This CD will allow you to try out Ubuntu before installing it, without repartitioning or overwriting any existing software or data.
Ubuntu preview live CD available
About The Author
Eugenia Loli
Ex-programmer, ex-editor in chief at OSNews.com, now a visual artist/filmmaker.
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Ubuntu is the future of the linux desktop. I’m still a devoted slackhead, but i could definitely get used to using Ubuntu as my main desktop OS. I can’t wait till they implement some of the new freedesktop projects.
I’ve been a FreeBSD guy for almost 3 years, and it’s been about 3 years since I’ve given a Linux distro another try. I’m downloading the iso right now (150KB/s!). Looking forward to trying it out and see what everyone is talking about.
There definitely has been a lot of hype around Ubuntu. I want to see what it’s like, I’ll check it out after this weekend. (I have no CD-burner right now)
Could someone please tell me as a long time Debian (home) and RedHat(work) user…just what is it that makes this distro special?
Just curious.
I’ve been curious about Ubuntu, but not enough to install it. Downloading the Live CD now to get a glimpse. I highly doubt it will sway me from Gentoo … but I’m always open to the possibility of change.
As far as I am concerned (Debian testing/unstable user), Ubuntu is a desktop oriented “stabilized” snapshot of Debian Sid, released every 6 months (just after new versions of Gnome), preconfigured and with a few extra nice things (more in next version): Gnome 2.8, some Gnome customizations, “project Utopia” (whatever that is), 686 recompiled packages… Easy & good looking Debian. You can get all the existing packages of “normal” Debian (from their own archives though, minor incompatibilities), but only a small number of them is supported.
I am thinking of replacing my existing Sarge with Ubuntu, but first I want to see how well mixing stable/unstable (ubuntu) works.
>Ubuntu is the future of the linux desktop.
Why ?
What makes Ubuntu stand out ? (honest question)
While they (ubuntu folk) don’t push it, you CAN mix stable/unstable ubuntu/debian. I have never found a debian distro. as nice as this. Very well put together (and still pre-release). The developers and other users are very responsive and helpful (altho’ that can be said of many lists and groups as well) when you have problems.
That being said, it is clean, quick (tho’ admittedly I’ve added a good bit of “stuff” to it), detects [my] hardware nicely and is easily upgradeable thanks to good old apt and/or synaptic.
I’ve used Slack, FC, Gentoo, several BSD’s… I’ve liked them all but somehow this one has struck a chord with me.
Mike
Ubuntu is a very promising project – ppl involved in the project is increasing every single day. The community of Ubuntu is more active compared to Fedora, I found a bug on Ubuntu, I post them to their Bugzilla and when I get back to the website 2 min later, a reply was there, and developers always ask to see users on IRC to SSH and fix the bug immediately.
Ubuntu is Debian-based, very fast distro indeed. It’s 100% plain GNOME distro, ofcourse u can install KDE from their repository if u like. Ubuntu is the 1st distro using GNOME 2.8 + latest kernel (not the latest X.org). By looking at the schedule of Ubuntu, I can see this project is very well planned. For now, it’s a bit ugly, not much colorful startup screen (still text mode), but this issue will be implemented soon. I thought the text mode installer is horrible but I was wrong, it was very easy like RH Annaconda and powerful like Yast too. Ubuntu is organized in different ways, the packages are assigned to developers, only main and good packages are choosen to be included in the CD, so you can expect a very wonderful GNOME solution (no more Mozilla, only FireFox in Ubuntu).
Hehe, ok. This really has been rehashed to death, but I like this distribution so much, that repeating the same points over and over again actually is fun.
So here it goes:
In a nutshell, Ubuntu is a commercially funded, yet totally free and open source desktop distribution, aimed to be usable for everyone while providing all the power of Debian.
It is not at all a competition to Debian, think of it more as another flavor of Debian. Unlike Debian, Ubuntu offers a stable release every six months, including all the latest software. This is ideal for desktop users who would be running unstable anyway, but want a little bit more reliability.
Unlike Debian, Ubuntu is a very specialized desktop distribution and less of a generic collection of packages. This is not of importance for longtime Linux users, but for newcomers it’s a big deal and for those who are getting bored of practically building their own OS from building blocks. Ubuntu only consists of an extremely polished and integrated GNOME desktop and tries to offer a desktop experience that just works from the first to the last byte (certainly getting some clues from Mac OS X).
