor support and a stable
(i.e. binary-driver friendly) driver API. At least the second thing won’t happen as long as Linus and other people who value developer interests over user interests control the kernel.”
Agreed. This is the real issue. Other issues to consider are one package management system, and one desktop environment. If Linux were to do these 3 things, a stable API/ABI, one desktop environment and one package management system, it would start to get major software developers actually developing for it. And that would in turn mean more users, would then cascade into better hardware support. This would cascade into a higher degree of ‘pre-installed’ systems.
Part of the problem is that GNU/Linux is about choice. And choice is good. Sadly, it’s a double edged sword – having choice means too much choice and confusion. For Linux to make serious roads into market adoption, it must make changes. If it doesn’t, it’s always going to be 2nd rate in terms of sales/adoption.
Dave
Oh, and get rid of Software patents would really help market innovation.
Part of the problem is that GNU/Linux is about choice.
GNU/Linux isn’t about choice anymore than Windows or OSX is about choice. If you run GNU/Linux then you’re stuck with what will run on that platform.
Part of the problem is that GNU/Linux is about choice. And choice is good. Sadly, it’s a double edged sword – having choice means too much choice and confusion. For Linux to make serious roads into market adoption, it must make changes. If it doesn’t, it’s always going to be 2nd rate in terms of sales/adoption.
Wow, you’re actually starting to wake up to reality.
“Wow, you’re actually starting to wake up to reality.”
Dave (Morgoth), as far as I understand him, wouldn’t use anything other than linux even if hell froze over.
But he is quite frank and therefore he’ll tell the truth about his beloved OS, no matter what. His aim is to see Linux improve.
You on the other hand sound like a troll.
Or is MS Winbloze now perfect? Since when?
Dave (Morgoth), as far as I understand him, wouldn’t use anything other than linux even if hell froze over.
Oh, so that’s his problem. I guess that’s yours too.
“Oh, so that’s his problem. I guess that’s yours too.”
No, it isn’t a problem at all, it is called being realistic instead of blindfolded.
You instead seem to have one, because apparently you believe that whatever OS you use is perfect.
You instead seem to have one, because apparently you believe that whatever OS you use is perfect.
Since you’re a troll, I guess it’s not surprising that your reading words that aren’t there.
“Since you’re a troll, I guess it’s not surprising that your reading words that aren’t there.”
I am writing in favor of linux in a linux thread.
You on the other hand…
So who is more likely to be a troll?
I am writing in favor of linux in a linux thread.
You on the other hand…
So who is more likely to be a troll?
Will you zealots (anonymous pengiun) ever learn to stop trolling threads?
Guess what: Hunting down and installing drivers one by one for Windows is MY nightmare.
I want EVERY piece of hardware I own to be correctly recognized and set up under any operating system available on the planet. For this to occure, there would have to be OPEN SOURCE, VENDOR SUPPORTED drivers. So each driver could be easily ported to every operating system, and could be distributed directly with the various distributions.
I greatly hope that the one graphics card project which tries to deliver 3D – graphics with an open source driver succeeds. I, for one will buy one regardless of price, simply because it will save me the trouble of hunting down drivers for my card.
This kind of thinking is too subjective. I like the Ubuntu background, I like Gnome, so, how can the Ubuntu team please all users?
I cassify this like a “mind masturbation”!
Please, say something to Ubuntu become better and better.
I have to agree with your comments about driver support and future driver support. The only way linux will really get popular is if redhat forks it, and either takes over the whole market or every distro follows them. The biggest problem with the kernel is the driver support, even ati/nvidia are haveing problems with one kernel to the next, because those kernel developers think its a great idea to keep changing things.
How is a company that has little resources supposed to release their product for linux if they have to constantly release new drivers for every stupid kernel? It is just a matter of time before redhat or novel decides to fork the kernel because of disputes. Lets hope it doesnt destroy linux.
I use Nvidia drivers, and I downloaded them from Nvidias site. However, they work on all kernels I throw them at.
The only thing you need is the kernel-sources and gcc, and the driver will self-install.
So, either you did not do it correctly, or your post was a failed attempt at FUD.
use Nvidia drivers, and I downloaded them from Nvidias site. However, they work on all kernels I throw them at.
The only thing you need is the kernel-sources and gcc, and the driver will self-install.
So, either you did not do it correctly, or your post was a failed attempt at FUD.
Here is a translation that properly reflects your intelligence level:
I USE NVIDIA DRIEVRS AND I DOWNLOAEDD TH3M FROM NVIDIAS SIET1!!!11! OMG WTF LOL HOWEV3R THEY WORK ON AL KARNELS I THROW THAM AT1!11 OMG LOL TEH ONLY THNG U NED IS TEH K3RNAL-SOURC3S AND GC AND DA DRIEVR WIL S3LF-INSTAL!!11!11
SO EITHER U DID NOT DO IT CORECTLY OR UR POST WAS A FALEED ATEMPT AT FUD11!11!1 OMG LOL
“So, either you did not do it correctly, or your post was a failed attempt at FUD.”
AHhh there it is – a good old fashioned linux attack
No, it was not the typical linux attack.
The guy was an obvious FUDster, but he used Nvidia as an example. Nvidia drivers are simple to install and work on all kernels.
Either the guy did not do it correctly, like having no kernel sources files, or he does not know how to change “nv” to “nvidia” in xorg.conf, or he is a complete muppet.
Therefore, I stand by my original statement;
“So, either you did not do it correctly, or your post was a failed attempt at FUD.”
I don’t know where you are comming from, but my GeForce 4000 MX PCs (2) and a GeForce2 MX PC does not work with the recent nVidia drivers. I need to use an old kernel and the v6111 (a year old) drivers to get 2D acceleration, or I need to disable this feature alltogether. It doesn’t hold! And _many_ people are experiencing problems with those drivers. And the ATI drivers as well.
Don’t accuse people of spreading FUD too easily. You just take value from the expression.
yes, because you’re in the middle of something but when 2.6 came, the nvidia drivers of this time needed a lot of hard manual tweaking in order to work… Still, 2 versions later of nvidia drivers worked correctly….
but you had to wait 2 months for that..
so no, your argument is not even close to one. Let us just wait the next kernel abi changing and see how long will we wait for the next nvidia stable release (I bet 2 months as usual)
Don’t forget Linus hates binary drivers so he just doesn’t mind about changing his abi “if they released their drivers as source, they’ll already be in the kernel” something like that..
