Issues with your account? Bug us in the Discord!

Ubuntu Linux

John WalkerJohn Walker Shadowman
in Zocalo v2.0
Greetings FirstOnes!

Lets put all that irrelevant "real-world" B.S. behind us, and get back to more important things like nerdy topics. ;)

Recently, I have been playing with [URL=http://www.ubuntulinux.org]Ubuntu[/URL] linux. So far, I am relatively impressed. Has anyone else tried it?

Previously, most of my experience has been with [URL=http://www.mandrakelinux.com/]Mandrake[/URL]*, which has been fine subject to a few issues I have with the distro:
1) While the security and core package upate is excellent, finding mirrors/sources for .rpm's and (preferably) urpmi mirrors for anything not part of the core install has been painful. Even with being and actual "paying" member of their club, I am still not able to find reliable mirrors.
2) MandrakeSoft is so focused upon trying to "be a real business" and "make a buck" that I keep getting turned off by annoying little things they do.
On the up-side:
1) The 3-4 CD's have most of what one typically needs.
2) The standard install gives lots of stuff to try; often multiple choices for the same activity so you can try several and pick one you like.

[b]Fedora[/b]* turns me off because I feel like RH's biatch: "all the pain (debugging), none of the benefits (enterprise version: security patches, etc.)"

[b]Debian[/b] has always interested me (and it's Ubuntu's base), but horror stories about the expertise required for the install have frightened me. (Just because I program for a living doesn't mean that I want to wrestle with my computer at home. I get enough pain from the PS2 development in a week to last me a year).

[b]Suse[/b]* is not a candidate for me: I run *nix on 3 different computers right now, and Suse's only "free" install is web (not .iso) based. Re-downloading all my packages for all three computers when I could just install all three from one download of the CD's (a .torrent) makes no sense.

[b]Gentoo[/b] is a bit too bleeding edge, and their community has a few too many zealots. Also, one of my buddies tried to install it and had lot 'o problemo.

[b]FreeBSD[/b] is also very interesting to me, but it is in a big transition. If I were running servers for my business, they would be FreeBSD 4.x or OpenBSD, but for the desktop, FreeBSD 5.x seems like the only serious choice. Unfortunately, even the current imminent 5.3 version isn't yet considered "stable" and is in a bit too much flux for my taste. I'll be watching FreeBSD closely, however.

I really like the (current) Ubuntu mission statement, philosophy, and stated goals. If they can stick to that, I'll remain interested. I miss KDE, (Debian and Ubuntu are Gnome-based) but Gnome is fine; it is mostly a matter of comfort and previous experience with KDE.

Comments?

* side note: RedHat, MandrakeSoft, etc. have every right to try to make a buck, I just don't really want to be squeezed for money when I am doing this as a side project or hobby, not as a business. Having said that, I get annoyed with the (ever increasing) "why should we [i]give[/i] all [i]our[/i] hard work to you?" attitude when they are riding all the hard Linux/BSD work of others. RedHat, et.al. were so much better IMHO before they were so big/greedy and/or publicly traded.

** It's not that I'm cheap or a free-loader, I am happy to give my software makers a cut when I'm making money with their product, I just don't like to buy things to try them out or to goof around with as a hobby. (especially when they got their foundation for free to begin with)

-- john :shadow1:

Comments

  • BigglesBiggles <font color=#AAFFAA>The Man Without a Face</font>
    Ah, the Debian based one. I had a brief look over that a while ago. I think it and another one (I think it's called MEPIA or something) are heading in a good direction. Too many of the desktop-ready distros are built around the faulty RPM system. Building on Debian's apt system makes much more sense.

    I disagree with your statements about Gentoo, though. While it may have more recent package versions than other distros, they arn't unstable, they are usually ebuilds of each programs' developers' own releases. Also, every community has its zealots and gentoo has no more than any other really (although we do seem to get the idiots who think 0.1s better performance is worth working a week to achieve). Plus forums.gentoo.org is the best place you could ever go to find help on linux (even other distros), and I've never been afraid to ask stupid newbie questions there.
    As for the installation, well it's one of the easiest if you can follow the instructions, but as soon as you run into trouble things go very bad very quickly and you're left with no choice but to search the forums or post to the forums and await a reply.
    In my opinion, Gentoo is very good for people who arn't afraid of breaking things occasionally and really want to learn about the depths of a linux system. Distros like Ubunty and MEPIA are great for the everyone else and those who want to learn with a little less danger, they are what most people should probably be running.
  • CurZCurZ Resident Hippy
    Have to agree with Biggles here. You [i]can[/i] build an extremely bleeding edge system with Gentoo, and have things break a lot (on the other hand, you can also have a bleeding edge system working perfectly.) But you can also decide to build a system out of stable packages only to minimize breakage. Installation can be a bit complicated, but once you get it down, you're confident in doing it and you've just learned a lot more about working with linux. Portage allows you easy and powerful package management, which is a big plus in usability as far as linux systems are concerned. What also gives Gentoo a big boost in usability is the amount of very intuitive scripts that help you with the basic things involved in running the system (init scripts for starting services, etc-update to keep configuration files updated, etc.)

