Is it time for Ubuntu?

[fos]

Ubuntu will be releasing a new version on June 1. It does have attractive features. I have tried a beta or two within the last couple of months. It wasn't quite stable on my mini ITX system. I'll try the new release when it becomes available. They are actually releasing numerous versions, from server to desktop.

Is it ready for prime time?

fos....

[fos]

LAMPS Certification for LTS sever edition:

Ubuntu 6.06 LTS Server Edition to Include Certified LAMP Stack

London 23rd May 2006

The Server Edition of the June 1st 2006 release of Ubuntu will include a mechanism to set up a standardised, certified and supported LAMP server with a single command. The feature reduces the setup time for companies providing hosted LAMP services as well as making it easier for organisations to set up and maintain their own LAMP standardised servers.

"This new functionality is a first step towards the simplification of common server deployment scenarios using Ubuntu" said Fabio Massimo Di Nitto, product manager of Ubuntu Server Edition.

"We aim to bring the same ease of deployment and integration to the server for which Ubuntu has become well known on the desktop. The new Ubuntu Server Edition provides a well-integrated platform for deploying a new server with any of the standard internet services: mail, web, dns, file serving or database management. The LAMP installation option brings together several of these components to reduce setup time and the risk of misconfiguration when integrating these services, and is the first of many improvements we envision for reducing setup headaches for common server configurations" added Adam Conrad, Ubuntu's lead LAMP developer.

The term "LAMP" refers to "Linux, Apache, MySQL and PHP", four ingredients of the world's most widely used framework for dynamic website publishing. While many variations on the LAMP theme exist, these four components are most commonly deployed together. The process of integrating these components will often take several hours per server and leaves room for the introduction of security vulnerabilities or unnecessary variation in configuration between different systems. With the introduction of a standardised LAMP setup the new Ubuntu Server Edition will reduce both the cost of ownership of large numbers of LAMP servers, and the risk of misconfiguration.

This announcement follows the recent announcement of collaboration, certification and support between MySQL and Ubuntu. As announced at the recent MySQL Users Conference, Ubuntu 6.06 LTS is a fully supported platform for certified MySQL solutions. In addition, Canonical Ltd, sponsors of Ubuntu, provides technical support for the full suite of components in this stack.

[benjaminq]

It has long been time for Ubuntu. IMHO Ubuntu conquered all those who backed up from MEPIS "de facto closed source" parts. The same effect could be obcerved with SuSE upon really opeining their Distro as openSuSE, it gave them an popularity boost.

Ubuntu: neither 4.10 nor 5.04 nor 5.10 have impressed me though. I found the concept of providing a _consistent_ and _designed_ Linux experience with a lot of (more or less) _sane defaults_ the absolute right thing to do. But I am not so much into GNOME, the apps crashed more than I was used to and trying to use Kubuntu 5.10 was horrible for me, also the hardware detection had been flaky on my machines. Mepis always worked better Kanotix always worked better, MEPIS is still not fully open, Kanotix has the best hardware detection but it proves that Debian unstable is what it is named after.

Now with the first extra fixed long time supported Release it becomes again interesting for me, since I can start with Mepis 6 (a distro I always had the least amoung of work to get it fit my own needs) and get support for quite a long time. Kubuntu's KDE is too "dumped down", so MEPIS is just the better start for me. So from this point of view Ubuntu does several things totally right:

- providing a consistent package
- providing ease of use
- design or eye candy (even if you don't like brown or orange)
- it has built a powerful community (stellar help-forums and howtos)
- the promise of staying free (as in speech)
and now
- enough testing
- better hardware detection (???)
- long term support

BEnjamin

[fos]

I'm looking forward to the new release. I intend to start building an AMD Athalon based system next week. It will be the most up to date system I have had since an IBM TP 760CD I purchased in 96. I hope they make the June 1st release date without forcing it the way MS does with their software.

fos...

[jpaulb]

I have the 64 bit running on testing disk. In some ways it is cute for the lack of a better word., It is different from pure Debian. to few choices for my taste. I could imagine me saying that if Tal hadn't shut down Libranet. That force me use Debian and struggle through the murky waters of RTFM. One thing that I dislike is the lack of a root password. In theory anyone can boot the box as root can create a real mess.

What I like about it, is that OpenOffice 2.x installs without a single problem. On the down side the LTSP project is a little problematic, I tried an installation following castaway's Libranet HowTo, it kept falling over with a bad check sum warning, while installing the files.

It is free and easy to install, which would make it a excellent choice for someone deserting Windoze

[bhobjj]

Is it time for Ubuntu?

Not yet for me.

I installed Xubuntu last week. The install process took about 20min.

Overall, it is a big disappointment.