I don’t judge, I’m glad oss exist but sometimes everybody seems to be to much rigid…….
(I think the glibc folks are way worse about binary compability for exemple)
Hence the reason why I have alot more hope in OpenSolaris moving onto the desktop than I do with Linux; its all very nice having hundreds of distributions, all claiming that they’re ‘aiming for the desktop’, but its pretty bloody hard when none of them actually ‘get it'(tm)
There needs to be a coherient and consistant layout, package management, desktop, configuration setup, stable driver ABI/API and a compiler that has actually nailed down a ABI that lasts longer than one release.
What end users need are these; out of the box support for their hardware; they don’t want to dick around with trying to add things to obscure text files, they want it either supported out of the box, or at the very least, the ability to easily download and install the driver with minimum fuss – click, click, click and reboot. If further configuration is required, plain english would help the situation alot more than gobblygoop ridden dialogue boxes that are chock with buttons with undescriptive labels.
End users also want applications; games are the least of their worries, they’ve got a games console for that. What end users want are applications which allow them to easy sync up their digital camera with their computer, edit their photos with built in filters that do 90% of the work for them – without the need of reading through a book.
*NIX users can scream and cry till the cows come home, but as so long as the end users requirements aren’t being met, the next best alternative to Windows will be Mac.
“*NIX users can scream and cry till the cows come home, but as so long as the end users requirements aren’t being met, the next best alternative to Windows will be Mac.”
I could even “sort of” agree if the price Mac hardware wasn’t twice (or more) expensive as generic x86 hardware.
It will be a cold day in hell before you’ll convince people in this country (Italy) to spend twice as much just in order to have a different OS.
“*NIX users can scream and cry till the cows come home, but as so long as the end users requirements aren’t being met, the next best alternative to Windows will be Mac.”
I could even “sort of” agree if the price Mac hardware wasn’t twice (or more) expensive as generic x86 hardware.
It will be a cold day in hell before you’ll convince people in this country (Italy) to spend twice as much just in order to have a different OS.
Ditto for Brazil. You took the words from my mouth. Its amazing how Apple apologists always dismiss the price factor when throwing Mac as an option for the average user. And it gets worst when they say that the Mac user base is bigger than Linux´s and that the price is right basing their numbers on the USA market share (as if the USA is the whole world).
I wish I had the money to afford an Apple machine. They´re slick and would fullfill my needs perfectly, but they cost big bucks here in Brazil (Really… I mean it!) so that´s a no go for me. Like dozens of people that I know, I switched to Linux because the price is “affordable” 🙂 and it offer the features that I need, plus one hundred times the fun of use it instead of MS OSes.
“I wish I had the money to afford an Apple machine. They´re slick and would fullfill my needs perfectly, but they cost big bucks here in Brazil (Really… I mean it!) so that´s a no go for me. Like dozens of people that I know, I switched to Linux because the price is “affordable” 🙂 and it offer the features that I need, plus one hundred times the fun of use it instead of MS OSes.”
How true. What you say applies to me verbatim.
Ditto for Brazil. You took the words from my mouth. Its amazing how Apple apologists always dismiss the price factor when throwing Mac as an option for the average user. And it gets worst when they say that the Mac user base is bigger than Linux´s and that the price is right basing their numbers on the USA market share (as if the USA is the whole world).
I’m actually in New Zealand – our GDP percapita is actually equal to that of Malaysia when looking at it in US$ terms – I’d hardly say that our little island nation is rich to the extreme.
I wish I had the money to afford an Apple machine. They´re slick and would fullfill my needs perfectly, but they cost big bucks here in Brazil (Really… I mean it!) so that´s a no go for me. Like dozens of people that I know, I switched to Linux because the price is “affordable” 🙂 and it offer the features that I need, plus one hundred times the fun of use it instead of MS OSes.
Here is another shock; even YOU don’t make up the majority of Brizilians; most Brizilians are struggling to get by on the meager living the scrap up via the long hours they work – they don’t give a toss about computer, their main concern is making sure their family has a roof over their head and food on the table.
So before your start giving me the crap about ‘the third world’, need I remind you, that you’re part of the top 10, possible 20 percent of your country! statistically, you are in a very small minority, so even if Apple computers WERE cheaper in Brazil, the vaast majority STILL couldn’t afford them – hell, they’d have to be government subsidised for the average Petro Gonzelus to afford.
OK, so I suppose that instead of yelling at one another we can agree about a very simple fact: the *vast* majority of the world population can’t afford a Mac.
How about acknowledging that the vast majority can’t afford a PC, because they have more important priorities, namely, surviving!
Also good. But at least a PC can be had for about $100, maybe less in poorer countries.
I could even “sort of” agree if the price Mac hardware wasn’t twice (or more) expensive as generic x86 hardware.
Interesting, provide proof of that assertion; you said twice the amount; I can purchase a mini-mac plus screen, keyboard and mouse for just under 2 grand NZ, including GST, and thats with a decent size screen.
It will be a cold day in hell before you’ll convince people in this country (Italy) to spend twice as much just in order to have a different OS.
Just a shape jab; it might help if the Italian economy wasn’t contracting along with the enemic wage growth that is causing problems in the EU; oh, and couple that with the fact that EU countries tax their citizens into the ground and beyond, little wonder they lack the spare change to purchase a Mac – something that isn’t exactly expensive when compared to the HP’s, NEC’s and Packard Bell computers I see being sold down at the local department store – which seem to fly out the door without much difficulty.
“Interesting, provide proof of that assertion; you said twice the amount; I can purchase a mini-mac plus screen, keyboard and mouse for just under 2 grand NZ, including GST, and thats with a decent size screen.”
A what? A toy computer with a 32 MB video card for Eur 739.00:
http://store.apple.com/Apple/WebObjects/italystore.woa/90612/wo/P62…
When for the same amount you can buy a desktop PC 3 times the specs? Anyway, try to convince my fellow Italians if you can, see what they say (I know it already)
It’s vendors that take time to come around to Linux and NOTHING to do with what your talking about. Once they realize that OSS and Linux is a money pit, they will come around, thats why HP, IBM and Novell are supporting and contributing to Linux.
