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Posted: 10/30/2006 11:51:11 AM EDT
[#1]
We recommend Ubuntu to freshmen at the UofA who are majoring in computer science/engineering. It's a good way to migrate from GUI Windows to Linux; I think it's (almost) as good as OS X for a UNIX-like GUI OS; you can't complain since it's free...
I think their slogan is that Ubuntu is "Linux for humans" 
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Posted: 10/30/2006 11:55:59 AM EDT
[#2]
Running it at home for my file server.
It has detected every device I have without fail. It just works, which is awesome since I have very little patience for the usual Linux l337-haxx0r, let's-recompile-the-kernel-so-my-mouse-works bullshit. |
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Posted: 10/30/2006 11:57:59 AM EDT
[#3]
It is good. I still prefer Gentoo (yeah I'm one of those fanboys
 ) but it has almost as much flexibility honestly and it works pretty well out of the box. And yes it does use Debian's package management.Only thing that annoys me is that it is all configured so that you have to do everything administrative through sudo. I had to change that when I used it. 
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Posted: 10/30/2006 11:59:58 AM EDT
[#4]
I like it.
but running it in VMWARE is kind of a pain. I could never get VM Tools to install...which sucks, if you know about VMWARE. |
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Posted: 10/30/2006 12:00:05 PM EDT
[#5]
Well, using sudo is a good thing, but it forces you? You can't just log in as root and manage packages or what have you? That'll annoy the piss out of me until I fix it. |
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Posted: 10/30/2006 12:01:30 PM EDT
[#6]
No, you can't use su to be root (or log in as root) unless you fix their lameness. I understand it is for protection or whatever but I'm not a novice so I don't need that crap. 
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Posted: 10/30/2006 12:02:05 PM EDT
[#7]
Ya, having the VM Tools is mandatory. As it turns out my VMware install is hosed at the moment, but as soon as it's fixed I'll install Ubuntu. If I get the VM Tools installed (and I will, or there's no point) I'll let you know how it worked. |
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Posted: 10/30/2006 12:04:33 PM EDT
[#8]
It just means that I improve my typing skills since I have to type everything twice.
SHIT!
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Posted: 10/30/2006 12:05:22 PM EDT
[#9]
I think you can use "sudo -i" to stay as root, so you don't have to sudo for every command. |
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Posted: 10/30/2006 12:06:39 PM EDT
[#10]
Nothing some proper planning in /etc/fstab couldn't fix.
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Posted: 10/30/2006 12:07:26 PM EDT
[#11]
You can always 'sudo -s' instead of 'su' it'll give you a root shell, just like su. I use that on Mac OS X all the time as root is disabled by default and su won't work. As for the question at hand. I like ubuntu. I don't use it too much, but I do play with it. I'm going to use 6.10 and install it as a MythTV machine (replacing FC4 mythTV box) just to get a more friendly machine running. I need to upgrade MythTV to .20 anyway, so why not refresh the whole install while I'm at it and refresh my memory on Myth and all the gotcha's getting it running. |
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Posted: 10/30/2006 12:07:59 PM EDT
[#12]
Running it as a virtual machine over VMware isn't a great way to see if it works with what you've got, because it won't directly interface with your hardware. It has to go to through the VM kernel, which presents hardware as an abstraction to it's virtual machines.
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Posted: 10/30/2006 12:08:23 PM EDT
[#13]
Really? I was under the impression that you needed to remount when you put a different CD in...my CDROM won't open unless I 'umount' it. |
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Posted: 10/30/2006 12:10:18 PM EDT
[#14]
Only if you want it to try to mount the CDROM at boot every time... which is unlikely. |
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Posted: 10/30/2006 12:11:42 PM EDT
[#15]
Unbuntu is a a good distro, I expect it will continue to grow in popularity over the next few years and will eventually garner a portion of the "Enterprise" server market once they get the industry recognition and approval out of the way.