Unlike Fedora and other usable Open Source Linux desktops, Ubuntu comes on a single CD which contains the entire base system. Despite this simplicity, Ubuntu offers (almost) the entire set of Debian packages built for Ubuntu in their “universe” repository. And then some. You basically get the best of both world, a carefully selected set of officially supported software and the huge repository of contributed software. There have been some discussions about “the paradox of choice” lately and nothing is really representing this paradox as perfectly as Ubuntu. The OS itself comes without ANY choice, the installation will not ask you anything about your prefered text editor or window manager and no redundant applications are getting installed. On the other hand, you have all the overwhelming choice of the Linux world right at your fingertips using the convenient synaptic GUI and you are not limited in any way, if you happen to disagree with the choices taken for you.
While Ubuntu is basically completely dedicated to free software, they are a little bit more liberal when it comes to drivers. Ubuntu will include non-free drivers, when they are necessary for users to use certain hardware, although they will always support free alternatives. For the non-free graphic drivers this means that they are included (as they are required to use hardware 3D acceleration of those cards), but not installed by default. Enabling the NVidia drivers for example is as easy as to install nvidia-glx and running a single command. The kernel module will be updated for every new Ubuntu kernel.
Then there is the sudo concept, which makes so much more sense for a desktop OS… Or the “zero open ports” policy, which many Linux desktops lack.
While all those points are mostly “just” good ideas, Canonical has the team to really pull this through. Thanks to the financial backing of Mark Shuttleworth (who seems to be a very interesting person to say the least) it is unlikely that they’ll go out of business anytime soon and the collected talent includes many of the most prominent personalities of the free software community.
Someone is putting real money into this but it’s still completely free (by all meanings of the word). Heck, they are even paying to send CDs to their users. If that’s not special, I don’t know what is.
Ok, I’m sure I have forgotten a few things which got me excited during the last few weeks, but you probably get the point.
This is the Free Software Linux Desktop done right and if you don’t believe it, then you have to try it.
I have been a freeBSD user for the past few years. I tried Ubuntu and now I ma using it. It detected my sound card, my laptop video card, WiFi, etc. After using BSD, I have come to conclude that the little gain I got from source compiling is not worth it/the performace gains. I wanted a binary based distribution. If FreeBSD offered it I would not have switched, but BSD’s binary ‘pkg_add -r’ does not work well when you want to upgrade the application or system.
Ubuntu is it … even for newcomers
-Dino
I just finished downloading and burning the Live CD. Here are some early impressesions.
Nice initial boot menu. More friendly than Knoppix. The first boot didn’t work for me though but that is a typical problem with my laptop. I have to specify “acpi=off” or it won’t boot.
There was no bootsplash screen to hide the “complicated” information. Personally I like having the bootsplash screen with the option of pressing F2 to see the boot info if I want it.
I have preferred Gnome over KDE for a long time now. I just think it’s cleaner and has a sense of elegance and class that KDE lacks. The default Ubunut Live CD Desktop is very clean and extremely easy to find your way around.
The first thing I tried to do was to use the Network Settings tool to bring up my wireless adapter. Unfortunately the Network Settings has no option for setting up WEP. That’s a HUGE disappointment … but a quick trip to the command line (ug), a couple of commands later and I had my wireless NIC going. (Obvously a lack of completeness in the Gnome Network Tool though, not a Ubuntu problem.)
# iwconfig eth1 essid myESSID enc XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX
# /sbin/dhclient
# ping yahoo.com
works… back to the GUI.
At that point I couldn’t get a single program to launch. It would say it was starting the program, but would then just vanish with no explanation a few seconds later. I’ve seen that issue before though so I thought I knew what to do. Log out, log back in.
Logging out would have appeared to have been a failed process to someone new to Linux/Gnome/X/whatever. But I sit here now writing this waiting patiently, confident that whatever process is running will eventually time out …
Sure enough. 2-3 minutes have gone by and it finally timed out and logged me out. Unfortunately it rebooted rather than putting me at xdm/gdm so I’ll have to go through the whole process again.
This time everything worked. Network connection is running and most programs are launching. Whatever this “Device Manager” is won’t start.
I’ve never been sure what the “Network” icon that resembles Network Places (Network Neighborhood) on Windows is useful for. I’ve never been able to see my Samba or NFS shares by using it. It doesn’t appear to be “working” with Ubuntu/Gnome 2.8 either.
Well … anyway … it seems to be a cool little Live CD that will enable you to check out Gnome 2.8. The distro “under the hood” seems almost irrelevant on a Live CD.
i’m now writing from the ubuntu live cd via vmware. extremely smooth distro.
cool gnome 2.8, evo 2.01, OOo 1.1.2 with cool icons, firefox 1.0, gimp.. very slick desktop, nice and relaxing colors, nice themes, newbie friendly loading screen. no dup functionality trough many apps, everything working for me out of the box. and that’s for a pre release. i’d give them a big thumb up.
i only miss gcc et.al. i prefere that newbies are still able to ‘get real’ and compile something here and then. knoppix managed to put it along with many other apps on one cd. i don’t see why ubuntu can’t.
nevertheless, an extremely pleasent distro.
keep up the good job.
avih
I’m really looking forward to trying this out!