The fact is that given a proper change Linux would gain huge market share, Remember AMD 10 years ago?, Intel owned the market.
For the last 6 years I’ve been told that the “Linux Revolution” is just around the corner, and each year when its been a let down, its another promise that its just around the corner.
Heck, atleast when I ran FreeBSD, there was a realisation that it would NEVER become a mainstream desktop operating system; Linux fanboys on the other hand thing for ever and a day to hope and pray that vendors will come.
They wont! sorry, but the fact is, companies have their advantage by the hardware they sell, by opening up their specifications to the world, they lose their stragetic advantage as it also shows how these things tick to their competititors, not so that they can copy, but so that they don’t make the same mistakes, directly off the source.
OpenSolaris offers that possibility in that its governed by a business friendly licence; reluctantly IBM is FINALLY supporting Solaris x86 – about bloody time.
Do I see OpenSolaris on desktops? of course not, because desktops aren’t the future; what will be the future are thin clients connected via high speed internet to the internet provider, who will offer applications, net access and storage all for a set price – internet access is comoditised to such an extent that ISPs are looking for value added services – this will be the move.
Couple that with smart devices and the rise of laptops – which Apple seems to be doing a bloody good job at selling, you’ll see a work where desktops will be a thing of the past, and people starting to demand mobility and realiability.
If Linux does want to be successful, the concerntration should be on these mobile devices, not desktops that will soon be extinct.
Do I see OpenSolaris on desktops? of course not, because desktops aren’t the future; what will be the future are thin clients connected via high speed internet to the internet provider, who will offer applications, net access and storage all for a set price – internet access is comoditised to such an extent that ISPs are looking for value added services – this will be the move.
We’ve been hearing the thin client is the future longer than we’ve been hearing that desktop linux will become mainstream. The future isn’t pigeon-holed into such categories. Yeah, businesses like presenting apps through a browser and I something like Mozilla is probably more important than Gnome, KDE, or whatever will ever be, but there will always be the need for heavy clients.
If Linux does want to be successful, the concerntration should be on these mobile devices, not desktops that will soon be extinct.
Linux is late to the game when it comes to the mobile market, and mostly because it can’t compete with Microsoft when it comes to a full fledged SDK and tools to make the job of developers easier. Microsoft is really beginning to dominate the mobile market. See the OSNews story from a couple days ago. But Linux is probably not out of it yet.
But I’ll agree Linux on the desktop as some kind of mainstream thing is dead. It had its chance, but the very nature of open source and Unix isn’t very conducive to getting something standard out there.
Do I see OpenSolaris on desktops? of course not, because desktops aren’t the future; what will be the future are thin clients connected via high speed internet to the internet provider, who will offer applications,
Nope, businesses will not support thin clients, they have been conditioned for the last load of years never to divulge important information over the internet.
Joe Businessman does not care if Linux/FreeBSD/OpenBSD/Mac OSX is far more secure than Windows, his business is totally dependant on the files he keeps on his PC. They need to be on his PC, where he can get them anytime he wants.
He wants his files accessed by the company who runs the remote server, their employees can be bought by aw competitor.
He does not want to take his laptop into someone elses workplace and ask for an internet connection, just so he can get the presentation file that he was supposed to show to a group of people.
He does not want to commute to work on the train every day with his expensive laptop that is essentially useless because all the apps and all his files are on a remote server that he cannot access.
These are the main reasons that the Sun vision never worked in the past and will not work in the future.
He wants his files accessed by the company who runs the remote server, their employees can be bought by aw competitor.
should have said…
He does not want his files accessed by the company who runs the remote server, their employees can be bought by a competitor.
I pretty much agree. Solaris has the problem of not having enough drivers, but doesn’t have the problem of binary driver/GPL conflicts or a stable ABI/API.
*NIX users can scream and cry till the cows come home, but as so long as the end users requirements aren’t being met, the next best alternative to Windows will be Mac.
So much of the *NIX philosophy holds back desktop development.
So much of the *NIX philosophy holds back desktop development.
So true; here is a good example; Apple has developed a great new replacement for Init/BSD intilisation scripts, using XML – a great piece of technology that has made booting MacOS X from being mind numingly boring to something that is rather prompt.
This was released to the world; all the *NIX world could bitch, whinge and complain; Solaris has a similar setup with their replacement, again, all the *NIX, more correctly, Linux fanboys, did was whinged and whine.
I don’t know about you, but it seems to be that the Linux world is infested by people suffering from the worst case of NIH (Not Invented Here) syndrom I’ve ever seen!
Being an old Debian GNU/Linux user (since ’97) I have tried Ubuntu myself under qemu, then decided to install it on wife’s computer instead of windoze-xp. Everything there works out-of-box, most hardware including wifi. The distro seems to be very user-friendly (unlike geeky Debian), stable and UTF8-ready.
Seriously, who on earth trips over the naming convention? Yes it’s silly…and?
I got other problems with the posting however:
A) Another posting about Ubuntu?!?
B) And just a generic review no less
C) Wait a minute, unlike the other reviews, and unlike the summary suggests, this one is actually pretty comprehensive with extra background, making it somewhat worth our time…in case you clicked regardless of the uninviting summary
D) ‘Just works’? The review itself shows this is far from the truth. I tried updating my dist from Hoary to something higher..after figuring out I needed to update the repositories the hard way…and my install is now broken. Doesn’t even boot in rescue mode. And I dare not touch it, since my Ubuntu partition holds my GRUB data.
He must be reading very different Ubuntu-reviews than me. Since Ubuntu kicked off, I routinely read them and the general verdict had always been somewhere between half-ready and unstable. I haven’t tried it, have nothing against it either, only, I got tired of distri-testing… so I won’t.
And you settled on ?
I didn’t post it on purpose, because it has nothing to do with my perception of Ubuntu in the Media. I ended up using SuSE, pretty much for the mere reason that the poeple who introduced me to Linux some years ago were using it, and this was a ‘trouble shooting decision’ for me back then. I am running 10.0 now, and it looks real polished out of the box.
