[NBLUG/talk] Ubuntu

[Aaron Grattafiori]

A'fish'ionado wrote:

>I got my free Ubuntu 5.10 CDs yesterday. :-)
>
>To be honest, after hearing all the hype about Ubuntu, I was a little bit
>disappointed when I finally got to try it.
>
>My biggest gripe is the live CD. It is S-L-O-W. It takes forever to boot,
>and even once you get to the desktop, it pauses and spins the CD with every
>other click. On top of that, you're faced with a curses interface that asks
>you probing questions at the begining of each boot. I don't know what the
>Ubuntu guys are doing, but they need to have a talk with the Knoppix people.
>Knoppix is much faster, and doesn't have the frightening startup sequence.
>  
>
ANY, livecd distro is going to be slow, unless you can load the CD into
a ramdisk or something like the knoppix option "toram" (you'll need
around a gig of mem).
If you want a livecd that works, I would say just use knoppix.

>Ubuntu does get hight points from me, though, for the touchy-feely
>"everything's so pretty" default interface (once you get past the curses,
>the startup screen is pretty, the default desktop is pretty, the default
>sound scheme is pretty...) and for "everything just works"-ness. When I
>plugged in my USB memory stick, after a moment of drive grinding, an icon
>magically appeared on the desktop. That's more than I can say for almost any
>other distro I've tried.
>
>  
>
Yes, this is one of the very high points of the distro, things just seem
to 'just work'.
It is quite bloated with pretty effects and gnome 10.2(?)... But you can
have the same interface running gdm and gnome on any other distro.

>After I got the hard drive install finished, the user experience was
>significantly nicer. Once you get past the installer, you leave behind
>curses for good, and the desktop is as fast as I usually expect for Gnome.
>The installer is a curses interface (I kind of expected more, but it works),
>not much of an improvement beyond what Debian offers.
>
Yeah I would expect ubuntu to have a graphical installer soon, similar
to something like fedora.
For as much as it tries to be pretty and user friendly, they should get
one going soon...


>Maybe I'm just used to multi-CD distributions, but it felt like there
>weren't very many applications included. It's certainly much more that comes
>with, say, WinXP, but even Knoppix seems to include more (but then Knoppix
>has its own magic compressed file system).
>
>  
>
Look into using the aptitude(?) grapgical package manager or  just open
a terminal with apt-get.
The only problem I have with people that start off with ubuntu, is that
the are kinda scared of the command line, and in a lot of cases, thats
what they need to learn to use, as well as all the graphical tools.
Someday linux might be (for "desktop"/"newbie") users at the point of
not needing to use the command line anymore, but I think thats still a
while from now.

My only gripe about ubuntu is the fact that there isn't that many
packages in the apt/dpkg servers. Even if you uncomment the other
servers in /etc/apt/apt-sources (or whatever it is) you still can't
install packages that are easily found in other systems (e.g. mplayer).
I added debian servers before and was expecting to break stuff, and I
did heh.. so that doesn't work...
Does anyone have a solution for this? Im not a big debian user, so maybe
I need to add ubuntu testing or something?