However, I think many people forget this is a pre-release; many things just arent finished yet. There wiki is great for showing what they are working on, planning etc.
blixel, IIRC they do plan on having a bootsplash for either their first or second release
dimosd, Project Utopia is the combination of HAL, udev, and D-BUS
one more thing.. their server is amazing: 657 KB/sec !
I will likely try out this distro, seems like a magic combination of Debian stability and Fedora newness.
BUT from the FAQ on their site it looks like they leave you to sort out Flash, Java etc on your own. Well I understand that these tools are non-free, but “just works” probably has to encompass these tools. This is where Fedora has an advantage – most third parties appear to be using RPM to package their stuff for distribution (you can find RPMs for jdks and flash, for example).
The lack of X.org also seems odd, early adopters will likely want to try out all the new stuff. I know Ubuntu is going to adopt X.org, just wondering why not now.
>> one more thing.. their server is amazing: 657 KB/sec !
use bittorent!!. leave their server alone
They don’t have X.org yet because Debian doesn’t
It doesnt really sound like the best excuse, but they were probably working hard on other packages and couldnt afford to convert to something that Debian hadnt even tried to do yet
>> use bittorent!!. leave their server alone
If there was any way to use bittorrent from behind a proxy, I would
>> BUT from the FAQ on their site it looks like they leave you to sort out Flash, Java etc on your own.
flash installs like charm from firefox. u click the “install plugin” where the flash should have been. few secs, and it’s installed. no need even to restart firefox. it really is ‘just works’. and that’s for the live cd without any installation!!
i had no such luck with java though. firefox couldn’t find the plugin. i guess it’ll improve over time. the “live-plugin-install” is quite new with firefox.
I’ve installed a bunch of stuff as a ‘test’ this week (actually running Ubuntu inside VMWare) – no problems so far. Ofcourse the one thing to be expected is that GUI-based apps installed from Universe don’t place links in the Gnome menus. Failing writing a wrapper script to do this automagically, has anyone come up with a quick and easy hack?
The real test is if they are still around a year from now, and if major userland upgrades like Gnome 2.10 will work without a hitch (being that they have customized some of the desktop i.e. the trashcan panel applet).
I’m using the liveCD now. It is the fastest liveCD I have ever used. I don’t know what they did, either GNOME 2.8 is fast, or the ubuntu folks have some tricks up their sleeves
I am on the LiveCD right now. It is the best livecd I’ve ever used and that’s coming from a big fan of Berry Linux. I think LESS choice for the average user is the right way to go and concentrate on the industry best apps. Have one browser, one office suite, one mail client. If you want more, you can download it. Ubuntu has a real chance at becoming THE LINUX DESKTOP(tm). Good job Ubuntu!
P.S. For those customers of mine, that have been getting Linux in the workplace… Here comes a new fab Linux.
No liveCD I’ve ever tried supports VPC 2K4 sound i.e. the SOundBlaster 16 bit ISA PnP. The Ubuntu Live CD does NOT support the emulated DEC NIC in VPC 2k4. That’s the first time I’ve ever seen that in a live cd. 🙁
If Ubuntu devs do read this, please fully support VPC 2K4 for future liveCD releases.
Ubuntu is pretty good. I like the simplicity(sp?) of it. I’m not one to need fifty million apps that I will never use. Ubuntu does this job for me. I’m not a big gnome fan but it is growing on me. It isn’t my main os and might never be but it could be one day. Although I hate there isn’t a forum. I’m not a fan of the mailing list type thing they have currently.
i’ve been a gentoo fan for two years. i always liked debian, but it lacked the bleeding-edge packages a grew to love from gentoo. i tried ubuntu on a test machine and in vmware before i finally installed it to a hard drive in my main machine. firefox is my browser of choice, and while i like thunderbird better than evolution i was able to install it from the ubuntu repository. a quick install of nvidia-glx, modprobe of the nvidia module and some quick fixes to my X config and i was up and running. (X config was for xorg from gentoo) gnome 2.8 is great. i’m contemplating keeping ubuntu as my main linux desktop. i’d recommend it to any linux user and am starting to think even non-linux users could handle ubuntu. like most linux dists (gentoo excluded) there is a severe lack of media format support. i added the debian-marillat repository and a few moments later i had mplayer with all the necessary codecs. i used mpd (musicpd.org) so i had to grab the .deb files from debian/musicpd and i was listening to all my music. if you havent tried it, its worth the time. i havent tried the livecd yet, but i’d recommend an install to hard drive and some real use to get comfortable with it. try it out!