Completely unrelated, but useful: I just figured that Proxomitron is running like a charm through wine… it doesn’t install, just click it.
‘The Proxomitron’ — now thar’s the most ‘with attitude’ warez I dang ever did see!
so i haven’t tried it since i guess early hedgehog days, but are people still having issues with grub on the x86_64 version?
NOT.
ONE.
PROBLEM.
Seriously, Pom-Pom…
– detected both of my digicams
– detected and flawlessly uses my printer
– baby-walked me through nvidia support
– sound works well
– brown theme is as good as any other I’ve seen
– updates with no brain function required
– surf, IM, write, sort photos, print, work… yawn. NO hiccups.
– gets better with each release
– has actually taught me to love Linux and it’s community (at their high points), instead of just putting up with them to honk off Microsoft
gimme gimme gimme Crusty Crocodile
By the way, I kept seeing the Kanotix fans trying desperately to get their distro of choice mentioned in the same breath as Ubuntu. So, I tried it. I’m back to Ubuntu, although for no huge reasons, but quite a few small ones. Ever tried to get Kanotix to be all brown? It’s almost IMPOSSIBLE!
I think most of the points you have are amusing.
1.Hardware compatibility
True there is a wide variety of hardware to support and is near impossible for a distro to keep up with direct agreement with those hardware vendors.The suggestion to have approved hardware or one distro shows that works however increases price.So you can’t really have your cake and eat it too.Ubuntu is one of the few distro’s that has either worked or nearly worked out of the box for me.I have tried btw arch,gentoo,vida,vector,slackware,suse,redhat,fedora,knoppix
mepis,mandrake(pre mandriva),debian sid,progeny linux.
2.ease of use
This is something you could argue about till your blue in the face.However it comes down to what works best for you.If you want simplicity with more configuration use fluxbox.Gnome and kde give much less need to configure however they still need polish in many areas.But since alot of people are working on these programs for free or relatively low pay it is hard to complain.I enjoy having the choice of using something that allows you freedom of choice.As far as ubuntu is concerned with this you can add other window managers if you don’t like gnome or kde or insert window manager here.
I wouldn’t call Ubuntu “just working”. Windows partitions were not mounted by default, wrong sound device was chosen so I couldn’t understand where’s the sound, Lucent winmodem didn’t work out of the box though is said to be present in the linux-restricted package, Totem-gstreamer didn’t work even with all codecs from multiverse installed (had to replace it with totem-xine), 60 Hz refresh rate was chosen by default in Xorg… Enough? 🙂
Nevertheless, I see the potential of Ubuntu and this is why it is my Linux distro of choice. Just don’t call it a name it doesn’t yet deserve.
“Easy Ubuntu” seems to help with some of the issues like getting ATI drivers installed or other stuff:
http://placelibre.ath.cx/keyes/index.php/2005/09/29/45-easy-ubuntu-…
All commentators ALWAYS misunderstand the sudo vs. su issue, so I’ll finally clear it up:
(1) On Ubuntu, the root account is effectively disabled because Ubuntu is geared toward non-Linux users who are making the transition. The idea of having two users, and two passwords, for managing one desktop computer just doesn’t make any sense. May make sense if you’ve been using Linux awhile, but doesn’t make _real_ sense.
(2) sudo is a bit more secure than su because it is actually logged (/var/log/auth.log). This means you can always check what administrative commands you ran, and also check to see if other people tried to run commands via sudo.
(3) Brute force attacks to machines always assume a root account exists. They can’t really know what other accounts exist, so your computer is harder to brute-force attack. This may be a bit of “security by obscurity”, but it works. Many crackers will just take a look, realize it’s not “easy” and move on to less suspecting targets.
(4) The semantics of sudo encourage single commands to be run. sudo -s and sudo -i, however, still provide full root environments when they are necessary.
(5) Since no “real” root account exists, no less security-conscious users will just say “to hell with all this security stuff” and log in as root (as they are used to logging in as “Administrator” on Windows). That makes the entire community of Ubuntu a bit more secure.
Those are the real reasons, I believe.
1.) Correct.
2.) Correct.
3.) Entirely wrong. Brute force attacks odds of working are so insanely low if you have a good root password it’s not even worth talking about. Brute force attacks are more concerned with accounts like ‘nobody’, ‘guest’, and other accounts that end up with no password because you changed the login command to /bin/bash from /bin/nologin. Like I said, this is only a concern if you’ve been hand hacking /etc/passwd.
4.) Correct.
5.) Totally Correct, and I second that fully.
Sudo does make a whole lot of sense for desktop users. I think the biggest is the “one password” idea. So that you can popup a box saying “I wanna do this, please gimme your password so I can do it!” I’ve watched people move from Unix to Mac, and they say “um, but I don’t know a root password.” Which is what you’d expect for a guy who’s dealt with the root paradigm his whole life.
The other nice thing about sudo is that you can have multiple admins with changing passwords who don’t need to coordinate to know what the new password is. The scary part there is that you have multiple admins with changing passwords who don’t need to coordinate to set a good password!
Sorry but other distros run the tradional user, root setup, now ubuntu have changed that it creates confusion, even to me. Time after time people ask about ubuntu how to run as root or use nautilus root. You go into recovery mode and it gives you root, just like the back door in Windows XP safe mode, passwordless administration login.
Now people from ubuntu are going to have to learn a different way(if they move to another distro) of managing root and user rather than sudo. Now we have even more non standard usage of Linux because distros like ubuntu and Linspire feel the need to get Windows users across, without thinking of Linux standards and consequences.
(1) On Ubuntu, the root account is effectively disabled because Ubuntu is geared toward non-Linux users who are making the transition. The idea of having two users, and two passwords, for managing one desktop computer just doesn’t make any sense. May make sense if you’ve been using Linux awhile, but doesn’t make _real_ sense.
Ubuntu is not geared towards switching users, it’s geared to Linux users with a modicum of Linux experience. If it were geared towards new users the documentation would’ve been present at least by version 4 (last version I tried, no documentation to speak of offline), and Ubuntu wouldn’t require constantly switching to a terminal and to type sudo in front of every command you need in order to get your system up and running, including in order to mount regular drives.
