Ubuntu Linux is a very recent project out of Africa with participation from many community volunteers and is sponsored by Canonical LTD. It is based on Debian and offers Linux kernel 2.6 and Gnome 2.8. It comes in a few different arch flavors too. Images are available for x86, AMD64 and also for the PowerPC. The Ubuntu team is strongly committed to free (and free of charge) software and plans on regular releases every 6 months. Product security updates for 18 months which will also be provided free of charge regardless of the release version.
I came across it around mid September and after reading up on it, decided to install their September 15 pre-release on my IBM Thinkpad T22. As a follow up to my first review covering the Warty pre-release of Ubuntu Linux, I want to cover some good and bad things I have come across in my day to day use of Ubuntu. These are just things I jotted down these past few weeks while using Ubuntu in my day-to-day tasks. I use my laptop daily both at work and at home. Most of my tasks are research related and involve using OpenOffice, Firefox, network shares and some miscellaneous file transfer methods (rsync, ftp, wget). I will break out and comment on a few things I have noticed during my month long use of Ubuntu.
Community:I am still very impressed with the Ubuntu community. It seems quite large and is very enthusiastic. It rivals some of the other Linux communities around that are known for their friendliness and willingness to help others. The #ubuntu irc channel on freenode is a great resource. It is a very diverse and friendly group of people. You probably will get an answer to your question the quickest if you visit there. Make it one of your regular stops while you get used to Ubuntu. Another great addition is the recent opening of the
www.ubuntuforums.org site. It is promoted as an unofficial Ubuntu forum site. You wouldn't think so though. The community presence is quite large, and they are all about Ubuntu. Plenty of activity in the forums and some great answers for lots of common questions can be found there. I particularly like the forum that recaps the mailing list. Speaking of mailing lists, the Ubuntu mailing lists are very active as well. Be careful subscribing to them or you may end up like me. Losing important emails only to find it buried under tons of Ubuntu mailing list posts. Subscribe to their list digests instead. For me it was the smart move that came too late
Overall usability:
I've been running Ubuntu for a few weeks now and after the minor tweaks I made, I am completely comfortable with it. It does what I need it to do. Ubuntu has taken the right approach to a desktop machines usability. Keep it clean and keep it simple. This is not a dig on KDE. I still use KDE sometimes and used to be a KDE junkie. Too often new users are plagued by the overwhelming amount of choices in the menu's. Some distribution makers have taken good steps towards solving that problem. However, having Gnome 2.8 as the default desktop environment is a breath of fresh air. The clean desktop without any icons, a simple and logical menu layout along with a refreshingly sane (there's that buzzword again) selection of installed packages, all contribute to Ubuntu's success in usability in my opinion. In the month that I have used the Warty pre-release, my desktop has not changed much from the stock defaults. Of course there is my obligatory change in wallpaper and color scheme to suit my individual taste. Additions to the default desktop were some quick launch icons I placed on the upper panel. I have kept up use of the spatial browsing for about 2 weeks but later gave it up. Many readers of my previous review sent me different tips and tricks for using Gnome's spatial browsing and I tried them. I just couldn't take it anymore and reverted back to the good old way of opening the windows in browser mode. Hey! It works for me, OK! So, to each his own. In the end I found that there was only minimal configuring I had to do to make the stock default desktop my own.
Networking:
Samba browsing just works. I use both share level and user level style shares. Some are Windows based machines sharing multiple directories, others are Linux based. I never had a problem. I am asked for my username and password when appropriate. copying/moving/deleting works great. Network browsing is so much nicer under gnome 2.8 than KDE's Lisa service and Konq. I won't go in to the miscellaneous file transfer methods I use such as ftp, wget and rsync. Just know that those packages work fine and are the same ones found in Debian proper.
OpenOffice:
What can I say... it just works. I was able to handle any Microsoft Office document I used. These included Word, Excel and Powerpoint files. Formatting, formulas, slide shows and so on were all properly displayed. Spell check is working fine too. OpenOffice is a great choice for the Linux desktop.
Firefox:
This is the default browser used in Ubuntu. Thank goodness someone had the foresight to replace Epiphany. It's one less thing to configure. Aside from some IE specific stuff at work (Authorware plugins required), it handles everything I have thrown at it. I can only see better things coming out of that project. The extensions are a great thing and work wonderfully well. Very easy to download and use. Now the following may or may not be related to Firefox. There are some strange hard lockup's I have experienced and Firefox was always being used when it happened. It happens with certain pop-up windows, clicking links to various sites and also when scrolling through pages using the mouse wheel. The machine will lock up hard. A hard reset is required. The keyboard is locked, so switching to a console and killing the offending program is out of the question. I haven't quite put my finger on the root cause as of yet because I can't get to a console to see what is going wrong. I hope to find the time and try to ssh into the laptop the next time it locks up hard. There was a mention on the Ubuntu lists about a possible fix for something similar I have been experiencing, but I have yet to try it out due to the recent Firefox update to 0.10.1/back up to 0.9.3 situation. I am still running 0.10.1 at the moment. This is one thing I have never experienced with either SuSE or Slackware with either the 0.9.3 or 0.10 releases. I hope to find the cure soon.
Multimedia:
I finally found time to view trailers and play around with some mpg videos under Ubuntu. There is lots of room for improvement here. I received consistent gstreamer pad errors using Totem to play them. Same files on another machine using Totem/gstreamer played just fine. Reading the lists, others are experiencing similar problems. Audio CD's work fine for me. After some more updates to Ubuntu, mpg videos wouldn't crash Totem/gstreamer but I would get audio only. Video was just a plain black screen. It appears the Ubuntu team is investigating multimedia, but more so to see what they can and cannot put in the default distribution. In the meantime I have been using gxine for the few rare moments I get to view videos. gxine works great. Those of you experiencing similar problems, I suggest you try out gxine or mplayer. There is a nice step by step how to on www.unbuntuforums.org for installing mplayer. It is going to take some work by the Ubuntu team to make basic multimedia work out of the box like the rest of their stuff.
System/Software updates:
Hey! It is Debian. The apt/synaptic combo does a great job. One of Debian's greatest strengths is its package management. I have enabled the universe repository using restraint. Mind you, nothing was broken during my usage of the universe repository during my updates. I just wanted to stay as close as possible to the supported packages in the Ubuntu repositories. Staying up to date proved to be very easy. Ubuntu Warty is about to go gold here in the next few days. Users of the pre-releases will be able to update their systems via synaptic. I have read though that the Universe repositories should be disabled first. This is an understandable precaution.
I understand that I am talking about a preview release/release candidate. Things are not going to be 100%. I don't expect them to be. Overall I am left with a solid impression. Ubuntu's Debian heritage, good development team, the Ubuntu philosophy and the enthusiastic community all play a big part in the rapid success of this distribution. To me, Ubuntu is sort of like that unknown asteroid barreling towards us that just popped up on everybody's radar. I think this one is going to hit planet Linux dead on. So keep your eyes on this distribution. I am sticking with my previous rating of an 8 out of 10.
JL Boers
UPDATE: Ubuntu Linux - Warty went gold today and has just been released.
See their announcement @ ubuntu.com
 Extra Information.... |
| Date Added: |
October 21 2004 |
| Reviewer: |
JL Boers |
| Related Link: |
Ubuntu Linux |