Why would anybody in his right mind put a 650 MB file on a http server…? These are even developers, not some game site kids… I *hate* that and it is stupid. I want a decent FTP with resume for this kind of business. Now, if someone would fix *that* in two minutes, I would paypal the project immeadetly.. 😉
Looks like they have it on their ftp server too. ftp://cdimage.ubuntulinux.org/cdimage/releases/warty/preview/live-…
Even if they only list http most such project will have it on their FTP server as well, just have to do a little digging. But either way the torrent is going to be much faster so go that way if you can!
One thing I don’t like about Debian is that I cannot install java by using an apt-get install.
What’s the position of Ubuntu project on that regard ?
Getting the file via HTTP isn’t any slower than getting it via FTP, and most proper downloaders support HTTP resume these days.
I have worked with many Linux-distros in my life. SUSE, Red Hat/Fedora, Munjoy, Yoper and Mandrake to name a few. Then i tried Ubuntu from the very first day it came out. And i have never enjoyed working with Linux as much as with Ubuntu. It is still in pre-version but nonetheless extremely stable. Few bugs, very good hardware detection, good look, nice handling. Ubuntu has the possibility to make Linux even more popular. And it finally managed to draw me from KDE to Gnome.
The OS is easy to use and quite easy to install. Only partitioning might be a bit tricky for the noob. Just like in Windows.
My only mayor complaint was the grub-bootloader that didn’t detect any non-linux operating systems and had to be configured manually.
I can only recommend the distro. fast, stable, powerful, easy to use.
I don’t really get what is so exciting about Ubuntu. I installed it a couple of weeks ago. First of all, I think the installer is not really that great. I tried to install it without installing a boot manager to my harddisk and that made the installation of some packages fail, e.g. gdm and without gdm X does not work either (I know I can start it with startx, but things like this are still annoying).
Second, I don’t really see the big difference to Debian. Ubuntu is not really usefull for servers because it is based on Debian SID and there are probably no security updates because the Debian security updates are only for stable. (Maybe they have their own security updates, I did not check that). This leaves the desktop. I don’t think that Ubuntu is usefull for a home desktop for several reasons:
– for newbies, I think the installer is too difficult. SUSE or Mandrake are probably better for newbies.
– for more experienced users, Ubuntu is not the right choice because of the limited set of packages available. You may argue that you can install packages from the regular debian repisotories but what is that point of using Ubuntu and not Debian SID then?
This leaves the corporate desktop. On the corporate desktop, Ubuntu is not any better then Xandros or Lycoris or any other of the smaller distributions. They all cannot compete with RedHat or SUSE for the simple reason that RedHat and SUSE are much better known and have a lot of more money.
Don’t get me wrong, I think Ubuntu is a nice distribution, but it is far from being the future of the Linux desktop and it is also not really something special. It brings some polish to Debian but for more experienced users, it is probably better to use Debian SID instead of Ubuntu because of the greater flexibility.
Second, I don’t really see the big difference to Debian. Ubuntu is not really usefull for servers because it is based on Debian SID and there are probably no security updates because the Debian security updates are only for stable.
—
debian doesnt provide security updates for ubuntu. canonical company does that
First of, you are right, there are still some bugs and the installer while nice in many ways still needs some work. But keep in mind that this is a pre-release and also that the ubuntu devs are aware of the problems and are working on a better, easier installer.
As has allready been pointed out, you are wrong about the security updates. In fact it is one of the greatest advantages of Ubuntu that you get a very up to date system like SID but also get security updates. I think that can be one of the main selling points for Ubuntu.
Apart from the security updates I think what can attract advanced users is, that Ubuntu offers you a very easy to set up Desktop that just works while at the same time giving you all the choice and power of debian proper if you want to use it.
Does anyone know of a free live cd with KDE 3.3? I will try Ubuntu anyway of course 🙂
berry.sourceforge.jp for the most advanced kde livecd available.
berry lang=us at the boot prompt
AFAIK, Ubuntu for now is a Gnome-only distro. not that you can’t install kde on it, its just not preinstalled.
Project Utopia is a system combining DBUS, HAL(hardware abstraction layer),udev and some other projects.