The packages include only Abiword for office programs.
It would be more usefull if a spreadsheet package was included

The desktop has been configured to look like Ubuntu (Gnome) with a background color of blue instead of Ubuntu brown. It is like they are using Xfce4 configured as "Gnome Lite" and it gives a user a completely different impression of the Xfce desktop. Too bad.

For a new user, it is more difficult to use than a standard Xfce4 desktop.

There is only one very nice feature of Xubuntu. It is the animated graphic of the Xfce mouse running inside of the Ubuntu logo. This is displayed when Xfce is loading.

Comparing Xubuntu (http://www.xubuntu.org/)
to
Zenwalk (http://www.zenwalk.org/).
Zen is a smaller iso image, but is a much more complete set of packages. Zenwalk seems to run much faster than Xubuntu.

-BoB


One thing that I dislike is the lack of a root password


$ sudo passwd
enter the user password and then you will be prompted for a new (root) password.

[bluesdog]

What is it with this no root password thing in Ubuntu?

Someone tried to explain to me that it increases system security to not have a root account, but if any user can su to admin, that does not make much sense.. does it?

[kmoffat]

I think the rational is that you must guess the appropriate 'root' username, then also guess the password for that user to gain root access. Makes some sense, I guess, but it's annoying if you are at all familiar with linux.

[kmoffat]

I like ubuntu for it's installer and general nice feel. I like gnome, finding kde too 'windows'. Ubuntu works well on my old laptop, and does my netgear 511 wireless pcmcia card well. But I do prefer kanotix, keeping in mind that it can be a bear to upgrade due to it's base of unstable debian. You must pay attention to the kanotix website for warnings as to when not to upgrade. On my server/desktop I still use Libranet, having changed the sources.list to etch. I guess if I were to do a new install for my home server I would first try ubuntu, server edition, which I haven't yet tried, then probably Debian stable, obviously for it's stability, and perhaps add backports when needed.

As for xubuntu, I feel it has a long way to go, although I very much like xfce.

I use Zenwalk on my 3rd computer, and find it very quick, responsive, easily updated, generally a good desktop. Once again, I like xfce.

[benjaminq]

I am about to switch to MEPIS 6, which is based on Dapper Drake. Yet I found it a stable and easy to use package that worked right out of the box. Well almost everything, but pecularities like Bluetooth and my litle Palm Z22 do not play as nice as they did with LN.

Bluetooth works "almost" meaning I can detect the phone and get a pairing but they refuse to talk to each other, Kmobiletools does nothing anymore. Same goes with Kpilot and the Palm, I can detect it but Hotsynching just won't work. It was always fiddling but 1 out of 10 times it worked with LN.

Ohter than that MEPIS has been all fun. It starts fast and performs really well, my system has become snappy again.

BEnjamin

[xmixahlx]

personally, i think ubuntu (at the rate it is currently moving) will single-handedly bring linux to the masses.

that's not saying i'll ever use it, but i appreciate what they are doing.

it's a good product/development/movement

i'll stick with debian/unstable


later

[fos]

6.06 is now available. ???

All of the mirrors are tied up, I couldn't get any of them on this side of the Atlantic to come up. It is really popular!

fos

[danieldk]

As usual, use the torrent :).

[danieldk]

Even torrenting is slow, at about 200KB/s - 300KBs. My usual rate for GNU/Linux ISOs is far above 1 MB/s (usually 1.5MB/s).

[fos]

I give up on the download! Mine is dropping as low as 25kb/sec.... hours to go!

I have to go to Florida for a few days. I'll get it when I get back.

I'll be packing my daughters Windoze laptop with a Knoppix 4.02 DVD. Maybe I can get something done.

I hope to find some internet connections while I'm gone.

fos....

[uteck]

What is it with this no root password thing in Ubuntu?

Someone tried to explain to me that it increases system security to not have a root account, but if any user can su to admin, that does not make much sense.. does it?
Not quite right. You can only use the sudo command if your account is listed in the sudo config. The main advantage of this is that any cracker can start doing dictionary attacks against the root user and eventually guess the right password, then they have complete control. This method has the advantage that nobody can login is as root without first gaining user access. But as others have said, you can reset the password for root if you want, or you can just start a new session as root with 'sudo bash' now the terminal session is running as root.

[sammil]

I have Ubuntu 6.06 (installed from the live CD, not server) up and running on my new machine. Hardware detection seems to be fine - SATA, onboard Marvell Gigabit LAN, onboard sound. The only problem is the newish Nvidia 7300, but the 'nv' driver works fine. Don't know if it's the OS or Nvidia. The first thing I did was to enable root login along with sudo.

