thelinuxlink.net

My wife took the NCLEX yesterday, so she no longer needed the Windows partition I kept around for her, which she used for those NCLEX practice test CDs that wouldn't run in Wine. Now her test is over, and I have a spare drive to devote to distro test drives.

I installed Ubuntu on it that same night after she finished the test, and I was really impressed with the live CD installer. Nice graphical interface through the whole process, and it even found and kept my gentoo install in the grub settings. I wish it wouldn't have reinstalled grub though, and given me the option to add my own entries to the grub.conf file. No big deal, though. I did have problems with a kernel update right after the first update. After the first reboot, it gave me a kernel panic saying "VFS: unable to mount root fs on unknown block (0,0)", but I went in with the old kernel and eventually installed the k7 kernel, since I have an Athlon XP, and that seemed to work fine. Of course, I can't imagine a newbie being able to get around that problem very easily. I'm still not sure what caused problems, unless it was corrupted during the download, though I installed it twice from different sources, so that seems unlikely.

Ubuntu does feel snappy, and I really like the new caramel brown color much better than the last color scheme, and the boot speed is pretty quick. I'm pretty sure the boot is a bit faster than my gentoo install, but that's because I have a ton of services starting on gentoo.

It's going to take a while to get used to the different configuration files--like the menu.lst instead of grub.conf--which are driving me nuts at the moment, but it's probably good that I get used to the way different distros do things. I'm trying to configure the CUPS service--I never have luck with CUPS--to share the locally connected printer so that my wife can print from her iBook. I managed to get it working in gentoo, but I can't get it to work with Ubuntu. I always thought the Linux Standard Base was a fine idea, and this just made me think about how great would it be if I could just copy the /etc/cups directory over and have all my settings from the gentoo partition work on the Ubuntu partition. Not really sure whether that would be possible even with the LSB, but anyhow I couldn't get it to work despite borrowing several settings from my old cupsd.conf. I didn't have a whole lot of time to play with that last night, since I was more worried about getting the kernel working and mowing the lawn. Anyhow, so far it's a nice distro, and if I can get the printer working, I'll have a lot more time to play with it. The kernel panic was a bit troubling, though, and reminds me why I never feel comfortable with the idea of sending a newb off with an Ubuntu disc in hand, and would never really recommend that someone do it unless I could help them out.

But mainly it's just nice that this hard drive is doing something useful again, instead of just keeping a practically dormant windows partition around for those two or three non-wine-friendly CD's my wife had.

Hey Vogateer, how about giving SUSE 10.1 a whirl?
(Remember do apply the updates during the install, and then reboot once it's fully booted up after the install, this prevents the major issues with the package manager)

That one's next on the list.

Going to give Dapper a proper try, though. Just to get comfortable with it.

Vogateer wrote:That one's next on the list.

Great, if you need any assistance with it, let me know.

The kernel panic was a bit troubling, though, and reminds me why I never feel comfortable with the idea of sending a newb off with an Ubuntu disc in hand, and would never really recommend that someone do it unless I could help them out.

I would feel very comfortable sending a newbie with ubuntu disk in hand.
Partitioning is the biggest obstacle - but that is an obstacle with windows too. and a newbie isnt going to have gentoo installed either.

If a newbie was going to wipe a disk I would feel comfotable having them install ubuntu. If they were going to do dual boot and shrink the windows partition then I would offer my help.

I am not a ubuntu fanboy or anything but the install isn't going to get much simpler than what ubuntu has done. Partitioning will always be the big problem as you found out with your install.

anyway just my two cents worth

Yeah, if they're just going to wipe out their hard disk, then no harm, no foul, send them off with the disk. I should have phrased that better, but what I meant is I'm not going to give that disk to, say, a member of my family who's an 11 hour drive away so that I can't possibly provide tech support to them. I've used linux for a long time, and I love it, but if you do upgrades, and you'd better for good security, then something is going to break from time to time. It's usually not a difficult fix, but I don't know of many people who would have been very happy about having a kernel panic within the first hour of using the computer, and it would have turned them off pretty fast. For me, it's not that big a deal, but most users are already scared half to death of their computers, and fear change, so when you change something drastically, like the OS, and then find the computer won't even boot up, I can only imagine the distrust most people would feel after something like that.

