Ubuntu user's report

[Myles Green]

Hi All, sorry for the length. If you're not interested in checking out a
new distro you might want to forgo this email.

I recently installed Ubuntu on my usual system in place of my usual
distribution (Slackware) for no reason other than seeing what all the
hype was about. Having used Debian in the past (potato), and liking it,
I thought I was prepared for what I was about to encounter. Much to my
surprise, I found that I wasn't. No hassles, just pop the disc into the
drive, reboot, answer a (very) few questions, sit back and watch it
install the basic system. After that was done, pop the disc out of the
drive, reboot, answer a few more questions and, if you answered 'yes' to
downloading software, off it goes and installs updated software (most of
it security related). If you popped that disc back in after the reboot
it installs more off the disc along with the downloaded software and in
about 45 minutes (broadband Internet + high speed cdrom) you're looking
at GDM ready to login. That is, unless you elected to do a custom
install and set up a server which, I'm told, there are several folks
doing and using in production systems.

At no time are you asked to enter a root password, by default the first
user created is added to the sudoers list. Now, I *did* have my
reservations about this idea but I do (sort of) understand their
reasoning. I also know how to type 'sudo passwd root' in order to
circumvent that idea (I believe that's all that's needed) but I've
pretty much gotten used to just typing sudo before any commands that
require root privileges - this is after all not a mission critical
system.

The default desktop is a somewhat polished Gnome 2.8 in pleasing
earth-tone shades and a fairly complete set of tools that the 'average'
user might need. Having said that, a quick edit of the sources.list
(found in /etc/apt/) and you can install just about anything your heart
desires - as long as it's free-as-in-freedom. I installed the
'build-essentials' meta package and then most of the 'devel' packages I
figured I'd need plus a few 'must-have' (for me) bits but the
xfce4-4.2rc2 packages didn't want to install. Another edit of the
sources.list to add a few more lines and, after grabbing the
dependencies it needed, XFce started installing but I could see it was
going to make me type in the name of almost every single package. I
decided instead to use the "graphical installers" and installed it over
top of the few binary packages that did get installed. Home sweet
XFce-4.2 home. =)

I also discovered that burning a cd-r was as simple as (and I'm
serious!) 'sudo cdrecord /path/to/some.iso'. Period. Of course one has
to make minor adjustments to the file /etc/default/cdrecord firsthand
but there was no mystery there either. When I ran 'sudo cdrecord
-scanbus' it told me to read /usr/share/doc/cdrecord/README.ATAPI.setup
and in there all was explained for both 2.4.x and 2.6.x kernels. I
haven't tried playing a DVD yet but I doubt there'll be any trouble.

In short and in case you couldn't tell, I really really like this distro
and it seems I'm not alone. The Ubuntu-Users mail list is the fire-hose
that this list was many moons ago, most of the posters are first-time
Linux users but there are quite a few knowledgeable and _friendly_
people with very few of the "viciously superior" types I encountered on
the Debian users list. In fact the folks at Canonical Ltd. (who sponsor
Ubuntu Linux, the website, the wiki and the mail-lists etc.) are usually
quick to dampen any fires that erupt in order to keep a friendly
atmosphere.

Of course *this* list is still second to none <grin>

https://www.ubuntulinux.org/

-- 
Myles Green <rmg57 at telus.net>
Calgary AB Canada
Ubuntu Linux. Get it, you'll like it.
My GPG/PGP public key is available on this site:
http://keyserver-beta.pgp.com/
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