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Ubuntu Linux Review 217

Posted by timothy from the with-a-name-like-shuttleworth dept.
JimLynch writes "Pardon me while I pimp one of my own stories. We've got a review of Ubuntu Linux up on ExtremeTech. Check it out. Overall we had quite a positive experience with it, we think it's going to be a good distro as it matures. If you're looking for an easy-to-install debian distro, give it a download." Update: 09/27 23:25 GMT by T : Eugenia writes with another review from USALug, and a 6-page comprehensive Ubuntu preview at OSNews, writing "Gnome's & Ubuntu's release manager Jeff Waugh also had an interesting interview detailing lots of interesting tidbits. The final version of Ubuntu is expected mid-October."
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Ubuntu Linux Review More

Ubuntu Linux Review

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  • Longer/better review (Score:5, Informative)

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday September 27, 2004 @05:58PM (#10367561)
    I think the OSNews review posted today is better: http://www.osnews.com/story.php?news_id=8407 [osnews.com]

  • Or (Score:4, Informative)

    by OverlordQ ( 264228 ) * on Monday September 27, 2004 @05:58PM (#10367562) Journal
    See the Debian Planet [debianplanet.org] story back on the 16th. Which linked you to the announcement [ubuntu.com] and also an interview [osnews.com].

  • Not Debian (Score:5, Informative)

    by Doc Ruby ( 173196 ) on Monday September 27, 2004 @05:59PM (#10367568) Homepage Journal
    Their packages are not binary compatible with Debian packages, so you can't mix them in a single install. Therefore, they're not really a Debian child, although they're related by starting with the Debian package selection, and bugfixing/certifying from there. More like a Debian half-clone, sent to finishing school. Which will have some effect on drawing away some community contribution to Debian, as a partial fork. Kinda like that clone beating his dad's time at the pub with his fancy accent, but then unable to get past Dad's doorman to use the penthouse jacuzzi.

    • Re:Not Debian (Score:4, Informative)

      by natrius ( 642724 ) <niran @ n i r a n . o rg> on Monday September 27, 2004 @06:16PM (#10367701) Homepage
      Most Debian packages work in Ubuntu. For instance, many people have successfully used the Debian mplayer packages from an unofficial mirror on Ubuntu. The reason why they suggest not mixing Debian packages into an Ubuntu install is because the versioning may be different and apt can get confused. Most Debian packages are present in the universe section of the Ubuntu repository, so it's not that big of a deal.

    • Re:Not Debian (Score:4, Informative)

      by dschl ( 57168 ) on Monday September 27, 2004 @06:22PM (#10367742) Homepage
      Funny, I installed the 040925 nightly build on the weekend, and then added a nearby Debian mirror (unstable, of course) to the package list in Synaptic. The (20? 30?) packages I installed from sid all appear to work just fine in Ubuntu. You appear to be incorrect, please look around for some of the interviews with the Ubuntu developers (relevant section quoted in this comment [slashdot.org]). I understand that most of the Ubuntu developers are existing Debian developers, who can now work on Debian full time - this will help Debian rather than draw resources away. Based on what little I know about the people involved with Debian, I doubt that they would be likely to do anything that would mess up the distro which they love.

      Oh, and your analogy sucks, too.

      • Ubuntu says mixing Debian and Ubuntu packages is not a very good idea [ubuntulinux.org]. They might not want something bad to happen to Debian while they create a distro that can fork away from Debian, but it could happen anyway. If developers' intent were the determinant of what happened to software, we wouldn't have bugs.

        • Re:Not Debian (Score:5, Interesting)

          by dschl ( 57168 ) on Monday September 27, 2004 @09:06PM (#10369021) Homepage
          They contribute changes to the upstream Debian package. Some of their developers overlap. They have a page clarifying their relationship to Debian [ubuntulinux.org], and they recognize that they are a subset. It would take a profound level of arrogance to imagine replacing a distro as broad as Debian, and arrogance appears to be absent from Ubuntu, from the name on down.

          You seem pretty hung up on the potential for a fork - odds are, we define the word "fork" differently. I view Ubuntu as a short-term, temporary fork, similar to the branches in the Mozilla project, where every new release is effectively a short-term departure from a frozen snapshot of the trunk, which returns to the trunk to refresh and renew on a regular basis. I also do not view it as the end of the world. Unlike rpm based distros, most Debian-based ones (or at least those that lasted, anyway, progeny, etc) do not appear to fork to the same degree as RedHat / Mandrake / ten thousand others.

