Ubuntu is amazing!

[GnomeProject]

I just got all 20 of the Ubuntu CD's I requested about three weeks ago...good stuff! Gonna go try it out now and I'll let you know how it goes... :-) From what I have heard it should be quite an amazing experience. So keep in mind, that the free CD's are for real.

[dragaal]

I have been reading up on this distro for the past few days, and I decided to just try it for myself, I had never tried a debian based distro before, let alone this one. So I went got the 1 cd it required me to get (very nice its on one cd by the way) and it started installing, I was actully amazed how much they cramped into that 580mb cd, they still have plenty of room to keep it on one cd, at least it only takes a 25 minutes or so to download it and burn it.

So on I went to installation, it went through everything in 20 minutes without locking or error, and boom, I was greeted with the Ubuntu Desktop, which is in Gnome, I looked at it, looked very professional, it also had sounds which was interesting, it wasn't the same old same old. I have tried in the past, Mandrake 10.1 - I have dependency hell, Fedora Core 1 and 3 - Ahhh the bugs!!!!! and Slackware - Yeah this one is decent, but it feels kind of bland for my tastes but definately a great distro none the less, its rock solid, so i'm left with Ubuntu, and I have to say, it kicks ***

And don't get me wrong either, Ubuntu is also rock solid

[Sgood1971]

While at my mom's house over Thanksgiving (She has a cable connection) I decided I could not wait for the free CD's so I downloaded and installed Ubuntu on my laptop. I like, I like. I am posting with it now. I am no fan of Gnome, but I may learn to like it in time. I am going to leave it as my main distro on my laptop for now alongside SuSE 9.1 Pro. The only thing I have not figured out yet is how to get my Linmodem working, but I have only had it installed since late last night and I plan to work on that today. First impression is very nice.

[jefjj01]

>>hi guys. i am new to linux and last week i bought a magazine for pc which has a cd with Ubuntu. is it easy to use for a biggener? should i try it? i now have Suse 9.0

Its been the easiest for me!

The really nice thing is you can just preview it with the Live CD and then if you like it go grap the Install CD.

I am also really impressed with the text based install. I at first thought a text based install would not be as good (or easy), but then discovered I like it a lot. It goes to show what a well designed program will do whether its a GUI or text based.

As for the distro itsself I haven't had on hiccup. I keep my computer on 24X7 and it hasn't gone down once. The programs I use all work great too, so its hard to find anything negative to say.

Seems like the only people who are not as enthused are the do-it-yourselfers in the slackware and gentoo world, or some of the KDE fans. Each to his own...thats why we have choices!

[torontonewbie]

So far I've found the Xandros OCD edition to be the simplex Linux distro to get up and running with "no fuss no muss".

Yes the OCD edition is a bit limited too but when you have a mixed Linux/Windoze network it works quite well...very easy to find your Windoze shares and also very easily found a shared printer that was connected to a Windoze box. Shared Windoze folders are not much of a problem on most distros but shared Windoze printers can be a royal pain for a newbie...and Xandros OCD fit the bill quite nicely on that.

I have heard quite alot of "buzz" lately about Ubuntu and want to give it a spin. I know the "easy" distros aren't for everyone but if Linux is to have a future on the home desktop (and I think it does) the "easy" distros are the way to go IMHO for 90% of home users.

My Xandros "test" box is a Celeron 333 MHz. with 96 MB RAM, 8 GB hard drive, 8 MB ATI AGP video card, old ISA 16 bit Soundblaster card. It runs quite slowly but it does work.

I have enough stuff in the "junk bin" to throw together a couple more old boxes. For most Linux boxes with GUI I've found I need at least a PII or K6-II at 300 MHz. with 64 MB RAM (but preferably more).

Any thoughts on how "low" to push the hardware on Ubuntu? I've got a bunch of PI 233 MMX chips along with some old motherboards in the junk box so was just wondering it it was worth my while.

[Sgood1971]

I have Ubuntu running on a 233MMX box w/64MB RAM. It's not even terribly slow compared to SuSE running Flux on the same box.