Personally I prefer "Mepis" Linux which is also based on Debian Linux (like Unbuntu) with the primary differences being that Mepis uses the KDE desktop and the developer works very hard on his hardware detection routines. The latest release of Mepis actually uses Unbuntu package repositories instead of the "pure" Debian ones. When they made the switch from Debian repos to Unbuntu repos I decided to switch to pure Debian or derivatives that use pure Debian repos like Kanotix Linux. As far as Fedora goes, I recently loaded FC5 and it's pretty slick, very polished and the development resources of Red Hat are obvious. I've been using it because I maintain some RHEL4 servers at work. Be warned! Once you learn how to use the Debain/Unbuntu/Mepis package manager "apt" you'll never (willingly) go back to using rpm's. Debian has +/-15,490 packages in it's repos, many of those are used by Unbuntu as well. "apt" is the best package manager I've ever used, see here for an overview of how it works. btw: rpm sucks. If you havent tried a Debian based OS yet I'd try Unbuntu, Mepis and Kanotix and see which one you like best (they are all live cd's). enjoy. |
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Posted: 10/30/2006 12:11:58 PM EDT
[#16]
I'm aware of that.
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Posted: 10/30/2006 12:12:15 PM EDT
[#17]
No, i don't think so. Just put in fstab with the user and auto options. |
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Posted: 10/30/2006 12:14:15 PM EDT
[#18]
Okay, someone has to say it...
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Posted: 10/30/2006 12:15:33 PM EDT
[#19]
Guys like him call me "boss" nowdays. 
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Posted: 10/30/2006 12:16:45 PM EDT
[#20]
Does Linux not have something like vold in Solaris? All I have to do is throw a cd in and it mounts, type eject and it unmounts and ejects. |
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Posted: 10/30/2006 12:18:18 PM EDT
[#21]
Yes, been using it as my primary (only) OS for about a year (was Debian Sarge before that). I moved my parents over to it about 10 months ago and it has worked well for them. It's a great distro for everybody... it has all the depth of Debian and it's very approachable for newbs.
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Posted: 10/30/2006 12:19:24 PM EDT
[#22]
Maybe in the KDE file manager it handles this, but who uses the GUI in Linux?
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Posted: 10/30/2006 12:19:26 PM EDT
[#23]
These days I'm dual booting Solaris and Backtrack...
Just a guess but you probably don't want your users to have backtrack.
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Posted: 10/30/2006 12:20:23 PM EDT
[#24]
Use the 'noauto' option in the appropriate line and it will not mount at boot. Using the 'users' options can allow users to mount it themselves. You can further control this with things like udev which assign group permissions to the devices. If you want it to act like Windows there's supermount and automount but I haven't messed with them much. |
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Posted: 10/30/2006 12:20:45 PM EDT
[#25]
vold works just fine with the console too.
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Posted: 10/30/2006 12:22:14 PM EDT
[#26]
AFAIK, VM tools doesn't support Xorg 7.x yet, thus all the problems everyone has been having since the major distros started using it. |
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Posted: 10/30/2006 12:23:49 PM EDT
[#27]
How large are the Ubuntu repositories compared to the pure Debian ones? To the distros differ enough to discourage using Debian repos? Is it anything like Fedora with endless headaches surrounding conflicts that innevitably arise from deviating from the official repos?
How does yum (which is handy as a front end to rpm, as it resolves dependencies for you) compare to apt? |
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Posted: 10/30/2006 12:23:51 PM EDT
[#28]
It also doesn't support Sol10 x86. 
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Posted: 10/30/2006 12:26:07 PM EDT
[#29]
Well, Ubuntu is synced with upstream Debian every 6 months. Everything available in Debian is available in Ubuntu, plus a little more. You can use some unofficial Debian repos (debian-multimedia for example), but Ubuntu has deviated in their package naming scheme enough that you are very likely to run into problems. ETA: Synaptic is reporting 20,333 packages available from the official Ubuntu repos. |
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Posted: 10/30/2006 12:26:45 PM EDT
[#30]
::PAGING FOX-
SS |
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Posted: 10/30/2006 12:28:45 PM EDT
[#31]
I've only used yum a little but I would wager that apt is a lot more powerful. |
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Posted: 10/30/2006 12:32:03 PM EDT
[#32]
It's very user-friendly, once they get the errors in a particular release out. I migrated my laptop to Ubuntu Dapper from openSuSE 10.1. My soundcard still didn't work, but my wifi did. Then out came Edgy, and I downloaded it and tried switching over. The sound worked right off the bat, which I loved, but I couldn't get the video drivers to install properly (after installing them, it would not boot past the very first loading screen), so I was stuck at 800x600 and no 3D. So now I'm down on Kubuntu Dapper again, going to try Fedora Core 6 for a little while until the graphics bugs have a chance to get worked out in Edgy.
