[LINK] Ubuntu

[Bernard Robertson-Dunn]

I was going to put this at the front of the IBM article, but decided it 
needed a posting of its own.

As a recent convert to Ubuntu, I was pleasantly surprised at its ease of 
installation and use. I used a free distro from a DVD on the cover of 
APC. It happily booted and then (after I initiated it) installed itself 
on an old Aptiva along side Win98 and a slave HDD with XP and Red Hat on it.

It then phoned home (via the internet, not dial up) and told me what it 
needed to upgrade to the latest release level, which I allowed it to do.

It has a habit (not unlike Vista) of asking for admin privileges, for 
which it needs my password (not root, just my login password), to do 
certain tasks.

The most amazing thing to me has been the way I can print to a printer 
on a Vista desktop machine. Ubuntu found the printer, a recommend driver 
and installed it. I have not been able to work out how to get my 
notebook Vista to print to this same printer over the network. I can 
print directly to it by plugging it in but I can't get at it over the 
network. Somebody is doing something stupid and it is probably me, but 
Vista doesn't help me find out exactly what the problem is.

The other thing I like is the Synaptic Package Manager. It lists over 
23,000 available packages, mostly free, some (like Open Office) needing 
a "I accept these conditions" tick in the box.

The only thing I found to be a problem was finding out that I needed to 
install a certain package set to compile and link C, Java etc. The 
information was buried in a help file. Once I did what was needed, 
everything worked fine.

And the whole system now takes up only 3.3 GBytes.

I'm next going to put Ubuntu onto a 4GByte memory stick

I have used a few Linux distros and this latest Ubuntu beats the lot. It 
gets pretty close to beating Vista too, depending on what you want a 
computer for.

-- 

Regards
brd

Bernard Robertson-Dunn
Sydney Australia
brd at iimetro.com.au