Ubuntu, was Re: [oclug] oclug traffic

[GR Gaudreau]

On Tue, 2004-02-11 at 19:58 -0500, Dave Edwards wrote:
> <snip> 
> 
> Hi Sean.  That was me.  Nice to see you made it to the lists.  I
> wonder if you'd like to favour us with your impressions of Ubuntu[1].
> I'm on the cusp of trying it myself, so I'm interested to take in as
> much info as possible.
<snip>

Hi Dave,
If you don't mind my chiming in here: I think Ubuntu is a great distro.
In fact, after having tried most of the "big names" such as Mandrake,
Redhat, Caldera, SuSe and what not, I think the folks at Ubuntu have
done a great job.

The install is a breeze. It's a one CD job, which asks a few basic
questions and then copies a bunch of stuff on your drive. During the
installation, it asks whether you'd like to download stuff from the
Internet. I said yes and got a few more goodies. 

Th default desktop is GNOME 2.8.x. I've been working with GNOME for a
few weeks now and I really like it.  The folks at Ubuntu, for reasons
listed in their FAQ, have decided that not activating the root account
would be safer for the user. You can sudo all the root task you need to,
but if you insist on "playing God" on your system, then you can
easily active the root account; I haven't yet.

One of the things I thought was nice was that the initial install
doesn't start services that listen to ports, so that a new user has a
bit less to worry about, security wise. You can change that if you wish,
but you have to learn to do it the Debian way, since there are no GUI
tools yet for starting and stopping things like daemons, for example. As
well, Debian doesn't differentiate between runlevel 2 through 5; you
have to alter the necessary files in /etc/rcx.d directories. The default
is runlevel 3, which boots you into X and the graphical login screen
(GDM). 

At first I thought it was an annoyance, but now that I think of it, what
better way to learn what services are running, why they're running and
how I can either stop or start them, add or subtract to them, learn what
services are set in motion and so on. 

By-the-way: if you insist on running KDE (I know you like this desktop),
you can easily download it and run it after the install. Did I mention
it was a Debian based distro? ;-)

All in all, Ubuntu is (in my humble opinion) the best distro I've tried.
Keep in mind that I'm just a noob. :-)

-- 
GR Gaudreau
<grgaud at gmail.com>