Of course, I've never worked on a system that didn't occasionally break during upgrades. My beloved gentoo has only had minor breakage, but it happens from time to time, though now that I think about, it has fared extremely well over the last couple of years. Of course we all know Win XP breaks with patches, and I know for certain that OS X breaks since I've seen it multiple times. We had to completely reinstall the OS on one of our new Intel Mac's just a couple of weeks ago. Basically every system I've seen needs some sort of tech support for newbies, but I have had to help my sister out more than once after an Ubuntu update didn't go so smoothly, and unfortunately the trouble is usually with her wireless card, so I can't ssh in and fix it.

jsusanka wrote: Partitioning is the biggest obstacle - but that is an obstacle with windows too. and a newbie isnt going to have gentoo installed either.

This is where a distro. like Mandriva really excels. The entire install process is really easy under Mandriva, in comparison to other OSs.

Judland wrote:

jsusanka wrote: Partitioning is the biggest obstacle - but that is an obstacle with windows too. and a newbie isnt going to have gentoo installed either.

This is where a distro. like Mandriva really excels. The entire install process is really easy under Mandriva, in comparison to other OSs.

Same thing goes for SUSE, when you start the installation, it will check to see if you already have Windows installed, if you do, it will dual boot without the user having to do anything. If you don't have any OS installed, it will just install itself normally.

That Dapper Drake is really good stuff, I use the Kubuntu version. I installed it on a hard drive that had Hoary Hedghog on it and partioning the hard drive was a breeze, it did it all for me, asked what size Iwanted it to be etc. I am actually very impressed with Dapper.

no1important wrote:That Dapper Drake is really good stuff, I use the Kubuntu version. I installed it on a hard drive that had Hoary Hedghog on it and partioning the hard drive was a breeze, it did it all for me, asked what size Iwanted it to be etc. I am actually very impressed with Dapper.

I'm not a GNOME user on a day to day basis, so I can't really give my honest opinion on Ubuntu Dapper, but I've been using KDE every day for exactly two years now, so I can, and I will, say something about Kubuntu Dapper.

The Kubuntu people still have a way to go in terms of polish and administration tools, it's not that the distro is bad, it's just that it's young. If you want an example of this, look at Adept and compare it to something like Mandriva's GUI package manager or SUSE 10.0's YaST (10.1's is still not top notch), it really looks awful in my opinion, sure it works, but man this thing needs a lot of polishing and better organization.

One thing I was pleasantly surprised about in Kubuntu was the section of the control center for adjusting X11 settings, that I thought was neat, although I still prefer SaX2.

One of the thing I find difficult when trying to get people in my neighborhood to use Linux is that most distros suck in terms of internationalization, or least when it comes to danish. As much as I love SUSE, so far, it's support for danish is awful. The distro I found to do the best job on this is Mandriva, and Kubuntu has so far been very nice in this area too, they still have a little more work to do, but it seems quite good so far.

In someway I look at Kubuntu and think of it as a little young for being what Mark Shuttleworth is trying to make it be, he claims that it's "enterprise ready" and I couldn't disagree more, the distro is only about 1½ years old, and if you compare it to the enterprise desktop offerings from Red Hat and Novell, you can clearly see that it's still a little early.

Kubuntu is certainly usable, don't get me wrong, but for people who are totally new to Linux, I still think it has some very rough edges, especially in terms of package management, because a lot of newbies don't understand the concept of having multiple package managers, the thing that's available out of the box, must work, at least until they do know a few basic concepts (Yes, I know SUSE 10.1's package manager has been broken six ways 'till Sunday, but they are working on fixing it, and they have released patches that actually make it usable, it's slow as a turtle but it works).