[Licaon]

Hey there,

Just got my free Ubuntu CDs this morning and i got it installed om my machine... looks good, as i am a Slack-fan myself i liked the text installer, but the partitioning interface rocks!!!(fdisk is fun anyway)

some stuff i did not like:
-the lack of MidnightCommander (had to get it from UNIVERSE throu SYNAPTIC);
-the lack of GORILLA theme for GNOME (i just love that theme... good colors...);
-while it installed GRUB it has a rather strange black (text!?) theme... well some Ubuntu-boot-splash could be more fun;
-looked like GCC/G++ are on the CD but not installed by default ... but since i want GCC a can run SYNAPTIC a get them installed;
-did not yet installed the NVIDIA drivers but ill give them i try tonight;
-since GNOME has large packages i feel like it uses the cdspace for some other packages like XMMS (rhytmbox doesn't do it for me)/XINE (i can't get totem to use subtitles);


ill post some more adventures under Ubuntu after i test drive it some more...

[Texatl]

OK, cuz of this thread - and I wanted to try something different. I downloaded and installed Ubuntu to my "play" laptop. It installed very nicely.

I use RH9 everyday on my main PC so I was used to Gnome and synaptic, etc... Don't know if I like this new version of gnome, but....

Opening up "universe" in synaptic allowed me to install, rather easily xfce, fluxbox, gkrellm. Although, flux came with nothing and I had to configure the entire thing myself (great learning experience though). So far I feel it could be a great disto for those who wants a working system now!

BUT, the whole sudo thing sucks. I burned a cd w/ gkrellm themes from the RH9 box (themes I can't find anywhere esle - googled for invisible and can't find it) and Ubuntu won't allow me to copy the files off the cd because I don't have permission to read the files ?!?!?!!.... Here is where su -l would really help. But Ubuntu barfs big green stuff when you try su -l.

Oh yeah and totem doesn't like any vid files I throw at it. I don't know why its on here...

So anyway. It looks good. Needs some refinement... But I like it (kind of)

[Licaon]

about totem and video files:

since the codecs aren't full open source they are missing from Ubuntu... check this out...
www.linuxforums.org/forum/topic-25783.html

i'm using XINE anyway...

[Hey girl!]

How does Ubuntu do for newer computers, how is the support for s-ata harddisks?

[mrBen]

Originally posted by Hey girl!
How does Ubuntu do for newer computers, how is the support for s-ata harddisks?

It's designed for newer desktop machine, although I've no idea about SATA drives - the drives shouldn't be a problem, but the controller might.

Get a copy of the LiveCD to try first.

with regards to the su/sudo thing mentioned above, there is a menu option that allows you to open a 'root' terminal.

[jefjj01]

>>BUT, the whole sudo thing sucks.

Someone posted earlier on this thread that you can...

"If you need to do more than that you can sudo su and become root. Then you won't need to use sudo for every command."

I have not tried it myself but it seems to be what you are looking for.


What a fun thread!

I just ordered a C programming book this morning. I'm excited . I have been a Java programmer for years, but figured its time to roll up my sleeves and learn c/c++ to do some Unix programming! I can't wait to see how Ubuntu does as a Unix development box. I use it for Java development right now and it works great!

[mmills]

I am running Ubuntu 4:10 on a HP N5340 Pavilion laptop and I get a pci error on boot as well as another I have no clue what it means, I like the wireless support ubuntu has but, I get a video error as well, I cant watch any sports videos, my video wont run, I tried installing mplayer, it failed, and left an icon in my system tray. other than a few glitches, I like the system.

[Gogeta_44]

Originally posted by psi42

Of course, by no means am I switching. As was mentioned before, this distro (like GNOME, I might add), is pretty much designed for the guy who wants to point and click his webbrowser around and basically little else. In my opinion, it does this job admirably. This is the best "desktop linux" I have ever seen, and I'm willing to bet that linux finally has a viable home desktop contender right here in ubuntu.

Too bad its not slackware based

I really couldn't have said it better myself.

[jefjj01]

>>is pretty much designed for the guy who wants to point and click his webbrowser around and basically little else.

hmm, thats actually a little insulting. I do more than use my web browser, and I would be willing to bet others do to!

Could you explain what it means to be a newbie distro and what is so great about the "elite" distros such as gentoo and slackware? I mean can I not do something on Ubuntu that I can do on any other distro? My experience are some are easier than others to get configured and then work with. I like Ubuntu because they picked the best (in my opinion) packages to install by default. I did try Gentoo from stage one, but got irritated at how often the compiling would fail. I did get it up and was excited about doing it, but I couldn't get around how often it would not compile and could not see moving it over to my main machine. I always meant to try Slackware, but then found this and cannot see why I would switch...at least not on my main machine. What exactly do you do with Slackware that is so cool? And I do not mean that in a bad way...I really want to know...what can you do that I cannot?