    *hugs Larry the Cow* ;)
  • SanfamSanfam I like clocks.
    One comment about SuSE...

    I got around the "Redownloading every single damn package" to achieve a web install by making one system on my network a "SuSE Install server" of sorts. I copied the entire SuSE/i386/9.1 folder to the system, and told the installer to get all data from an SMB share.

    It generally works, too. :D
  • JamboJambo Scriptkiddie
    You could also create a bootable dvd if you wanted to.

    [url]http://www.linuxiso.org/forums/viewtopic.php?t=13567[/url]
  • John WalkerJohn Walker Shadowman
    I'll have to remember that trick for SuSE, thanks!

    (note, "my friend" isn't some lame way of saying 'me', if it were me, I would say so. It was Ben from here at work) :D

    I know I'm going to get the Gentoo terminology wrong here, so please bear with me.

    The problem my friend had with Gentoo was this:
    The package/ports (emerge) thing was fine for finding what he wanted to install, but it seemed like what was pointed to was often on some random server out on the net. Thus, he would select things to install, and then get back a list of errors for missing components, packages, or the item itself. This can be caused by the needed thing (a) being moved, (b) the server being too busy, (c) the server being gone, (d) or the connection being too slow and just timing out. I'm sure that there are other possibilities...

    I'm not saying that Gentoo isn't right for you or for anyone else, really.

    The bleeding edge remark needs more explanation. One of IMHO the most frustrating things about getting non-standard-with-the-install software for any linux distro is this: I find something that I want to try. It's newer, late beta, not very common (e.g. wxRuby, etc.), or otherwise a bit off the path. So I "get it" (whether that be with source, .rpm, apt/urpmi/yast/etc).

    Because it is being actively developed by a programmer (remember I am a programmer, so I can complain about "them" :p ), so they [i]must[/i] have the latest versions of all the upstream libraries/SDKs installed. So now, when I go to compile/install it, all it's dependencies want to be updated. When I try to do that, I get warnings that it will break all the "standard" things I have installed, or at least require tracking down all the bleeding edge versions of those as well. Usually at this point, since I can't spend 6-8 hours trying to get everything all sync'd up, I just give up on the new thing and look for something else (or go to bed).

    [COLOR=silver]:angryv: // begin rant
    This leads me to another complaint about all linux distros: locally installed software (per Unix standard and 30 years of history) should be installed to /usr/local/* (aka [i]local[/i]ly installed). So, where does everything get installed? /usr/*. Where do things compiled from source expect to install? Some are /usr/*, some are /usr/local/*, some are "other". :(

    Now you're going to say "Gentoo fixes all that because everything is installed/built from source" which is great, when it works. (I have plenty of guilt about this, I was the one who recommended to Ben, my friend, to try Gentoo) In our test, it didn't; but maybe we were just "unlucky".
    // end rant [/COLOR]

    Thanks to the pointers to their forums. I will try to do a better job of forming my own opinions rather than reading about "fanatical Gentoo users" and taking that at face value.

    Meanwhile, here's a funny site: ;) [url=http://funroll-loops.org/] Gentoo is for Ricers[/url] [COLOR=gray]I'm making fun of you. It's a joke.[/COLOR] (here's [url=http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=04/10/31/0011233] another[/url])

    I understand that being a fan of "easy" distros like Mandrake, Ubuntu, etc. makes me a target for being "non-'[url=http://catb.org/~esr/jargon/html/E/elite.html]leet[/url]" and a "linux n00b", etc. :rolleyes: It's okay to make fun of me, I'm a [COLOR=gray]grumpy w1z@rd[/COLOR] big boy, I can take the heat. :shadow1:
  • CurZCurZ Resident Hippy
    No need to worry about Gentoo zealotry from this side, John :D

    I'm not going to tell you Gentoo's the best there is either, it's merely my preference. It has its pros and cons, like any distro, and you do have a point with some of those things.

    I haven't encountered the missing tarball problem anywhere near often, though yesterday I was updating and couldn't download a certain texinfo source package anywhere. The file simply wasn't on any of the servers. My guess is, that would happen when the tarball is a new one and the mirrors haven't had a chance to update.
  • SanfamSanfam I like clocks.
    Be glad you don't have to deal with Debian zealots. Yeeesh!

    They're all over...and they push nothing but debian...all the time!

    "No, I won't use it! TOO COMPLICATED BRAIN EXPLODE"
  • John WalkerJohn Walker Shadowman
    re: my rant.