          You might find the following blog entries from Jeff Licquia (a Progeny developer) interesting. He's got a lot better perspective on the issue than most:

          Ubuntu universe is a snapshot taken twice a year, without any security fixes or updates. I have run sid for several years now, and quite like living on the bleeding edge - I do not plan on updating only every six months, and I also don't worry too much if anything breaks beyond my repair skills - that is why /home and /var live on their own partitions. But Ubuntu fills a gap for someone who is not ready to deal with sid on a regular basis - who wants a different compromise of stability and freshness than the regular Debian release cycle.

          • Re:Not Debian (Score:3, Informative)

            by grokster ( 557481 )
            I have run sid for several years now, and quite like living on the bleeding edge - I do not plan on updating only every six months

            Ubuntu will also have a dev branch, once the first version is released. The dev branch will be similar to sid... daily changes etc.

    • Not a fork (Score:3, Informative)

      by QuantumG ( 50515 )
      Ubuntu is a commercial distribution with 34+ full time engineers working on it. Every bug they fix they contribute back to Debian or the relevant project. There are a number of really good distributions out there that have forked Debian, but Ubuntu is one of the few who gives most of their changes back to the community. So I say it's a branch, not a fork.
      • If those patches work, and are accepted, then all will be well. I will use Debian, 100% compatible with itself, a week or so after Ubuntu sends their patches. This development is really good news for those of us building a Debian package distro from source, with patches from any trustworthy source.
    • Do you mean that if you install it for AMD64, then the binary packages aren't compatible? That's the only way I could see it.

      I installed from the AMD64 ISO and had to apt-get source, which I think only didn't work because it was my first time ever using apt-get... I wouldn't say there was a problem with Ubuntu.
      • No, Ubuntu says there can be problems, because apt-get doesn't distinguish between their Ubuntu binaries and binaries in the Debian archive. Since they're built on different machines, with different configs, possibly against different library versions, they can have binary incompatibilities. All this is from the Ubuntu FAQ, but they don't seem to think it's a big deal. I do. YMMV.

  • Wireless Card (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday September 27, 2004 @06:00PM (#10367584)
    Finally, we were disappointed (but not surprised) that Ubuntu did not detect or configure the wireless card in our laptop. We've come to expect this, unfortunately. But it would sure be nice at some point if we could connect wirelessly right after installing a Linux distro, with no extra effort required.

    I don't know what brand of wireless card it was, but if it was one with a Broadcom chip inside, well your SOL on that one. If they would give out the specs, we'd have drivers for them.

  • Ubuntu? (Score:2, Redundant)

    by raider_red ( 156642 )
    Could someone please explain where the name came from? I'm picturing African shields and spears flanking my computer.

  • Poor review (Score:5, Informative)

    by iMaple ( 769378 ) on Monday September 27, 2004 @06:03PM (#10367603)
    The review concludes that one of the few disadvantages of the disro is 'no VPN wizard'. Now isnt that a bit too picky !!! I would understnad if they mentioned the Text based Installer, no pakg selection , bad install documentation etc. but no VPN wizard is absurd.
    • Not at all. A VPN connection is something that any OS/desktop should be able to quickly and easily. Windows has had it for years, there's no excuse at this point for Linux to not have it.

      • Re:Poor review (Score:2, Insightful)

        by ghideon ( 720955 )
        What kind of VPN?
        A Cisco VPN client? A MS style PPTP VPN client? Freeswan? That web based client for Nortel Convtivity?
        It drives me nuts, and I'm the Network Admin at my company!

  • software and hardware (Score:5, Insightful)

    by dankelley ( 573611 ) on Monday September 27, 2004 @06:05PM (#10367621)
    In case you're wondering, it holds recent versions of software (Evolution 2.0, Gnome 2.8, ...).

    The main thing, it seems, is that this disto provides a spoonful of sugar to make the Debian medicine go down. But this sugar may not be enough for laptop users. Quoting from the article, we were disappointed (but not surprised) that Ubuntu did not detect or configure the wireless card in our laptop. So that spoonful of sugar may be deceptive ... some real skill may be required after the pointy-clicky stage. Is it a good thing to mix the difficult and the simple?

    • Re:software and hardware (Score:3, Informative)

      by Soko ( 17987 )
      There are some issues with the lp module b0rking up Dell and IBM laptops, so that may be the cause of the wireless trouble that ExtremeTech had. It is with my Dell Latitude and it's IPW2100 wireless chip - see bug 1254 on bugzilla.ubuntu.org.