“Ubuntu is not geared towards switching users, it’s geared to Linux users with a modicum of Linux experience. If it were geared towards new users the documentation would’ve been present at least by version 4 (last version I tried, no documentation to speak of offline), and Ubuntu wouldn’t require constantly switching to a terminal and to type sudo in front of every command you need in order to get your system up and running, including in order to mount regular drives.”
Considering they’ve only had three releases, there isn’t a version 4. The version numbers are the year.month of release.
And I don’t know what you’re talking about documentation, Gnome comes with some, though I’ll admit, it’s not all that great at the moment.
I don’t know about you, but all my drives are automatically mounted once I add the right line to /etc/fstab. But then again, a lot of other distros do that for you (I don’t know if they fixed that in Breezy, since Haven’t installed it yet.)
I bet I could get all hardware working just fine on Breezy without once opening a terminal.
Considering they’ve only had three releases, there isn’t a version 4. The version numbers are the year.month of release.
Oops, my bad. Well, they didn’t have any help documentation to speak off just a year ago. Or at least non findable from the desktop environment.
I don’t know about you, but all my drives are automatically mounted once I add the right line to /etc/fstab. But then again, a lot of other distros do that for you (I don’t know if they fixed that in Breezy, since Haven’t installed it yet.)
Well, aren’t you agreeing with me right here then? You need to go to a commandline, find a config file somewhere and edit it. Which wasn’t explained in the documentation, so Ubuntu, unlike the distros that add a ‘mount link’ onto your desktop or add the auto-mount line to fstab, is not geared towards beginners/switchers. And it wasn’t like I could go online to see help, since I couldn’t install my wirelesscard drivers, since a compiler wasn’t automatically installed (unlike 90% of distros?) and thus my installation instructions fell flat on their face. It was much later I found out GCC was on the install cd, but how to get it onto my system..not knowable for a switcher/noob like me.
Like I said: Ubuntu is geared towards people who already know Linux.
I was sort of agreeing and I thought I had read somewhere that Breezy was going to fix the issue of not mounting the windows drive. I know it automatically mounts my external drive (through dbus/gnome-volume-manager) but I agree that it doesn’t mount the internal windows drive. But if you don’t have a windows drive at all, it is a non-issue.
apt-get install build-essential will install all the build tools, and I agree, that should be installed by default, though for most normal users like my mother, wouldn’t need it for anything.
Just a note about 3, I don’t think you can say the “odds” of a brute force attack working are low. The odds of a brute force attack working are HIGH: 100%. Given unlimited time t, brute force attack WILL work.
It’s true that t approaches a big number the better a password is, but that’s not to say people don’t try it, and people don’t succeed with shorter, less complicated passwords.
I agree, there are other better ways to break into systems. (Bugs in ssh, apache, etc.) But people still try it.
I disagree with you entirely.
I am an Ubuntu fan but I don’t feel in any way shape or form making all accounts by default sudoers is more secure than running su root.
By giving all user accounts user access there is no need to gain root access because all user accounts have already been effectively given root access through sudo.
Why the hell would you bother trying to brute force the root password when you can simply type “sudo passwd root” and change it to anything you wish?
No, sudo just gives you root access for that job and not like root account does. It fine doing certain tasks in root, but sudo just doesn’t let you open nautilus up.
I always compile a kernel from /usr/src without needing commands to make links, just a simple case of using the root account. You cannot do that with ubuntu unless you use recovery mode (requirers a reboot).
“No, sudo just gives you root access for that job”
Uhm, hello, that “job” could be anything including handing over the root account.
The idea of having two users, and two passwords, for managing one desktop computer just doesn’t make any sense.
Completely true if this is your own computer. But much less true for enterprise use where the sysadmins need to lock down some actions.
Even for your own computer, having to type a password for some operations can be overkill. At least sudo lets you configure which actions need a password, and which commands they are allowed to run.
Can somebody please tell me what happened to the amd64 user guide for ubuntu?
So for some time Gentoo was the poster-child for “Linux the right way”, now it’s Ubuntu. What will it be next month?
It seems like everytime i try out a new version of ubuntu i get burned.I know that the hardware i`m trying to install to is not standard and can accept that somethings wont work right off the bat,however since 4.10 i have not been able to install a working ubuntu on my computer.I have a dedicated drive just for it,i have 2 sata raid cards that i dont want it to access so thats fine,my gf fx 6800 into dual lcd`s allways have problems (why does it default to the right side when everything else defaults to left? ),had no luck gettin sound from my audigy 2zs thru digital so all in all theres no benefit me trying to get away from windows at every release of ubuntu.
Not trying to put linux down because i wish to move to it,however install windows+drivers for my hardware then download OS apps and it all works.
Last install (5.10 final) first stage installed fine,reboot grub error 17,i tried everything to get it working,no luck.I even mounted the drive via livecd looked at the grub config,was spot on.No idea,but i`ll have to stick at the mo.
“Not trying to put linux down because i wish to move to it,however install windows+drivers for my hardware then download OS apps and it all works.”
Why not try another distro? Ubuntu is not linux, is just one of several hundred flavours.
1. I installed ubuntu-510RC and the nvidia driver, it was a pain because needing contradictry packages like gcc, gcc-4(gcc-3.3.4 installed by default) to get it to compile. Then having to do the CC export, why can ubuntu not have the SAME names for things?
I wanted to use my own kernel which is fine but the nvidia-settings panel kept giving segmentaion faults, so did OO.o (but fixed itself later after another update). Installed the nvidia-setting from synpatic, which just destorys the nvidia driver and x dont start. The updater didnot tell me that there were updates until I refresh it(bug, wierd if so!)
2. Installed it on my mums machine yesterday(final release) Went well as her /home is on a seperate partition from previous install of SuSE. It failed to chown her /home direcory and gnome wouldn’t login. After manually doing it I still got a nag screen saying .dmrc didnot have permissions everytime I logged in. I had to do with a recovery mode because as you know, ubuntu root is disabled (back door like Windows XP) which is very bad. I couldn’t get sudo privilege even when I got her account logged in.
Changing the Linux securtiy model like this is bad news, I could have sorted it in minutes it I had root(like it all distros). I’d rather have two passwords to remember rather that sudo anyday, so I put my mum on Slackware with Dropline gnome. I will not use ubuntu again, it works well on my uncles but after the problems I had, wouldn’t recommend it to a experienced Linux user, dont come close to Slackware/Dropline gnome combo.
