Some more of nothing !
After a lot of pondering and researching ultimately found the right kind of linux distribution for my needs.Gentoo was becoming a little too complicated for me to handle. Debian certainly had the potential to make it to my list but failed because of the slow development cycle. Debian did not have most of the latest and the greatest of the open world. Even if it did, it was labeled unstable. I can understand that they are a little paranoidl about new softwares and very serious about the stability of the distribution, but, I wouldn't want to use Gnome 2.8 after I get my grand children, either.
So, there it was just waiting for me "ubuntu", a cute little linux distribution with almost all the things that I wanted. Some folks in south Africa actually put this distribution together, the current release is codenamed "Warty Warthog" Ubuntu is actually a word from the African Nguni language family, meaning "humanity, caring, and harmony" yeah..singing the same open world song. Things that I liked the most, also being the reasons for my choice:
1. Distribution based on Deb. which meant I could apt-get :-)
2. Linux kernel 2.6 (Wireless Support, Laptop power saving)
3. Breaking the tradition, it had HAL, means more H/W friendly
4. Gnome 2.8
5. Evolution 2.0
and more than all these it's a single CD base edition, more ingenious ones can always apt-get.
Installation is so straight forward that anyone as dumb as a Dodo can install it blindfolded and with arms tied behind his back. Installation screens are ANSI graphics, which is in fact good and pleasantly reminded me of the good old days of bulletin board systems.
I have to admit GNOME 2.8 is awesome, I remember few years back installing RH6 on one of my friend's comp., that was the time when GNOME had introduced Nautilus and the world of spatial design was catching up. Till this time I was totally against Nautilus after having witnessed it's performance issues during the early years. But GNOME 2.8 rocks ! nautilus is nocibely quick. Infact GNOME has taken the best of all the worlds. Context Menu Options and drag-drop(Windows), Dockable Menu/Bars( NextStep/Mac) and some GNOME specific stuff like Application and Systems as two seperate menus. I am no usability expert but I find GNOME 2.8 really convincing.
Most of the hardware on my notebook was detected without any problem, the only thing that failed was the IR port, I don't use it often anyway. Did some apt-get for xmms and vlc, those are by the way two good audio and video players, got bittornado for torrent downloads. I found this interesting fact about Ubuntu while trying to mount my windows ntfs partitions. The root account is disabled by default and all operations are carried out using a user account. When there is some operation that requires root privilege it "sudo"s. That again is cool for the chances of you messing up things are less. One annoying thing was that the terminal did not refresh properly, like when you have lot text on the terminal window and you scroll up and down the text gets garbled, have to look out for an alternative. That was friday till 2AM, that's when I decided to hit the bed.
Otherwise there are lot of crazy activities happening around this place. Particularly, mother nature has been really hostile in this part of the world, 4 hurricanes in the south east, a really strong earthquake measuring 6.0 on the richter rocked the west(California) and now St.Mt. Helens is being overwhelmed by the hot activity in her belly. Helens belched a roiling plume of white steam and ash today, more than a week after a flurry of earthquakes first warned an eruption was on the way. This is the first noticeable activity after 18 years it seems. Now the interesting part, I live exactly 180 miles away from mt.st.helens and last time when she erupted she consumed everything in 200 miles radius :-)
So, there it was just waiting for me "ubuntu", a cute little linux distribution with almost all the things that I wanted. Some folks in south Africa actually put this distribution together, the current release is codenamed "Warty Warthog" Ubuntu is actually a word from the African Nguni language family, meaning "humanity, caring, and harmony" yeah..singing the same open world song. Things that I liked the most, also being the reasons for my choice:
1. Distribution based on Deb. which meant I could apt-get :-)
2. Linux kernel 2.6 (Wireless Support, Laptop power saving)
3. Breaking the tradition, it had HAL, means more H/W friendly
4. Gnome 2.8
5. Evolution 2.0
and more than all these it's a single CD base edition, more ingenious ones can always apt-get.
Installation is so straight forward that anyone as dumb as a Dodo can install it blindfolded and with arms tied behind his back. Installation screens are ANSI graphics, which is in fact good and pleasantly reminded me of the good old days of bulletin board systems.
I have to admit GNOME 2.8 is awesome, I remember few years back installing RH6 on one of my friend's comp., that was the time when GNOME had introduced Nautilus and the world of spatial design was catching up. Till this time I was totally against Nautilus after having witnessed it's performance issues during the early years. But GNOME 2.8 rocks ! nautilus is nocibely quick. Infact GNOME has taken the best of all the worlds. Context Menu Options and drag-drop(Windows), Dockable Menu/Bars( NextStep/Mac) and some GNOME specific stuff like Application and Systems as two seperate menus. I am no usability expert but I find GNOME 2.8 really convincing.
Most of the hardware on my notebook was detected without any problem, the only thing that failed was the IR port, I don't use it often anyway. Did some apt-get for xmms and vlc, those are by the way two good audio and video players, got bittornado for torrent downloads. I found this interesting fact about Ubuntu while trying to mount my windows ntfs partitions. The root account is disabled by default and all operations are carried out using a user account. When there is some operation that requires root privilege it "sudo"s. That again is cool for the chances of you messing up things are less. One annoying thing was that the terminal did not refresh properly, like when you have lot text on the terminal window and you scroll up and down the text gets garbled, have to look out for an alternative. That was friday till 2AM, that's when I decided to hit the bed.
Otherwise there are lot of crazy activities happening around this place. Particularly, mother nature has been really hostile in this part of the world, 4 hurricanes in the south east, a really strong earthquake measuring 6.0 on the richter rocked the west(California) and now St.Mt. Helens is being overwhelmed by the hot activity in her belly. Helens belched a roiling plume of white steam and ash today, more than a week after a flurry of earthquakes first warned an eruption was on the way. This is the first noticeable activity after 18 years it seems. Now the interesting part, I live exactly 180 miles away from mt.st.helens and last time when she erupted she consumed everything in 200 miles radius :-)
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