So a few weeks ago I ordered, for free and free shipping, 20 copies 
of Ubuntu Linux for i386, 5 for PowerPC, and 5 for AMD/64. They arrived 
while I was on vacation last week. I intend to hand them out at the 
next user group meeting I attend, probably the San Jose VFP SIG 
(crimestar) during my demonstration of Dabo later this month.

The i386 version comes with two CD's: a "live cd" which allows you to 
boot into Ubuntu without messing up any of your disk partitions: it'll 
leave your Windows installation alone, allowing you to see if Ubuntu 
will run on your system and dabble with it a bit. This is a bit slow as 
it swaps to/from a RamDisk from the CD-ROM.

The install CD provides a very nice plain-text installer that basically 
lets you accept the reasonable defaults to install the system. After 
the contents of the CD-ROM were copied to my hard drive, I was prompted 
to remove the CD and reboot, at which point the installer continued. 
Very early in the install process, I got a dialog:

"Multiple network adapters were found on your system. Please select the 
one you wish to be the primary adapter, for the purpose of installing 
Ubuntu." To my great astonishment and delight, my Intel Centrino 
wireless adapter was one of the interfaces listed. I selected it, and 
then got a message asking me if I wanted to download the latest updates 
from the internet. I said "yes", and got a "waiting for DHCP to set up 
your internet connection", after which about 30 minutes of apt-get 
messages passed by while just about every package was updated to the 
latest versions. 

After that, the installer continued, with very little interaction 
necessary. My grandma could have installed this system, even though it 
was all plain-text.

The system disables the root account from logging in but gives the user 
you specify during the install process full sudo access. This is a very 
sane approach IMO.

After the installation was complete, the X Server started and I got a 
nice looking login screen, and to my surprise and delight no stupid 
"welcome" messages cluttering up my experience. Just a nice looking 
desktop with a taskbar down below and an application menu system up top, 
complete with battery monitor, wireless network strength meter, and the 
system time. Red Hat/Fedora is left in the dust here: Ubuntu realized I 
was on a laptop - I even noticed a message during boot "we are a laptop" 
while I always had to install the battery meter stuff separately on 
RedHat. Also, this is the first time I've seen the wlan signal strength 
meter actually working.

An interesting sidenote is that my inittab shows that we are booting 
into runlevel 2, even though the end of the boot process starts up the x 
server and presents the graphical login. This must be a Debian thing.

Mozilla FireFox is setup as the default browser, but I had to install 
ThunderBird (apt-get install mozilla-thunderbird), about a 30 second 
process. One of the first things I wanted to do is to get my settings 
from my subversion server, and I quickly realized subversion wasn't 
installed. A quick apt-get install subversion had it installed in 
literally 20 seconds. A few seconds after that (svn checkout svn://paulmcnett.com/...) 
I had all my settings available.

Python 2.3.4 is installed by default with a plethora of batteries 
included, such as MySQLdb. 

The system runs much faster than Fedora, and I'm not sure why. Starting 
applications is much faster, and working with applications appears to 
be faster as well. 

One thing that surprised me was the HAL (Hardware Abstraction Layer) as 
I thought Linux didn't have this. I was able to browse all my hardware 
devices, including the video card, network adapters, pci bridge, cpu, 
sound card, etc. They all had vendor and product information in 
human-readable format.

I'm back on Fedora now, but I think I'm going to be migrating over to 
Ubuntu soon, assuming that I can get the nvidia driver, Python 2.4 and 
wxPython 2.5.3.x installed and working. I'll have to install from source 
which hopefully will be a nonissue on this Debian-based Linux distro.

This is my first foray into a non-RedHat distro, and I'm very impressed. 
I've always been aware of Debian and all the distros based on it, and 
I've always had that niggling feeling that perhaps Debian has a better 
core, but I've been afraid to try it out for lack of time and hardware 
to test on.

Anyway: keep an eye on Ubuntu!
http://www.ubuntu.com

Next stop (once I've migrated to Ubuntu) is to take a look at Gentoo, 
which has as its main feature a pure-source distribution model. The 
emerge tool downloads the source to your hard disk, then compiles and 
installs it locally. This is in contrast to building a program and then 
distributing the binaries like RedHat and Debian do. Theoretically, 
this provides a more flexible system and better runtime performance 
because the kernel and programs are compiled specifically for your 
system, at the cost of installation time (I've heard that it can take 
days or weeks to compile everything for a base Gentoo install).

© 2005 Paul McNett       [/Computing/Linux] permanent link