The non root sudo thing just boils my blood, having superuser privileges with the same password as user is just asking for trouble. It’s not the point that you can change it, average joe dont know so remember that when you slag off Windows since ubuntu has the same flaws.
You appear to be seriously confused about quite a few things here (gcc-4 and gcc-3 are by no means `contradictory’, Ubuntu is not supposed to fix the permissions on your mom’s /home partition — probably you just gave her a different username than under SUSE, etc…) and I would advise you to gain some more knowledge before you next attempt to compile your own kernel and setup the NVIDIA drivers for it…
I’ve been a fan of Ubuntu until recently and if asked what flava of Linux to try, I’ve suggested it. I still would, too, though less enthusiastically. That single, carefully thought-out and for the most part reliable CD is a boon and a pleasant surprise to folks who fully expect trying Linux to be straight out of Torquemada. In most cases, you insert the CD, hit enter four times and 45 minutes or so later you have a fully functioning system.
However, I’ve been beginning to feel a little uneasy about Ubuntu. Despite smooth-talking assurances to the contrary from the Ubuntu camp, it’s increasingly looking as if they are running a fork and not a derivative, and that they’d like to parallel everything Debian does and, effectively, put Debian out of business. This would not be a good thing, imho, and I can’t help feeling that the lure of large bags of money is involved somewhere. So I guess I don’t really trust Ubuntu, and am typing this on Debian which I’ll stick to. Debian deserves support.
Several folks have mentioned hardware problems. The only answer is to stick to mainstream hardware and you should be fine. That means avoiding chipsets from folks like SIS and weird-sounding brands of PCI cards. I’ve never really had a hardware problem with Linux. Lucky? Perhaps, but I choose my hardware with Linux in mind.
Debian isn’t in ‘business’. How can you put Debian out of it?
I thought people liked the brown color theme of Ubuntu, I like it a lot, it’s new, fresh and human. Most OS are blue, I’m sick of it. Do you want a blue Ubuntu now???
>> Do you want a blue Ubuntu now???
Err, that would be Kubuntu.
After 7 unproductive hours trying to get it to a) support my laptop’s 1280×768 resolution (success) and truemobile wifi card (failure, with lockups using ndiswrapper), it’s time again to remove Linux and re-install Windows XP. This isn’t the fault of Linux, rather the device vendors not making Linux drivers. I think ubuntu is a sensational Linux distro but I am not spending money to replace otherwise perfectly functioning components in my 6 month old laptop to use it. One day, maybe one day. the network config needs MUCH better feedback on whether you have entered your wlan key correctly I have to say though, it normally just sits there….and sits there….and sits there. NO feedback.
Ubuntu is not Linux, it is just one flavor of it.
Give Suse 10 a try. I’ve been working only on Windows XP on my laptop since it’s the only system it works there as it should. However, yesterday I installed Suse 10 and was very impressed. Everything works: wireless, ethernet network, sound, hibernation, Nvidia 3D acceleration, power management… it runs like a dream. Software management could be better, but there’s lots of software on the DVD so it’s not such a burden.
Honestly. I’m one of those who fail to see what all the Ubuntu fuss is about. I’m not saying Ubuntu is not a good desktop distribution. It is, and it’s a very young distribution with a bright future, but it is far far overrated at this point and its success is due more to hype and free shipping CDs than it’s actual quality.
Thanks for the recommendation, I’ll give Suse 10 a try. The only problem I think is that I don’t think any distro’s have Broadcom MiniPCI WIFI drivers because Broadcom keep their hw specs close to their chests. I HATE having to go back to XP so I will happily explore that option.
You have to use the NDIS wrapper for the broadcom Wifi. not the greatest solution, but they do work.
The only problem I think is that I don’t think any distro’s have Broadcom MiniPCI WIFI drivers because Broadcom keep their hw specs close to their chests. I HATE having to go back to XP so I will happily explore that option.
Don’t worry, you won’t have to switch back to Windows because of that. Under Ubuntu (as well as under any other Distro I guess), you can get your card working with ndiswrapper. Have a look at
http://www.ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=71598
Yeah, I actually spent a lot of time in the ubuntuforums sorting out the wifi issue and managed to get the truemobile 1450 windows driver running under ndiswrapper, but I experienced periodic freezes from it, and for the life of me couldn’t connect to my WAN, which I have Windows and Mac (and even Sony PSP) connected to. I think I will just wait until a native driver (hopefully) appears, I did see some people are working on one so fingers crossed. I couldn’t get the PCMCIA bluetooth card, nor memorystick slot, not sd slot, nor compact flash slots working on my laptop either. I’ll just wait a while I think as it takes too much time messing around installing stuff etc, in the meantime if I see an intel minipci going cheap anywhere I will try to give it a bash again as there seem to work much better under Linux
I’m not sure I understand this, but with an older version of ubuntu, enabling root login was just a matter of setting the root passwd.
I still use sudo for most things. You can get a root terminal with sudo anyway. However sometimes I use su. And if things lock up (generally with a bad application) I can use the default terminal to login as root.
Would this not work in the latest release? Or are people just whining?
sudo passwd does still work in 5.10
and yes, they are just whining
Yeah, well I installed Ubuntu on my Dell C650 last Saturday, and the thing wouldn’t even start X. The C650 should be right in the sweet spot as far as driver support as it is old, but not that old.
Dialogues were formed out of ASCII characters and when asked if I would like to see the error log, I was presented with a blank box – Awesome.
I know I could’ve gotten into XF86Conf and probably sorted this out, but I don’t have time for that crap anymore.
About an hour later Fedora was working just fine …
Console graphics seem to be totally broken. Midnight Commander for example is unusable.
The NVidia drivers (both nvidia-glx and nvidia-glx-legacy) lock up X.org on my machine, and the 6629 drivers (last decent version of NVIDIA driver) can’t be compiled under 2.6.12 without patching.
This basically means that a hell of a lot of people are going to find Ubuntu Breezy either the most crash-prone OS they have ever used, or are going to get unbelievably sluggish windowing performance when they have to either disable RenderAccel or switch to the nv driver.
