[SWLUG] ubuntu disks

[Steve Anderson]

I missed this thread as I've been flitting around getting work done on 
the house...

Philip Downer wrote:
> On Thu, 2004-12-16 at 17:25 +0000, Gerald Davies wrote:
> 
>>what is the general opinion on ubuntu? any good? does it have a future?
> 
> 
> I've not used it that much but I did install it on a spare machine a
> while back and my impressions were that it is not only the easiest
> distro to install, but the fastest as well. I didn't spend that much
> time using it before I needed to remove the hard disk for use in another
> machine, but it did seem very easy to use and everything that I tried
> worked.

I'm using Ubuntu right this second. It's great - it's Debian with bells 
on. Clearly aimed at the desktop Linux market as opposed to a 
server-type environment, and you can tell this by what's included on the 
disc (Gnome 2.8 is the biggest draw). There ARE problems but they're 
more to do with what's included out the box compared to what one might 
expect to get out the box - there's barely any servers, to start with, 
and I've had to install Apache, OpenSSH, ProFTPd and Samba myself. Not a 
big problem but after a while of expecting to get these more or less as 
a default, this was a little odd. Also no firewall GUI, so grabbing 
Firestarter is a good plan.

Being Debian-based, it's apt-get-tastic, and Synaptic comes with the 
base install which makes things easier. There's a couple of lines in the 
sources list commented out to access the 'universe' which is basically a 
snapshot of Debian unstable from October, and are supplied without 
guarantees of suitability because they haven't been built specifically 
against Ubuntu. That said, I've not had any problems with either that or 
a multitude of third-party deb repositories, so I reckon it's more a job 
of covering their asses =)

Releases are planned for every six months - the most recent is 4.10, the 
next will be 5.04 in April 2005 - the numbering threw me until I grasped 
that it was y.mm and I hadn't missed three previous versions!

Biggest difference between Ubuntu and most other distros is that there's 
no root user as standard - anything you need to do as root you 'sudo 
<cmd>' or open a root shell; the idea being you're not in a superuser 
mode for too long and can't break things. If this isn't to your taste 
(it wasn't to mine) there's instructions on the ubuntu website on how to 
get your root user enabled. I should mention the quality of the 
technical support you can get on the website - the community is 
EXCELLENT. Many of the key developers are Debian developers as well, so 
there's a healthy knowledge flow.

The biggest backer is Canonical Ltd, a techie company based on the Isle 
of Man, probably for tax reasons. Canonical is a company fired up by 
Mark Shuttleworth, who started Thawte back in the day, flogged it to 
Verisign for $575 million, and now just sits around, being an 
open-source-fan billionaire (apparently) and part-time cosmonaut. Given 
his past and enthusiasm, it's pretty safe to bet that Ubuntu is going to 
be around for a long time. One of the interesting things Ubuntu does is 
provide bounties on bugs and feature requests, which might be 
controversial but if it can improve software I use on a daily basis that 
I'm not having to pay for and don't have the skills to develop myself... 
I'm not going to complain.

All in all... you can probably tell, I'm a fan.

Steve