Basically, it adds far better auto-detection and configuration of hardware devices to Linux. For example, in Ubuntu I plug my SD card and I get a nautilus window of its contents on my desktop automatically. It looks to be the future of hardware support on Linux, and has cross-Desktop environment support.
i really like ubuntu. installed the preview on my production machine and never stopped using it. it’s just great!
regards,
christian
I just got a new P4 3.6ghz, dual channel DDR2, PCI express ATI, dual SATA Seacrates. The only problems I’ve had with linux is support for brand new hardware. A shame coz I like it so much – but like to stay on the edge. Anyone running it on a Asus P5GD2? It sounds really interesting. I’m downloading the live iso now, but if it’s anything like Knoppix, I don’t hold much hope
Are there any Ubuntu-specific GUI config apps (like Fedora/Mandrake/SUSE have their own GUIs for system configuration), or is Ubuntu just the latest Gnome thrown on top of Debian Sid?
The more I use Ubuntu the more I like it. I installed it as a test a while ago and now I’ve wiped my Mandrake install in favour for Ubuntu. It’s faster, easier and cleaner.
I don’t know what changed with my last system update but Ununtu is a lot faster now than it was when I first installed it. It’s not as fast as BeOS or Windows on this box, but it’s a lot more usable than most other linux distros.
Ubuntu is the first linux distro that I’ve felt that I could as an everyday all around OS. If it wasn’t for the crappy media support/players I’d probably use it full time.
I tried to install it without installing a boot manager to my harddisk and that made the installation of some packages fail, e.g. gdm and without gdm X does not work either (I know I can start it with startx, but things like this are still annoying).
I had that problem too. But I thought it was a faulty CD-RW in my case, because when I switched install source from CD to FTP it worked just fine.
But I guess it could be something else then,
For newbies, I think the installer is too difficult. SUSE or Mandrake are probably better for newbies.
What part of the installer did you think was harder than the SUSE or Mandrake installer? Apart from the partition mananger I think that the Ubuntu(debian) installer is just as easy if not easier than both of them.
No sound, No Network, No Video, just a black screen, but it wasn’t a total waist I suppose, I got Firefox, Thunderbird, the gimp, OpenOffice, Audacity and Abiword, all for windows on the iso WTF? I just downloaded more windows apps on a linux live cd than a working linux, Please Explain?
Hi all,
This disto seems to install well on my ‘difficult’ Dell laptop, but there is no sound on bootup 🙁 I couldn’t find a sound configuration tool…anyone any ideas?
BTW it wasn’t the typical Alsa ‘default mixer is mute’ problem that I have experienced before.
Cheers,
John
>Are there any Ubuntu-specific GUI config apps?
http://www.gnome.org/projects/gst/screenshots.html
How easy is it to install KDE 3.3 on this thing?
I really can’t stand using Gnome for more than 5 minutes, sorry. I need a distro for use at work, and although I was going for SuSE 9.1, I may try this instead as long as I can have KDE 3.3 easily installed on to it.
As for at home, it won’t be pulling me from my Gentoo for a while…
>Are there any Ubuntu-specific GUI config apps?
http://www.gnome.org/projects/gst/screenshots.html
I know that Gnome has some admin tools. What I meant was does Ubuntu have something like Libranet’s Adminmenu? Or (since Ubuntu liveCD is based on Morphix) does it come with Morphix Control Panel?
What I’m trying to figure out is if Ubuntu has something to offer for a non-Gnome user.
I got my previous Slack installation to a state of no Dropline-GNOME, after trying to upgrade it to GNOME 2.8 🙂
Yesterday I was thinking: “should I try Ubuntu or not?” Because it’s a new distro for me, and I had mixed feelings about it.
So far, what I have heard and seen about it seems perfect.
What I like about Ubuntu:
– Daily and downloadable ISO builds – wow? is that a tad unique at the least?
– GNOME !!! I develop for GTK+, so a GNOME distro is a must!
– Installation was a snap, though I did get worried about the default selected option of erasing everything from the hard-drive. That would delete my working Windows partition. Besides that, it was very tranquil.
– 6 Months releases sound about right.
– I guess that the people behind Ubuntu are trying to deliver the easier Debian distro. That’s important.
– I think that with Debian based distros we get to install more programs than with other distros. It’s so easy., most of the time.
– FireFox is a must! 🙂
– Ubuntu is looking to me, as I just installed it. Gotta use it a little bit. See ya 🙂
why are they using totem-gstreamer? Gstreamer is NOT ready for the primetime. First thing I did was install totem-xine.
Try Mepis. http://www.mepis.org
KDE based live cd with an easy installer within the live cd. Has most everything configured and ready to go. Uses straight debian packages with a few packages of its own for hardware detection and configuration. Be wary of doing an apt-get distro upgrade though, this will move you to pure debian.
I had to try several times to get the live CD to boot, each boot option I tried just hung on the Ubuntu startup screen, the only way I could get it to boot was using the expert mode, none of the other ones worked.