    Now, while looking into installing the new Thunderbird, people are talking about the /opt directory. Shazbot! :mad:

    Yes Sanfam. Debian = too expert. No thanks, stop asking, HAND, I'll be in the car. :shadow1:
  • SanfamSanfam I like clocks.
    Well, I'm usually a tiny bit more active than that. I get on the offensive and throw things ;)
  • BigglesBiggles <font color=#AAFFAA>The Man Without a Face</font>
    I figured that slashdot article was possibly where you got the thing about gentoo zealots, John. :D

    As Curz mentioned in his first post, gentoo also has the nicest init system and config scripts I've ever seen. The init system does away with things like magic numbers for determining order and instead uses a partially-ordered planner. The scripts themselves are really really simple and there is documentation on how to write them on the site.

    I've never encountered the missing tarball problem myself in the just over a year I've been using gentoo. I can see how it would happen, though. Basically what Curz said, the tarball is too new and hasn't made it to all the mirrors yet.

    I don't quite understand this comment you made:

    [quote]tracking down all the bleeding edge versions of those as well[/quote]

    Portage will track down and install all those for you itself. If a package is in portage then it is capable of being emerged perfectly (well, assuming it's unmasked, a process that usually takes a couple of weeks from first appearance) without you needing to find packages yourself.

    I completely agree with the directories thing. These days it seems like every distro has its own structure.
  • John WalkerJohn Walker Shadowman
    That's not the only place, I just thought that was funny.

    For the recursive update problem, I was mostly talking about the non-souce distros like getting a random .rpm for mandrake, or trying to build something from source where all the dependencies were installed as binaries (or source .rpm's), etc. Basically when you can't urpmi (aka. apt-get) and you have to handle the dependency tree yourself.

    On the Gentoo side, it would be when that shiny new app needs tarballs for it's dependencies that are unfindable or broken links.
  • SanfamSanfam I like clocks.
    [QUOTE][i]Originally posted by Biggles [/i]
    [B]
    I completely agree with the directories thing. These days it seems like every distro has its own structure. [/B][/QUOTE]

    That was driving me totally off the wall with my MythTV installation attempt earlier. I spent quite a while trying to relocate everything (not to mention the fact that I'm already pretty damned unfamiliar with the structure in general)
  • BigglesBiggles <font color=#AAFFAA>The Man Without a Face</font>
    On the RPM side, that's what drove me away from RPM based distros. I was always getting stuck in dependancy hell, and it was annoying having to install half my system from RPMs and half from source whereupon the files would dissapear into my system with no easy way to remove them.

    Oh, and personally I don't consider urmpi to be anything like apt-get. ;) apt-get actually works.

    As for the gentoo side, if a shiny new app needs dependencies, those dependencies must also be in portage or the ebuild won't be accepted by the developers. For any ebuild to be accepted then it must be capable of getting its tarballs, and it must be proven to be working in a particular environment before it can be unmasked. As I've said, I've never encountered a missing tarball problem that hasn't been solved 5 seconds later by emerge trying another mirror. The only way I can think of for it to happen would be for the ebuild to use a non-gentoo site for getting its tarball (most packages have their tarballs stored on official gentoo mirrors) and the person who runs that site (probably the program's site) has been silly and removed the tarball, or it's trying to get a really old version of something which is no longer around (in which case the ebuild probably just needs updating - you can do it yourself easily, they're usually about 5 lines long). Personally, I've installed a [b]lot[/b] of bleeding edge stuff and never had a problem with dependencies (including stuff that isn't even in portage - yay for the wonderful overlay system!), but as usual with linux, your mileage may vary and nothing works the same for everyone. :)
  • JamboJambo Scriptkiddie
    I have! Last night it was openntpd, and a few months ago it was a version of dbus that couldn't be found anywhere.
  • TyvarTyvar Next best thing to a St. Bernard
    You guys would hate my father, he started out on old Skool AT&T unix, which is odd because were on the west coast so you think he would be using Berkley. anyways throw in IBM's propritary OS's till they came out with AIX which was basiclly IBM's spin of Unix.

    When linux came out he tried a few different distros, mainly mandrake and Red Hat, but now he's an old grumpy stick in the mud who has things the way he likes em for what he does and anything else can go to hell :D he runs SuSe and just buys the new versions when then come out if they look interesting enough :D
  • BigglesBiggles <font color=#AAFFAA>The Man Without a Face</font>
    Sounds like my supervisor. He uses emacs for everything from command prompt to email to writing documents. :D He was a postgrad back in the day of remote terminals running on a central server, though, so he prefers a command line to a GUI.
    Me, I believe the GUI was invented for a reason.
  • TyvarTyvar Next best thing to a St. Bernard
    Same here. I know the old dinasaur (my father) only has a windows box to play jagged alliance 2 and thats about it.

    Oh sure he runs the SuSe GUI to look high tech, but if you look carefully he's doing everything in the one window which has the command line :D
Sign In or Register to comment.