[clue-tech] Ubuntu experiences good and bad

[Collins Richey]

CLUE has been handing out a lot of Ubuntu CD's lately. I'm just
wondering if any of you have taken the plunge ?!

I put up Ubunto alongside my CentOS system a month ago. I didn't use
the giveaway disks, because they are the girly-man Gnome variant (my
prejudice is showing). I installed a Kubuntu 5.04 system, then upgrade
to 5.10. Some comments:

1. This has got to be the simplest, most painless Linux installation
known to mankind. I loaded it on two different machines (a P4 with
junk onboard video and audio and an older Athlon with nvidia and
separate sound card), and both installs were flawless. In the case of
the older machine, I let Ubuntu take over the disk. In the case of the
P4, I installed to new partitions on an existing system, and Ubuntu
set up grub correctly to boot all existing systems !!!

2. Kubuntu has gotten some bad press for KDE lovers. Apparently it is
not as rock solid as the original Gnore variant. I'm not really a fan
of either of the behemoths. I'm running wdm and IceWM.

3. The upgrade from 5.04 to 5.10 was a little rocky. The upgrade
seemed to be aok, but when I installed mplayer and its codecs, the
system became unusuable. I had to do some lengthy searches in the
forums offline to find an answer. When I installed the fix, a whole
s###pot of additional packages came on board, which makes me think the
the original upgrade package was incomplete. Now all is well again.

4. The fact that Ubuntu is hell-bent on a 6 month replacement cycle is
a little worrisome in the light of my 5.04 to 5.10 woes.

5. I did manage to get a working mplayer with plugins for Firefox and
can play movie trailers with video and audio.

6. The only weirdity that I haven't solved yet is xscreensaver. All of
the other distros I've run in recent years (Gentoo, Fedora, CentOS)
have a working xscreensaver setup. Ubuntu is the first Debian system 
On this system, the xscreensaver-demo works, but it won't take over
and work as a screensaver no matter how I tinker with the demo
settings.

7. Learning to deal with a Debian system after many years of Caldera,
RedHat, Mandrake, and Gentoo is a definite PITA, but I'm getting
there.

8. There is lots of documentation and HOWTO material and an active,
friendly Forum, and the info is pretty darn good. Ubuntu is what
Debian could have become years ago if they didn't have their heads in
a dark place (prejudice is showing again).

I'll be interested to hear other experiences.

--
Collins Richey
      Debugging is twice as hard as writing the code ... If you write
      the code as cleverly as possible, you are, by definition, not
      smart enough to debug it.
             -Brian Kernighan
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