[clue-tech] More Debian vs. Ubuntu musings

[Collins Richey]

Had another system crash a few days ago - motherboard disk controller.
Since some of my peripherals were getting to be flaky, I decided to go
for a new system. It took a bit of doing to get one at a reasonable
price with an nvidia card. Most of the el cheapo units have freakin'
ATI or SIS or Intel video. I decided not to pay the extra bucks to get
a dual-core cpu since a single core job is plenty for my needs.

After setting the box up with an additional harddrive and the usual
Windows actions, I discovered that I no longer have a Kubuntu install
disk. I was going to download and burn using Windows, but the download
was taking forever. So I tried and FC5 install (from a magazine DVD)
and wasn't too thrilled with that. I still have a Debian Etch install
CD, so I tossed that in. Various niggling problems:

#1 The installer did not want to use my NIC  - tried about 15 times to
get a DHCP address, then rebooted and it worked. No clue what that was
all about.

# 2 Firefox install OK. Started searching for nvidia installation
instructions. After following two different sets of instructions, gave
it up as a bad deal.

# 3 Discovered during #2 above that paste text from a Firebox browser
session to input under vi has a hickey. Any line that starts with '#'
gets pasted as a string of hex garbage!

# 4 Discovered that the version of vi (vim?) presented by Etch has
ancient syntax and behavior - can't do 999d if fewer than 999 lines of
text, major blip everytime you press EXC or scroll to the top or
bottom. I was not impressed.

# 5 Finally got the latest Kubuntu ISO downloaded with wget and burned
with cdrecord. At least something works!

# 6 Discovered that the FC5 installer had done weird things to the
hard drive. It's a 120G drive with only about 50G allocated, but for
some reason FC5 didn't allocated the full remaining space to the
extended partition, so I couldn't add another logical drive. Bummer!
Oh well, I wasn't betting the farm on Debian anwyway.

Started up the Kubuntu install. Mostly good news.

# 1 The Ubuntu LiveCD has got to be the slowest thing ever to start -
like watching paint dry.

#2 No problems here with the NIC.

# 3 The gui mode installer is quite nice. I was able to delete the
extended partitions and reallocate them full size quite easily.

# 4 The install ran without a hitch

# 5 Reboot, adjust sources.list, update, get Firefox no problems.

# 6 Searched for the nvidia instructions on Ubuntu Forums, did the
necessary steps, and viola I'm now running the nvidia card in native
mode. My friends on the linux-users list tell me that the nvidia
drivers packaged by nvidia are pretty dated, but thus far it's working
for me.

Basically, I discovered what I already knew. Ubuntu is the Debian for
the rest of the world. Too damn easy.

I still need to get through the printer setup (let's hope that CUPS
works better than 6 months ago) , scanner setup, and get MySQL asnd
PostgreSQL back on the box. And then begins the tedious process of
recovering my databases from the old hard drive. Have to mount the
drive in my external USB case which is a pain because the case is DVD
sized and needs rails for harddrives. Before I do that, I'll need to
recover my CentOS installation that is currently in the USB case.

One thing I've discovered out of this disaster scenario. I want to
keep backups of databases in a better format. Maybe create a partition
for the databases and symlink.

Since the new box is an AMD 64-bit unit, after I get everything
restored I can play around with 64-bit stuff as well. Wahoo.

Enjoy,

-- 
Collins Richey
     If you fill your heart with regrets of yesterday and the worries
     of tomorrow, you have no today to be thankful for.