Edit: Apt works great, better than I could ever get YaST to work. The repositories are large enough for most software if you enable universe and multiverse (unsupported and commercial, I forget which is which). Some software, such as Opera, however, you have to download separately, but it installs fine. Edit 2: The no-root, sudo-only thing is annoying at first if you're used to just logging in as root, but you get used to it. Also, you can change permissions on restricted files with chmod, using sudo. |
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Posted: 10/30/2006 12:34:11 PM EDT
[#33]
No, if you stick to the official repositories then you'll be golden. Dependencies are automatically and intelligently resolved. RPM hell is the main reason I abandoned Red Hat based distros, and the dpkg/apt system has been like a dream come true. There are several tools to use with apt. You can use straight apt to install stuff (sudo apt-get install banshee), or aptitude which is a console based manager that is very nice. There's also Synaptic which is a GTK based GUI manager or Ubuntu's update-manager which will help you just keep up to date (think Windows Update type of interface). The other nice thing is that if you compile a lot of software, say wanting to run CVS versions of software available in the repos, getting build dependencies is amazingly easy too (sudo apt-get build-dep banshee). |
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Posted: 10/30/2006 12:34:22 PM EDT
[#34]
Anybody using XGL and compiz? I'm thinking about trying it out soon...
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Posted: 10/30/2006 12:35:35 PM EDT
[#35]
Holy cow, it boots as a Live CD and you can install it from there. That's pretty sweet.
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Posted: 10/30/2006 12:36:47 PM EDT
[#36]
Nothing like surfing the web and chatting while installing an OS 
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Posted: 10/30/2006 1:31:26 PM EDT
[#37]
no kidding he's a smart guy i JUSt installed fedora core 6 on my dual boot machine at work. was running core 5. the upgrade took about 1.5 hours. im guessing i didn't use a stop watch .............. samba, thunderbird, seamonkey, bittorrent...... everything STILL WORKS EVERY machine of mine i have installed ubunto on. i can only get 640X480 as a screen resolution. I am in no way a linux geek. But so far every machine i have installed fedora on has worked flawlessly. yum update to manually update OR you can configure it to auto update under services..... |
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Posted: 10/30/2006 2:55:30 PM EDT
[#38]
Well, I've got it installed and running. The only thing is, Firefox 2.0 is kinda funky with ARFCOM. Some of the buttons aren't displaying correctly.
 Anyway, so far so good. Now, it's time to figure out package management. Oh, and I got the VM Tools working. The issue is, VMWare Workstation 5.5.2 (the latest) supports X.org 7.0, but not 7.1. Ubuntu 6.10 and X.org seem to already include support for the VMware video adapter, so I just edited /usr/bin/vmware-config-tools.pl and commented out the lines that installed vmware_drv.so, since it already exists as /usr/lib/xorg/modules/drivers/vmware_drv.so. Everything works fine now. I'm kinda diggin' it. |
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Posted: 10/30/2006 3:06:40 PM EDT
[#39]
Yeah, Firefox 2.0 has been pretty poorly received... apparently it's pretty buggy, kind of rushed. Fortunately, an excellent fix has been released. |
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Posted: 10/30/2006 3:27:32 PM EDT
[#40]
Don't Wuntu
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Posted: 10/30/2006 3:51:09 PM EDT
[#41]
Ok, so it's been a while since I've used any Linux distro as a desktop OS (all of mine are servers). Holy cow, things have gotten easier. Imagine my surprise when my HP PhotoSmart C3180 Printer/Scanner just...worked. Detected automatically and everything. No shit, it was more work to get it going in Windows (I actually had to install drivers). SANE and CUPS have come a long way.
My grandmother could figure this out. Wierd. It almost takes the fun out of it.
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