Theres no point having a desktop distro (that is becoming more reliant on 3D acceleration for reasonable performance) that ships with broken 3D drivers and has a kernel that cannot use the older drivers.
This is total crap, and while it is mostly NVidias fault for shipping drivers that don’t work properly, I don’t think that the kernel developers, the ubuntu packagers and the Xorg guys could have made life more difficult for me, the user, even if they were trying really hard.
>> …and while it is mostly NVidias fault for
>> shipping drivers that don’t work properly, I don’t
>> think that the kernel developers, the ubuntu
>> packagers and the Xorg guys could have made life
>> more difficult for me…
I agree completely. I’ve gone from a nice warty kernel which supported the 6111 drivers to a sluggish xorg with renderaccel turned off to be usable at all. At least it has opengl acceleration..
“Just works” is all well and good, but with ubuntu if it doesn’t “Just Work” then you are screwed.
Apparently sound configuration “Just works” with ubuntu. But I don’t think the developers took in to account the fact that you can have more than one sound card.
none of the graphical config tools allowed me to choose with of the two cards I wanted to use(one of them didn’t work and was built in to the motherboard).
The ubuntu IRC channel was of no help, because nobody knew how to configure their sound, because they never had to do it.
anyway, I worked it out with knowledge obtained from my many gentoo installs. Gentoo doesn’t “Just Work” but all the tools are their to make it “Actually work”
– Jesse McNelis
>anyway, I worked it out with knowledge obtained from my many gentoo installs. Gentoo doesn’t “Just Work” but all the tools are their to make it “Actually work”<
Exactly. Now Gentoo is not my fav distro, but give me Gentoo every day over Ubuntu.
At least Gentoo hasn’t changed anything of the Unix/Linux standards.
none of the graphical config tools allowed me to choose with of the two cards I wanted to use
System/Preferences/Sound/”Default Sound Card”
Watch out, here come PC-BSD! All it lacks is $10 million, but hey, maybe they won’t need it.
ubuntu has always felt slower and less responsive than, say mandrake, … i don’t use gnome/kde so that sort of polish doesn’t bother me.. but if the underlying system is slower than an alternative, that’s a problem.
Ubuntu is very much like most other modern desktop-oriented Linux distros.
Ubuntu comes with the latest GNOME. So do most other distros. Ubuntu has the latest KDE. So do most other distros. Most distros have some sort of development branch that allows users to update their installed apps to the newest versions between major releases. Maybe Ubuntu has some kind of backports repository for this purpose, I don’t know.
Most distros have an easy installer. So does Ubuntu. Most distros have good hardware detection. So does Ubuntu. Most distros give you a working desktop pretty much “out of the box”. So does Ubuntu.
Many people seem to like Ubuntu’s default theme but I don’t. So I change the desktop theme and also the gdm theme and desktop background. I tweak the X config file because the auto-detected settings are not quite optimal. I tweak the font settings and then I install additional fonts, flash, java, and some multimedia codecs. I edit the apt-get sources.list and install a smaller and snappier window manager because I find GNOME a bit unresponsive. I set up a firewall. I install lots of other applications. I edit lots of configuration files to tweak some extra performance from Ubuntu and to make it act the way I prefer.
But the rest of the stuff in Ubuntu works “out of the box”, just like in most other distros.
I’ve been using Kubuntu 5.10 for a few days now. Unlike Ubuntu this has a blue/greyish default look which I don’t mind much. Not that I’ve seen much of it since I have my own favourites for just about everything (icon theme, style, window decorations, kde-splash screen, X11-cursor theme and desktop-wallpapers).
I’ve had a few minor problems. For example I don’t like the Firefox and Thunderbird replacement icons and would like to see packages to use the official builds rather than the Debian ones. Especially since the Debian Thunderbird build seems to conflict with my normal thunderbird configuration directory, that’s worked well on all other distros (none of them debian based) I’ve tried before. (I solved this problem by copying the Firefox and Thunderbird directories from my slackware partition to Kubuntu and redoing the simlinks in /usr/bin)
Another problem I have with Kubuntu is their replacement of kcontrol, it has the functionality but I prefer kcontrol myself. Fortunately the package was easily found and installed with Synaptic.
Thirdly I personally dislike the no root login system, though that can be solved with ‘sudo passwd root’. (I won’t claim to be enough of an expert to know which is more secure, I just want root login on a terminal and su to be available since that’s what I’m used to doing)
Beyond those minor problems it’s a reasonably solid and quite usable distro. I’m not sure it’ll make it to be my default distro, but I haven’t booted into either of my other distro’s in the last 36 hours, then again my only reboot in the last 36 hours was after I’d disabled some services I don’t need at startup. Not something I could test by booting Slackware or Arch. So to quite a large extend yes, it does just work for me. It also did a good job detecting my hardware, but there of course your mileage may vary.
The only gripe I have with it is sound, sound in Ubuntu has always sucked hard and still does
It’s not as easy as some here make it out, but then no linux is yet. But if you’re willing to put a bit in to get a bit out, it’s a very good choice.
Now I must ask one thing, because no one can answer this for me so far
What is a good window manager for gnome when running xinerama and two large lcd’s, because if I have to use metacity for another day, I’m going to stck a fork in my eyes so I can’t use a computer anymore, it’s that bad IMHO 
http://www.osnews.com/moderate.php?news_id=12265&comment_id=46127&v…
http://www.osnews.com/moderate.php?news_id=12265&comment_id=46127&v…
Every Ubuntu article in OSNews turns into flamewar… I guess it’s a good symptom of success
(but everyone knows, Ubuntu is an ancient African word meaning….)
The hype finally got to me, and I had to give it a try. I chose kubuntu.
I consider it a decent system, but I don’t see why it is considered so supperior to Knoppix, Mepis, or any of several other debian/kde distros.
I do not know why either. Mepis is simply excellent when compared to other debian based distros. Everything works out of the box on all the machines I have tried it on, but it never gets a good review or good coverage for some strange reason.
And Kanotix is a very similar case.
I do not know why either. Mepis is simply excellent when compared to other debian based distros. Everything works out of the box on all the machines I have tried it on, but it never gets a good review or good coverage for some strange reason.