Also does anyone know if Gnome 2.8 has some way to have child windows open center screen?
> How easy is it to install KDE 3.3 on this thing?
Activate the ‘universe’ repository within synaptics and select the KDE [meta] packages.
FYI: The Ubuntu LiveCD has a small collection of Windows software on the free space (Firefox, OOo, Gimp, etc.). It’s basically a stripped down version of TheOpenCD installer with some selected apps. Testing would be appreciated
– Henrik (TheOpenCD project)
Unfortunately KDE 3.2.3 is in that package selection. I know because I did it.
Mepis, like some other Debian based distributions, uses a mixed /etc/apt/sources.list combined with a preferences file. One of the repositories is for Mepis. I assume this is for the Mepis specific front ends to the configuration utilities. The other highly ranked repository is Debian Testing. One of Mepis’ strengths is that is already is %99.44 pure Debian. The Debian repositories are pure gold as a resource.
What I’m trying to figure out is if Ubuntu has something to offer for a non-Gnome user.
Not really. It doesn’t even have anything to offer Gnome users either, except for a great distro.
But it is very GTK-centric.
I already have debian installed. What exactly can I not do with my present installation, that I could do with Ubuntu?
So what if they come out with a new distro every six months? Once debian is installed, I can make it as up-to-date as care to make it.
Am I missing something?
No except that they are not really competing with Debian, infact if you read the interview with Jeff Waugh you will see that all the improvements they make to Debian are fed back into Debian main. Ubuntu developers are literally Debian developers in fact, just paid by Canonical.
Regarding up-to-dateness. Ubuntu provides security updates for each version, but each new version is basically a stable snapshot of Debian unstable with Ubuntu touches and package selection. Basically all the work they do on Ubuntu goes into Debian unstable. If you kept up-to-date with Debian unstable you would not have as stable a Debian as you get with Ubuntu but you will benefit from the work done by Ubuntu.
I have done it and it works just fine (I use aptitude instead of apt)
The reason it works is because Mepis uses “pinning”, that is, for those who are unaware, giving a certain priority to each component of your sources.list: in Mepis “testing” has a very high priority and “unstable” a very low one.
And now back to the main subject: I still prefer Mepis and Libranet (granted, Libranet badly needs a new release): they are almost pure Debian and they give you the commercial apps.
As to Ubuntu, if I installed something from “Universe” it didn’t appear in the Gnome menu.
I tried to install Kdm, but I couldn’t because of missing dependencies.
I am writing this from Ubuntu, and at least it booted on my Dell Inspiron 8600. The “Device Manager” refuses to start and the sound doesn’t work, The default fonts looked bad, but after setting the dpi to 79, they look better.
Not related to the distro at all, but I mounted the live-cd with windows, and I must say, Celestia is awesome! I just installed it on my Windoze, and it works great.
Tried the live-cd as well. I wasn’t blown away, but it was nice. It will definitely be among the best when it is in a “non-preview” state. I guess I’m biased toward KDE distros though. 😀
Well, from what I’ve seen so far, with this live CD I think I’ll be installing Ubunto. My only complaint with the LiveCD is that after I activate a network connection, I can’t load any apps, so I have to load Gaim, Firefox, etc. before activating my network. I can’t even load the Calculator after activating the connection.
Ubuntu is sure quite promising. But the project could have a bit clearer and more clearly stated goals and focus. Now it seems that they just want to do almost everything that the big Debian project already aims to do: servers, gateway machines, various architectures, newbie desktops… What’s the focus? Where’s the beef?
If the goals are very loose and open, it may eventually lead to many people’s disappointment, contradictions in the developer and user community, then developers and users leaving etc. So the old and familiar story…
The various Debian-based distros could benefit if they tried not just do what everyone else already tries to do, or compete with each other & the Debian proper (= reinvent the wheel). The smaller distros like Ubuntu could do wisely if they tried to find their own markets and goals more, and then try to serve those specialized goals perhaps better than anyone else can.
I think the BSD world has got it right. Well, there may be a healthy degree of friendly competition between them too, but each BSD flavor has its own rather distinct goals, and there’s good cooperation between them just because of the different goals, and the BSD flavors may borrow good, tested new tools and ideas from the other flavors.
As to Ubuntu, why not just concentrate on, say, easy to ue power desktops and workstations on a couple of architectures only, and then try reach those restricted goals better than anybody else? Yeah, I’m sure that many Ubuntu developerds would want to run their own fav distro on every machine they have from firewalls to corporate web servers to their game consoles and mobile devices… But seriously, if I wanted to have a good server machine, wouldn’t I find many better alternatives than Ubuntu even in the Debian-based alterbnatives? Think about this seriosuly, you Ubuntu developers…
Also, if Ubuntu takes common desktop usage (newbies) seriosuly, having better GUI config tools than what only GNOME offers would serve non-experienced users better. In that respect SUSE, Mandrake, Xandros or even Libranet (etc.) are still much better choices for newbies than Ubuntu.