Worked out of the box with no fiddling with the Gigabit drivers, which is more than I can say about CentOS, Libranet and Debian Etch network install. Ubuntu found the LAN and sound without any intervention from me.

No scanner or wireless.

Edit. A bit too eager as usual. Giggling turned up the solution to the Nvidia problem. Seems the new Xorg puts drivers in different locations, so using the switch --x-module-path=/usr/lib/xorg/modules/ along with the Nvidia driver fixed it. Nvidia-settings now shows the card and screen correctly.

Next will be why glxgears doesn't show. Plus why does settings show 512MB when I thought I bought a card with 256...

[autek]

>The first thing I did was to enable root login along with sudo. <

sammil, care to tell me the correct syntax for this. I tried to search, had 50 hits and as about as many ways to do it. Thanks

Ed

[benjaminq]

If I am not wrong it goes like this: in a shell do "sudo su", now you have a root-shell and you can execute "passwd root" and give root a password.

However, sudo will still be activated for your user account. You can then EITHER edit the /etc/sudoers file (with visudo or a text editor visudo is said to be preferred, because it does a consistency check before saving, but I found visudo strange to use and used a nomal texteditor and some caution), OR set up a new user and work with this one.

Hope it helps.

Benjamin

[danieldk]

However, sudo will still be activated for your user account. You can then EITHER edit the /etc/sudoers file (with visudo or a text editor visudo is said to be preferred, because it does a consistency check before saving, but I found visudo strange to use and used a nomal texteditor and some caution), OR set up a new user and work with this one.

The problem is that Ubuntu has patched kdesu and other programs to work with sudo. If you disable sudo for a user, you won't be able to use these programs.

[ralvy]

Just installed Kubuntu 6.06 last night. I haven't seen such a slow distro, in terms of performance, in a long time. I find the desktop drags. The fastest I have seen so far are Arch and CentOS.

[danieldk]

On my main machine (K)Ubuntu is pretty fast (Athlon64 2800+, 1GB RAM), but on my notebook Ubuntu, Kubuntu, and Xubuntu are very slow (Athlon MP2000+, 384MB RAM). So, I run CentOS pretty much everywhere, except on my main machine, which runs Ubuntu and CentOS.

[sammil]

Ed

What I used was the following

sudo passwd root
<enter user passwd>
<enter new root passwd>
<confirm new root passwd>

First line is verbatim, then prompts follow.

[jpaulb]

I think the rational is that you must guess the appropriate 'root' username, then also guess the password for that user to gain root access. Makes some sense, I guess, but it's annoying if you are at all familiar with linux.

Interesting.
On a reboot GRUB has the option of a recovery mode. Where you are the root account with out passsword :! Type nano /etc/shadow. Now you can erase all your users passwords, so if anyone has access to your box they can find out the users name, erase their password, reboot, and sudo without a password.

I am not too sure how safe this is. :?

There are a number of security measures that could be taken. Password protect the BIOS, a password for GRUB, put the system on a hdd other than hda and use a boot floppy.

[ralvy]

On my main machine (K)Ubuntu is pretty fast (Athlon64 2800+, 1GB RAM), but on my notebook Ubuntu, Kubuntu, and Xubuntu are very slow (Athlon MP2000+, 384MB RAM). So, I run CentOS pretty much everywhere, except on my main machine, which runs Ubuntu and CentOS.

Checked my xorg settings and found it was set to use the vesa driver instead of the sis driver. Now it's peppy. I noticed that the install did in fact install the sis driver, but it didn't put it in the xorg.conf file.

[danieldk]

Checked my xorg settings and found it was set to use the vesa driver instead of the sis driver. Now it's peppy. I noticed that the install did in fact install the sis driver, but it didn't put it in the xorg.conf file.

The S3 Savage driver locks up on my notebook since an update not far before the release. But the VESA drivers is pretty snappy on that video chipset. The overall system is just a tad slow. I think may laptop just needs more than 384MB RAM, things have changed alot since GNOME 2.6 ;).

[julius]

I tried releases 4 and 5 of Ubuntu when looking for a Libranet replacement.
Both installed well on a test machine and looked good, but -
The package repositories were rather limited and, even though there were other options that could be opened up, they were either often off-line or just unavailable.

My biggest headache was the sudo thing to acquire partial root permissions. For most things I could get by using sudo, but there are some things that it wouldn't let me do. I followed some instructions in the Ubuntu forum to add a password for full root access, which worked fine but totally borked a GUI that I was using to manage MySQL until I got up to speed with managing SQL databases directly. Swings and roundabouts - as they say.

I gave up and went searching again. Still haven't found a linux replacement for my aging Libranet (one machine has gone to XP) [shock horror] so am hoping that I hear some good news about Ubuntu 6.06 to encourage me to have another try.

