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February 19, 2005

What a Linux distribution should be

I bought some new computer hardware today. Included in this purchase was a new ABIT motherboard and an AMD Sempron processor. I've been meaning to do this kind of upgrade for a while now, but I've either lacked money or couldn't convince myself to spend the money to do the upgrade.

Amanda made me purchase the items tonight. Apparently she's tired of my being indecisive when it comes to purchasing things like this. It's a really bad habit of mine, but that discussion is best saved for anther day.

Anyhow, anyone who's ever done a major upgrade like this knows how tricky it can be to get your existing OS to follow over. Most sane people take the easy road and backup all of their data before doing an upgrade. I am not one of these sane people. After doing the hardware changeover, I started the machine and saw the Windows boot screen for about a 1/2 second. The machine then rebooted. Again and again.

I had a decision to make at this point ... would I worry about getting Windows up and running again or would I reformat my machine? I choose the latter option, but decided that I wasn't going to put Windows on my nice new fast PC. Instead, I chose to install Linux instead.

However, the distribution that I installed isn't one of the regulars I generally use. A few weeks ago, I sent off for about 20 copies of Ubuntu Linux. I did this for two reasons ... 1. I had heard good things about the distro ... 2. They were going to ship me 20 CD's at no charge.

After the CD's arrived, I loaded the Ubuntu LiveCD on my machine at home, which to be honest wasn't terribly impressive. Every LiveCD that I've ever tried had loaded up just fine on my existing hardware. But what really won me over was when I tried booting the LiveCD on the Dell D505 I used at WHAS. Until this point, I had been unsuccessful in getting any LiveCD's to load properly on this machine. I generally ended up with a green screen and had to do a hard reboot on the machine.

To my surprise, Ubuntu loaded a desktop. At this point, I knew I had something special on my hands.

Now, I've been busy over the past few months, working at both WHAS and at SkyWay. I haven't had a real chance to mess with Ubuntu because of this. This weekend, however, I was determined to get the CD's out and play around with it a bit. Now that I took the plunge, I must admit that I've been pleasantly surprised.

Unlike most distributions, Ubuntu comes in a single CD. It gives a base install of the Gnome 2.8 desktop and very little else. Since it's based on Debian, it comes installed with APT (which anyone who knows me understands that I LOVE APT) and the Synaptic GUI. Within a few minutes, I had Synaptic up and running, downloading and installing some of my favorite applications. In all, it took me about 30 minutes to find everything that I wanted downloaded and installed.

Here have been the benefits of Ubuntu thus far:
- One CD
- Simple Install Process
- APT and Synaptic pre-installed
- Firefox and Evolution 2.0 pre-installed
- Gnome 2.8 is the standard desktop

Here are some of the drawbacks:
- One CD ... if you want additional packages you'll need to download them. This can be a pain if you're on dial-up.
- The install process is all text based. Some people might not like this. I've been using text based installs for so long now that they're just second nature to me, so I don't really give a rats ass.
- There's no KDE, only Gnome. There is no Dana, only Zuel.

Anyhow, if you're wanting to try a different Linux distro, give Ubuntu a try. I think most will be pleasantly surprised with the results.

Posted by ed at February 19, 2005 11:47 PM

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