(continued:)
The only real advantage of Ubuntu over Debian proper, or over some other Debian-based distro, is the promie of getting a relatively stable Debian Unstable (i.e. new packages) with security updates. That would be a huge plus indeed, but it still remains a promise and a nice goal only.
Can the Ubuntu developers make Debian Unstable so much more stable than someone running Debian Unstable/Testing and having enough experience to upddate his packages without getting too may bugs with each upgrade? Do the Ubuntu developers have the resources to fix all the bugs in the big Debian Unstable repositories? Of course they don’t. So basically Ubuntu will have security fixes only for a relatively restricted, Ubuntu-specific set of Unstable packages (GNOME etc.).
If you want to run a lot non-Ubuntu-specific software, like KDE, XFCE etc., there might not be much advantage to choose Ubuntu. Ubuntu-specific customizations might even cause many package incompatibilities for such users.
I don’t know what are their goals, but a good Debian distro which does not support KDE by default is very welcome.
Many Debian based distros use KDE by default, and their creators are very stubborn about that as well.
The reason to have only one of the two is space in a CD. The 1 CD distros spread very fast, and Ubuntu won’t be different.
Above all, if Ubuntu is a community effort, it’s well ahead of many other debian based distros, which sometimes are supported by only one individual.
One of the features of Ubuntu is to support internationalization better than most other distros. I was greated with Portuguese from the installation on, and that’s very unique. I assume they support lots of other languages/countries.
Its only “downside” is to not support KDE by default, because I agree that KDE is much more “robust” for a newbie.
Anyway, I’m typing this from Ubuntu, after finally getting my dualhead monitors working on it. Cheers. 🙂
How about reading their website?
Their goal seems pretty clear to me. They want to make an easy to use, up to date desktop distro.
The website also say that it’s suitable for a server. Which is true. But their focus is the desktop.
I agree with you about the lack of differense among the distros though. Most of them are pretty much the same with a few minor differences. I sense that it’s somewhat a fear of alienating the conservative linux users.
The only distromaker that I think has completely lost that fear is Linspire. Not saying that it’s such a great distro, but at least they have the guts to make it whatever they want it to be.
That said, I think that Ubuntu is a great start. I just hope that they won’t be too conservative and allow themselves to take it even further. But it’s still a young distro, I guess time will tell.
Its only “downside” is to not support KDE by default, because I agree that KDE is much more “robust” for a newbie.
Why is that? I’ve always felt that KDE is more of a poweruser DE. Gnome is much more minimalistic and newbiefriendly in my opinion.
“Why is that? I’ve always felt that KDE is more of a poweruser DE.”
Exactly. But what is a poweruser to you may be an average user to someone else.
“Gnome is much more minimalistic and newbiefriendly in my opinion.”
Exactly.
You aren’t wrong, but the approach of the distros that use KDE is to install lots and lots of programs by default, and that helps a lot of people who wouldn’t know what to look for and where to look at, if they needed to install the programs by themselves.
Most users of Debian are either paranoid, or they run Sid.
Most users that use Woody only do so because it is supported and stable.
Ubuntu is Debian done the way it always should have been. Its Debian with some motivation. Lets face it, people who are motivated do not release software once every 2 years or more.
Conanical (Mark Shuttleworth) provides that motivation by way of Monitary means.
There are downfalls, you can’t support every peace of software in the world. Only 3 ports come along, and only Linux comes for a kernel. For many people though, these things were simply a hinderance to the speed of things getting done at Debian.
Above all else, there is a clear person in charge. Debian’s maintainers don’t appear to be able to agree on anything, and it is the higher ups that are supposed to keep such things under control. Mark just says “Here, I want you to do this within 2 weeks, I’ll give you $1,000 to do it”. What do you know, this appears to be working.
Progeny Debian is better. It uses Fedora’s anaconda installer and you can install any package from Debian also.
“i only miss gcc et.al. i prefere that newbies are still able to ‘get real’ and compile something”
# sudo aptitude install build-essential
Well… I’ve been reading the Ubuntu website and Ubuntu sounds like an interesting concept for a Debian based distro. In Ubuntu you’ll be updating your applications only twice a year (plus security updates whenever they come out). That’s probably a very sane approach and it helps to keep the software relatively stable (at least stable enough for desktop use).
