[Lancaster] Greetings + Odds and Sods

[andy baxter]

On Sat, 2006-12-16 at 13:50 +0000, Ken Hough wrote:

> The comment in my previous message (Re: [Lancaster] Fw: Mouse disapears) 
> concerning Ubuntu wasn't entirely flippant. I've been playing with it 
> and initial attempts with v6.06 resulted in one case in the installer 
> crashing (OK, Ubuntu was polite enough to report that the installer had 
> crashed), and in the other, reports of packages not installed.
> 
> Subsequently, I had a go with v6.10. This was successful, but I found it 
> the actual installation to be a bit of a pain.
> 
> Firstly, because a complete 'live' installation has to be loaded before 
> a 'proper' installation can be done  --- takes some time.

You can download a special install disk that is designed for custom
installs, which lets you go straight to the install without going
through the live CD.

> Secondly, the partitioner/formater got itself in a mess  --- it reported 
> (on the second page) that one of the partitions that I had correctly 
> created (via the first page) was of zero size. I could not proceed and 
> had to reboot/reload to clear this.
> 
> Also, having this information split between two pages is a nuisance. It 
> is neccesary to remember all of the partition info from the first page 
> so as to correctly set up the second page   ----  not a patch on the 
> SuSE/YAST system.

I remember finding this annoying.

> So far I'm unable to understand why Ubuntu is so popular, except maybe 
> for the number of CDs, etc that have been sprinkled around the world. It 
> doesn't seem to offer me any advantages over SuSE. What am I missing?

I like it mainly because it's debian based, which means that you benefit
from a better package management system (apt plus synaptic), and also
the huge range of installable programs in debian's archive. The latter
is particularly useful if you're doing any development work - the
libraries you need are almost always in the archive rather than having
to compile them yourself.

andy.