YWAM Information Technology - Ubuntu 7.04 ("Feisty Fawn") released - Comments

re: Kubuntu

neo — Sun, 22 Apr 2007 14:25:53 +0100

Hi.
So, I just tried it this afternoon.

Enjoy - install it on an old box and you wont look back!

Well, in a sense I only have old boxes. The newest one is "only" 2 years old but at the time I bought it, it was the cheapest/slowest available machine. The only good thing is, I got enough RAM with it. Can you imagine how long it took me earlier this year to look for a decent video card that would actually fit into this computer? It took me forever. Anyways, since I don't have a extra machine for testing I do things like that with VMWare.
So, this afternoon I installed Kubuntu as a virtual machine (VM) and was surprised in many ways.

First of all I was wondering why the heck do they boot up that thing as a LiveCD or did I miss an option? At boot up I selected "Install or Try Kubuntu" and it didn't give more option about what exactly I want, install or try out. So, it booted up as LiveCD with a shortcut on the desktop to install which I did right away. After installing and rebooting I was surprised that it only took 45min. Pretty good for a VM on low-end hardware I guess.

After boot up I needed to manually select the video card but that's not a big deal. I don't know if auto detection works better without VM. Up till now I couldn't figure out how to get any kind of sound out of it. But again, it's a VM. So, I guess that's the difficulty. I would have a hard time to believe that a up-to-date OS can not auto detect a standard on-board sound from a 2 years old computer.
Since this is really just for testing/checking how it looks like it's not a problem at all, so I will not dig deep into this. BTW I have the same problem with the Fedora VM but the Fedora that runs as first boot option (Windows is 2nd ;) ) works just fine.

Something else what kinda surprised me was that there is no Firefox by default. Maybe that's just me but I kinda expected that it comes with Firefox pre-installed. I know it's only a install CD not like Fedora which comes as DVD and therefore comes with more than 4x the size of Kubuntu. Fedora is about 3.2GB to download. Well, anyways this is fixed very quickly. Mac or Windows don't come with Firefox either, so no downside there. Fedora comes with Firefox but as I said it's DVD with more than 3GB.
The next surprise was OpenOffice. First of all not all OpenOffice programs are installed, at least I haven't seen them. Even if I never heard of someone using OO Math, Draw or the Database but it's something I expected to have by default. But actually what I find is really strange are the icons used for OO. Why are these not the original OO icons? At least I'm the kind of person who is looking for the icons when searching for the program I need to use. Very unfortunate.

Something else I actually don't like too much is that there is no root password by default. I might be a bit old fashioned here but I like to have a root user with a password instead of using sudo and then typing in the password I already use for my normal user.
Earlier versions of Kubuntu could be updated with a "real" root user, means assign a password for root, so I assume that it's possible with this new version as well. I just haven't checked for that so far.

APT vs YUM.
I personally like APT better. It's so much faster and the results are better to read. But as I said, that's my personal opinion. There is however one downside compared to YUM. You always search through a local file that contains all information about available packages. That means, if you want to be up-to-date you have to update that file first. YUM is doing that by default but the search takes so much longer. Also depending on what you're searching for it can be a very long list and therefore almost impossible to read. But it gives more description of each package.

So, besides what I said, Kubuntu looks really good. Not that it's so different from other derivates but just keep it like that, I really like Debian's APT. That plus Kubuntu is very easy to use is a very good combination. I don't wanna play geek, I want a OS that is doing what I want. So, Kubuntu and Fedora have a very good hardware recognition, those 2 seem to be the ones for me. So far I have Fedora running on both, Laptop and Desktop. But I might give Kubuntu a go on the Desktop since I need to reinstall that thing anyways. Windows takes so long to boot up that's really a pain.
So, I'll see what I will do but for sure Kubuntu is an option.

Greetings from the MatriX,
neo

Kubuntu

KevinColyer — Sat, 21 Apr 2007 09:40:30 +0100

Dear Neo,

I upgraded my laptop to Fiesty today - that was pretty painless and I upgraded my server in half an hour too. Just the LTSP server to go. That might happen this weekend - it tends to break a few more things (mostly config files).

To be honest upgrading a distro is incredibly easy - either from the command line or from the GUI's available. I have never experienced anything in Linux as easy as the Ubuntu (and Debian) package management. What I like so much is that setting up a Linux machine is so easy and quick and it comes with a huge software stack. I re-installed an XP machine the other day, setup printers and the like with all the software and settings and... it took a whole afternoon! Linux installation takes 30 mins! I guess Fedora's YUM package management is good too but I have heard it is not quite so slick at the APT system.

Enjoy - install it on an old box and you wont look back!

Kev

Ubuntu 7.04 ("Feisty Fawn") released

neo — Fri, 20 Apr 2007 08:17:59 +0100

Hi @ all! The new version of Ubuntu is available. As I expected the news said right away that the download server are unable to cope with the amount of users who download the newest release. Well, it was a big hype in the press about this version, so how could it different. If you waited for it, do yourself a little favor and let the others download first and do some beta test on the final release and the next week enjoy a fast download. So far I'm running Fedora but for sure I will test the new Ubuntu version. Well, I am a big fan of the KDE desktop so I will check out the KDE version, Kubuntu. What is VMWare good for, if not testing a Operating System?! I guess that most of you here have heard about Ubuntu and/or even heard about the release of the new version. But I want to take the opportunity to let you know that there are many other version available. Some of them might be interesting for some of you. Check out the Ubuntu Derivates, specially the bottom of the page. You will find things like Ubuntu Christian Edition and also Ubuntu Muslim Edition. Kinda funny is that these 2 are many times referred to as Ubuntu CE and Ubuntu ME, respectively. Although nothing special is build in to these versions, since every software is available to every Ubuntu installation, I find it interesting that there are some folks who make a version available which has a Bible software etc as default when you install Ubuntu. Another version is called Ubuntu Studio. However, that one is not yet available but I'm looking forward to it and most likely will test this as well. The aim is to have all needed software for Video and Sound editing, Image Manipulation, etc build in and of course tested in order to work properly. Not everyone might know that specially Sound Editing is somehow more critical than most other tasks, also the importance of a decent video card even if graphic seems to have nothing to do with audio. So, all the available version are a "nice to have" but specially the Studio version I would say is a "very good to have" for people who professionally work in one these areas. neo