      That being said, they have released an evaluation install, not a final. That's scheduled for mid October, IIRC. It's therefore not suprising to see some things - especially wireless - flaky or non-functional in the eval release. The final is supposed to be a lot better
    • kick-ass laptop support is one of the stated goals of Ubuntu, so you can assume this will go away when the final release is done. As for a VPN client, yeah, ok, whatever, file a bug at bugzilla.ubuntu.org and in the description point at some existing stable free client that could be incorporated.
    • Keep in mind that Ubuntu is currently under heavy development. Things are getting fixed pretty quickly. The mailing list is helpful with questions, and the developers are responsive to bug reports.

      To make a long story short, I liked Ubuntu so much that I finally ditched RH9. Ubuntu is now my main desktop, sharing my hard drive with Windows only because I play Dark Age of Camelot.


    • I had nothing but a good experience installing Ubuntu on my iBook G3. Detected all the hardware and was installed fully within a half hour.

      Excellent. Finally a PPC distro for the older computers I don't want to put Gentoo on.
    • It is a preview release, so there will be some teething problems. Updates are being released virtually hourly fixing bugs, so they quality is going up all the time.

  • Works with my Apple G5 (Score:5, Informative)

    by huiqbal ( 726451 ) on Monday September 27, 2004 @06:11PM (#10367661)
    Well at least we have to give Ubuntu folks some credit. This is the only linux distro that installed on my Apple G5. Installation was real easy on G5. They have PPC32 support only. PPC64 support coming soon. For those of us looking for an alternate OS for their G5 without paying yellowdog or without having technical expertise for debian and gentoo, Ubuntu is the distribution. The only problem sound card is not recognized. Even the thermal driver is working.

  • Why you should care (Score:3, Informative)

    by steveha ( 103154 ) on Monday September 27, 2004 @06:21PM (#10367739) Homepage
    Several people have already posted comments asking why the world needs yet another Linux distro.

    I wrote a Slashdot comment explaining why Ubuntu is interesting. Click here [slashdot.org] to read it.

    A comment [slashdot.org] by Doc Ruby states that Ubuntu is not package-compatible with Debian. I said otherwise in my comment linked above, but I haven't checked it out for myself yet so I'm probably wrong.

    steveha

  • Oh great... (Score:5, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday September 27, 2004 @06:35PM (#10367845)
    Me: Hey boss, why don't we standardize on Ubuntu Warty Warthog Linux on the desktop.

    Boss: Say, that sounds like it will decrease our ROI, while providing value to our shareholders. However, why don't you install Ubuntu Warty Warthog Linux on one test machine, and Indigo Salamander Pumpkin Dog Linux on another machine, that way we can objectively compare their packaging systems.
  • Because it's Utnubu spelled backwards.
  • ... is there an AMD64 (x86_64) version?

    • Re:All I want to know (Score:2, Informative)

      by Anonymous Coward
      Yes! I'm running the ubuntu x86_64 version on an HP pavilion a650e with AMD64 3200+ cpu, everything works well. I'm also running the standard 32bit x86 version of ubuntu on my home pentium II system. So far I'm quite happy with ubuntu. Debian, gnome, python, just works, what's not to like?

  • Where Ubuntu is coming from and going to (Score:3, Interesting)

    by theolein ( 316044 ) on Monday September 27, 2004 @09:31PM (#10369230) Journal
    The name Ubuntu is zulu, a South African language, for God. The distro is compiled and managed by South African Soyuz tourist millionaire Mark Shuttleworth (Hey boet) and his company Canonical. There has been quite a bit of movement in South Africa over the past couple of years to get Linux into schools and small businesses, although the vast majority are still using pirated versions of Windows or whatever came with their computer.

    This distro, from my point of view (I'm South African), makes excellent sense for people wanting to install Linux and basically just get up and working without having to fight through masses of obscure applications. It provides what 90% of average computer users need and use on their computers:Office productivity, mail, browser, messaging, graphics and media player. That's it, no fluff.

    This distro is exactly what is needed (once they sort out the various bugs) for a home user or small business to get started. Given that there has only been a move to competition in the telcom business in South Africa this month, and that SA has had the world's highest rates out, wireless networking has not been a major feature in the SA IT landscape up until now, so I think that not working detection of Wireless NICs is not a major priority at the moment.

    I'm really proud about this, as it gives SA its first distro aimed at the country.

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