<sarcasm>
Maybe it is because Mepis is a KDE-centric distribution. We don’t like that K thing around here… 😉
</sarcasm>
Seriously, Mepis is one of the best distros that I’ve ever tried. Its features are on par with Ubuntu’s regarding ease of use, hardware detection, etc. except that it comes with the non-free goodies by default (Java, Flash, RealPlayer, MP3 support, etc.). Not that I care about that, since I would add it manually anyway. Another nice thing is that the Live CD actually is the installer, like Knoppix and derivates, but it has a more professional feel thanks to the nice applications that Warren developed for his distro.
The forums at http://www.mepislovers.org are nice and very newbie-friendly.
Having said that, I’ll second the assertion that it is strange that Mepis never gets a good coverage since it is a Debian derivate, fully compatible with Sid and Etch and can do anything that Ubuntu can do (except perhaps sport GNOME as default DE… :-))
http://www.debianpure.com
My main distro of choice now. Switched from Ubuntu last month.
Me too. Tried Kubuntu briefly, went right back Debian.
I like debian’s 100mb base system download. I prefer a lighter system. I use IceWM.
Its insane to see people complain about the superficial elements of the brilliant work others especially when it is given as a gift! Wake up!
Keep up the great work *buntu!
-nX
Amiroff had some problems with his Turkish keyboard. I have problem with my Swiss French kbd too (Kubuntu). The remapping file is just missing. I already post about this issue and inform Kubuntu about this.
My concern is not about the bug itsself, but more about the “management”. If somebody had tested a Turkish or Swiss French kbd, I would have been obvious to see that these kbbs were not working. Nobody did it.
I do not blame anybody. I understand a lot of work has been done. But this kind of issue is showing, something is not going right.
I tried kubuntu, and while it was rather nice in some ways, my HP 5150 wouldn’t work. I mean, if my driver doesn’t work, I don’t really care that they include more printer drivers then other distros. It also seemed much slower then KDE under slackware. Anyway, so I’m back with what works for me. Slackware 10.2.
Not that much for me to get excited over after all it’s only a linux distro, and a re-packaged old linux distro at that.
Just too bad an OS is not judged by the combined weight or volume of it’s PR, hype and bullshit. Or is it?
If it were this one would surely be king.
The root password is not random, as it says in the article. The password is actually disabled (see “passwd -d”,) meaning that login programs will not even attempt to gain entry for the account.
If you really need actual root access, you simply bypass login, that means starting in single user mode (or any other method that ends you up in runlevel one.)
Oh, and you can always get to a root prompt by su’ing to the user who is allowed to sudo. Or ssh x@localhost for that matter…
I usually ask for a bunch of CDs with each release. Then I distribute them in my local university, for free, at the libraries.
Ubuntu release names are practically unpronounceable and very hard to remember for non-Anglos. Spelling, in mailing lists, impossible. I wish they’d choose simpler names, like Debian does. It makes it easier to communicate “Oh, did you install Ubuntu’s ____ release?”
Sound was broken.
The open source ati driver was broken.
Console graphics was broken.
Then I went back to my ordinary operating system.
They wont! sorry, but the fact is, companies have their advantage by the hardware they sell, by opening up their specifications to the world, they lose their stragetic advantage as it also shows how these things tick to their competititors, not so that they can copy, but so that they don’t make the same mistakes, directly off the source.
That’s a whole load of crap.. you’re suggesting that opening up an interface has anything at all to do with opening up a card. Sure, if the open source driver-makers were asking the companies to release circuit diagrams, then maybe that wouldn’t be fair. But they’re not.. just asking them to document how the OS is meant to interact with the card. It’s like saying that web servers and web browsers will never interoperate because revealing the protocol would reveal too much about how the server works.
One (very) happy Ubuntu 5.10 user here…does anyone care ? After few sudo apt-get install *prog (including kubuntu-desktop) i have the desktop of my dreams. I didn’t see any brown wallpapers (how could it be different if i am leaving my home directory on separate partition untouched during the upgrade) .
No nvidia-drivers, sound, or any other problems. Boot up is ultra fast, detection absolutely fenomenal (although i don’t have any ‘fancy’ stuff like winmodems).My fastest install ever. Must mention here that it was clean install (dist-upgrade messed some things & finished with some errors, but hey – that’s probably why this method of upgrading is marked ‘experimental’..)
My only complaint is general, not directly related to Ubuntu. I wish i could say to my frien, whom i am going to install Ubuntu that i can install all the stuff i have on my box even before we connect to the internet. Maybe there should be some additional cd’s for download with even more soft. I know, that using debian distribution almost implies having broadband connection, yet still i would prefer to have the opportunity to install all the goodies from cd’s.
So after reading quite a few comments from this topic i guess that beeing happy with Ubuntu i am in minority….or am i ?
Seems to be under development. Fingers crossed! I don’t really like the idea of needing an emulation layer wrapping up Windows drivers.
http://bcm43xx.berlios.de/
Blah, none of themwork properly on my powerbook without major issuses. Ubuntu, wouldn’t bring up a desktop no matter what I did. SuSE wouldn’t play audio file from CD or mp3 or anything. Ubuntu did easily format my drive, which SuSE was unable to do, SuSE gave me a nice Gnome GUI after I tweaked the hell out of the xorg.conf file, no matter what I did Ubuntu was unable to start X. I even tried the xorg.conf from SuSE to no avail. Ready for the desktop? I think not.
Ready for YOUR desktop, probably not.
“”Various reviews I’ve seen about Ubuntu have attacked the release names (Hoary Hedgehog, Breezy Badger and upcoming Dapper Drake), or the ‘ugly’ brown GNOME screen background (which is easily changed). I consider such “flaws” to be trivial. When push comes to shove, I want my operating system to ‘just work’, and in this department Ubuntu delivers.””
Because gay circus clowns only enjoy sparkly fisher price GUIs and don’t care about features.
I was trying to install to free patrition on my ThinkPad T40. And every time I tried doing it I could not boot to windows. I can see the Windows XP Media as one of the options in Grub. But when selecting it I see the WindowXP screen for a sec or so and then I get BSOD with message something like NO bottable image or something like that
Any one has a clue how to get aroud this proble.
BTW I did choosed their auto partition option on free scpace