[danieldk]

The package repositories were rather limited and, even though there were other options that could be opened up, they were either often off-line or just unavailable.

Did you enable universe and multiverse? There are thousands of packages when these are enables.

My biggest headache was the sudo thing to acquire partial root permissions. For most things I could get by using sudo, but there are some things that it wouldn't let me do. I followed some instructions in the Ubuntu forum to add a password for full root access, which worked fine but totally borked a GUI that I was using to manage MySQL until I got up to speed with managing SQL databases directly. Swings and roundabouts - as they say.

The problem is that some programs are patched to use sudo. I personally don't like sudo, but if you disable it, things like kdesu stop working.

I gave up and went searching again. Still haven't found a linux replacement for my aging Libranet (one machine has gone to XP) [shock horror] so am hoping that I hear some good news about Ubuntu 6.06 to encourage me to have another try.

It works pretty well. Other good alternatives are CentOS and Debian Stable plus backports.

[benjaminq]

Also from this point of view Mepis is the best Ubuntu derivative out there ... there you have a full blown KDE not a crippled one like in Kubuntu, you have a root account and a normal user account, you have more multimedia out of the box, you get a live-CD installer that does not kill your existing MBR without quoting, you have better samba integration out of the box ... I really think Mepis is the Ubuntu for Linux Users and the Original ($)ubuntu's are for lazy Lemmings ... may sound harsh, but there is a reason for a root account. Users are often enough lazy and so their user password will not be as strong as one whishes it to be. If you have a root account you have to think twice and the probability that your root password is weaker than you user password is close to nil I suppose.

Benjamin

[kmoffat]

What is the advantage of Mepis over plain Debian?

[benjaminq]

What is the advantage of Mepis over plain Debian?

Hm, it has some small additional configuration tools (for setting up the network, user accounts, rescue partitions, create an on-the-go-disc). Basic things.

No, the difference IMHO is the package. One live-cd, installable from the live mode, with everything that you need (partitioning program Qtparted, the installer asks you where to put Grub, you get user and root account ...). With only a few clicks and within 15 minutes you have set up a desktop system that needs only very little work to make it complete.

Then there is "the extra mile": spam assassin preconfigured, virus scanner preconfigured, multimedia preconfigured (w32codecs and libdvdcss are lacking but the rest is already there), samba, firewall ...

Plus the hardware auto detection is very close to Kanotix's, this time everything just worked (I only had to activate the scrollbuttons of the touchpad by uncommenting one line and making the touchpad "alwayscore", but if you have no clue, navigating and tapping worked right away).

It is quite fast (I have no comparison with plain Debian though) compared to LN 3.0.

In sum: for me it is the distribution that comes closest to what I want, need and ask for. I purged a few packages and installed a couple of others (via synaptic). The sources.lst includes already one multimedia repo, you only have to activate it. This version has been a very pleasant ride to date, I started with beta4 and upgraded to rc2 now, added the czessi repo for some newer versions of a few packages (kaffeine, k3b, amarok) ... everything stands rock-solid.

Maybe it is Debian for the lazy. I tried once to install plain Debian, but since it just won't accept the PCMCIA WLAN card and after spending some time with getting ndiswrapper installed and still being unable to get it working because I obviously missed something (maybe I would have had to compile a module or so??) I gave it up because I want the OS doing work for me not the other way around ... I tend to take the line with the least resistance.

Benjamin

[kmoffat]

Nice summation, thanks. I might download it and give it a spin. The thing is I prefer to not use kde, just stubborn, I guess, but I use Xfce and Gnome most of the time. I'm sure Xfce would be an easy install, but Gnome is more involved.

I am using Zenwalk now, a slackware and Xfce based distro, extremely fast and well thought out, one app per task, not many as in libranet, but I would like the debian repositories with their huge package selection. I have tried Ubuntu, and it's close, but not quite there. Slackware itself has droppid gnome. I still use LN3 for my home server box. Kanotix was my choice for a bit, but there were some upgrade issues, so I'm still searching.

Very glad to have this forum with many libraneteers! Thanks.

[julius]

Thanks for the feedback on my comments about Ubuntu - food for thought.

That was a nice overview of Mepis, benjaminq - It sounds pretty cool, and is now on my list of things to try. But I'm one of those confirmed Gnomers - I like the interface - so have just one other distro to try before Mepis. cheers. :)

[fos]

One problem I found with the Mepis release candidate is with SATA hard drive support. It would not install to a partition only the whole disk. I had the same problem with Ubuntu 6.06. Ubuntu corrupted Grup on my new installation even when I aborted the install when it wouldn't go to a primary partition.

SATA support is still a little rough around the edges. It probably would have been fine if I didn't have WinXP on the first partition.

fos....