So Ubuntu is likely to interest many conservative desktop users who don’t always demand the “latest and greatest”. And, of course, you’ll always have Ubuntu’s Bohemian “big brother”, Debian Sid, to fall back on if you get bored of Ubuntu’s security and want to live dangerously, getting daily updates for your apps. 😉
I installed Ubuntu on a laptop and it worked great right from the start–recognizing the synpatic touchpad and configuring double tapping and vertical scrolling without editing configuration files–right from the start! The latest version of Evolution–2.0–is also included. And though sound is increasingly less of a problem for most users it has been a problem for me on my laptop for reasons which are still largely mysterious to me. With Ubuntu, the volume control worked just as I expected. Java is missing, but can be added with a little effort by following the instructions on http://www.serios.net. Installing flash was even easier.
I booted the livecd, the sound worked, the screen came up ok, the disc does not have enough configuration tools. It only recognised my cd drive, it did not recognise my dvd drive or the cdr drive. I could find no hardware configuration tool. As it is it is ok as beta of course, but certainly not primetime. I am wary of others promoting this distro now due to the problems I have seen, whilst with other distros I have had no problems at all. If anyone else raves about this distro then I would have to say they are to be treated with suspicion. There is nothing special about this distro, it is ok for what it is, but there are much better alternatives out there, such as Linspire, Mepis, Knoppix, Mandrake etc, etc…
You should categorize the distros. Some are good for somethings and others for other things. 🙂
This one gave me a very very cool system. But I’m a programmer, and I liked having to install some missing packages, for example. A LiveCD is fun, but it’s not for me.
This is the first ever dist that has detected all my hw, and correctly. I’ve got a Gbit NIC onboard, and a soundcard, none other dists have made it on the first try.
Even my graphics card got correctly.
Now i’m streamin, and Firefox’in with ubuntu.
Thanks for a very good distro!
If you’re tried “all of them” before, try this… and see for yourself!
I love that they also use 2.6.8 !
I, too, am I FreeBSD user who tried Ubuntu. While my initial impressions were very positive as apart from keyboard support it seemed very polished, I found Ubuntu to be extraordinarily unstable and buggy — merely switching themes often caused the entire system to lock up, and processor usage when the system wasn’t doing anything was upwards of 10% on my Pentium-M/1.5GHz machine. The more I looked for tools — a GUI for GRUB configuration, for example — the more disappointed I became. It’s a distro to watch, certainly, but it’s not quite there yet.
As for the FreeBSD packages bit — I’ve never had a problem using portupgrade’s package-only/preferred option.
Their goal seems pretty clear to me. They want to make an easy to use, up to date desktop distro. The website also say that it’s suitable for a server. Which is true. But their focus is the desktop.
I’ve read that too. But according to some comments by Ubuntu developers that I’ve read, those goals don’t seem totally clear yet.
My point was: If you want to make a good desktop distro, then concentrate on making a very good desktop distro – and forget servers. On the other hand, there could very well also be Ubuntu server distribution, but IMHO it would be wise to separate the server version altogether from the desktop version. Also the server Ubuntu could then try to reach its own goals as well as possible. The goals that easy to use and up-to-date desktop distros and OTOH reliable server distros have are very different.
Anyway, also I do find Ubuntu very promising already, and I wouldn’t be surprised if I used it as my default desktop OS after a few months. But nevertheless, or just because of that, I wanted to point out some potential problems that might arise, and that are well known from other similar projects: the problems of too broad and even contradicting goals, new distro marketing hype vs. rough reality (= possibilities of having a stable unstable Debian, security fixes for all Debian unstable?), what it needs to make a competitive newbie friendly desktop OS etc.
It is always easier to choose a few restricted goals and try to reach them very well than try to be everything to everybody – what ever those goals may be in each caase.
I finally bit the bullet and replaced my Slack install with Ubuntu last night, and it’s got some really nice features.
First up is the installer, which is the new Debian installer – it picked up all my hardware (including SATA drives), and happily installed my system.
After downloading the updates, I was booted into my new system, with autodetected X settings, working sound, and Gnome 2.8. The only thing I needed to do was apt-get the ATI binary drivers (yup, you can apt-get them), and configure it.
They also made the choice of not enabling the root account – all root stuff is done using sudo.
Well, none of the installation iso’s worked with my hardware, but I was able to succefully complete a net-install using the mini.iso (burned to cdrw) found here:
http://archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/dists/warty/main/installer-i386/cu…
Just thought others with installation problems might want to give the net-install a go.
it loads fine then breaks after a while… apps fail to load, the “busy” pointer doesn’t appear… the sata drives are not detected… sure looks polished.. but it won’t be working on the shuttle amd64 system.