Ubuntu: Linux for Human Beings

 

"Ubuntu" is an ancient African word, meaning "humanity to others". Ubuntu also means "I am what I am because of who we all are". The Ubuntu Linux distribution brings the spirit of Ubuntu to the software world.
(note: this is proof the sahara bushmen are a bunch of pinkos. any good capitalist knows you are who you are by climbing there on the backs of those weaker then you are.)

Well, I'm once again on ubuntu, and once again loving it. Which is kind of suprising, considering the hell I went through in the install process. Basically, I downloaded hoary, installed it, and couldnt connect to the internet (the PPPd logs said that it was a PAP authentication failure, even though I know the user/pass was correct). Fiddled with it for a long time, and finally gave up. However, I had an old warty cd lying around, so I figured "Hey, why not". Did a base install, then tried pppoeconf again. What do you know, it worked :)

All excited now, I did a hoary dist-upgrade, which seemed to be going ok, so I switched to a virtual terminal and started a few torrents going with btdownloadcurses, and did a bit of web browsing, while going back to the first console every now and then to get through the occasional dpkg --configure screen. All of a sudden, DNS lookup stops on all websites, torrents grind to a halt, and apt cant stat any repos. I wanted to cry. Turns out I had overwritten my generated /etc/ppp/peers/dsl-provider file which I had gone to such lengths to set up. So back to square one.

Went through the entire setup again for warty (which is buggy as hell, they were using an extremely early version of the new debian-installer. also, the boot process took a good 10 minutes at times). after the base system was back on, I did a specific upgrade of pppoe to make sure I caught the question about overriding that damn dsl-providers file (I also backed up all of /etc/ppp), and backed it up on two different partions, and then emailed it to myself just to be sure. (I did NOT want to install warty for the third time)

After I was sure I wasnt going to bork my internet connection again, I did the rest of my upgrades with the -y option. After that was done it was almost 1:30 in the morning, and I had to work today, so I fired up those torrents again, went into aptitude and queued up about a gig of software to download and install, (the important one here: if you just have a base debian system you can usually just go for a "metapackage", which doesnt install anything itself, but depends on a "standard" set of packages. The one I did here was ubuntu-desktop, and made sure to be on the K7 kernel packages.)

When I got up this morning, everything was done downloading. Did a sudo reboot, and what do you know. I had a fully installed, internet enabled hoary.

Now, to some people this may sound like a horror story, I really dont see it that way at all. Without a single google, I was able to install an old version of the os, and end up with a highly customized current version with a trivial amount of work. The fact that it is not only possible, but also easy, really shows the power of debian.

This is the distro to watch folks. Hoary is just comming out the door, but already they are head and shoulders above the other big players, at least for the desktop. The release cycles are synched with the gnome foundation as well, so Breezy Badger will go gold as gnome 2.12 comes out the door. There is already a substancial community surrounding ubuntu, the ubuntuforums are second only to gentoo, the official wiki has a ton of useful information, and ubuntuguide.org is something you can point your mom to when she asks for ogl acceld drivers for her leet new ati vid card so she can pwn noobs in et.

Ubuntu is sponserd by cannonical, which is a company owned by a guy who has more money then he knows what to do with, Mark Shuttleworth (you may remember him as that billionaire who bought his way into space). The ubuntu devs are actually some of the top debian guys, and all ubuntu fixes get rolled back into sid, which makes ubuntu a debian branch, not a fork.

Anyways, ubuntu is a phenomenal distro, and I would recommend it to anyone who wants to try out linux. If you go to the official site, they will even ship pressed cds to your door for free (nice to have, but the torrent is faster). Hoary still has some rough spots, so be sure to have your local linux guru on hand if you run into any snags, but all in all its a joy, especially if you know what you are doing.