Ubuntu
The long “holiday” is over. Well, it involved taking my mom around most of Melbourne’s great shopping sites, and a few touristy spots. Most fun, no Internet, a lot of walking, and a lot of Melbourne/Victoria I’ve not seen in a while.
Jdub was in Melbourne, giving us his talk on Ubuntu Linux, going thru an install, answering many questions, and I have some rough notes of what happened. They built up something so quickly, and where are we? You can tell I had a rough train ride home, thinking…
October 6th, 2004 at 7:45 am
how was the ladies’ nite out?
got any guys?
October 8th, 2004 at 12:44 pm
I thought I’d chime in with some feedback on the Ubuntu and Fedora Core distributions.
I’ve been using and recommending FC since FC1 (I was a RedHat user before that) but I’m thinking about switching to Ubuntu and I plan to save my personal data and make the switch after Ubuntu Warty comes out so I can test Ubuntu for a few weeks. Then (if I don’t like what I’m using) I’ll switch back to FC installing FC3.
I’m doing this because FC doesn’t ship what I’ve come to learn is possible with the programs that make up FC. Nautilus, for instance, can make network folders that link to ssh and ftp (perhaps even sftp) volumes. But I can only get FC’s Nautilus to make links to anonymous ftp volumes. I don’t want to type my login and password in cleartext (hence my desire to use sftp or ssh) and I don’t see the user/pass panel I’ve seen in GNOME screenshots from other users.
Using my USB key is needlessly hard in FC2, but I’m told Mandrake makes it quite easy to use. Samba setup seems to be needlessly complicated and I’m curious if anyone else makes it easier. Printing when the printer make & model is determined automatically should be a snap, but I still have to go through configuration panels that scare beginners. Submitting bugs into bugzilla is hard because I don’t always know what program to file a bug against. I imagine beginners who want to help are put off by the large configuration of bugzilla.
It’s a combination of what does GNOME let me do easily (which will help or hurt all GNOME distributions) and what does FC add to that to make things easier still.
I said when FC1 debuted that I’d give it a release or two to see where it is headed. That time has come and I need to see what the others have to offer too.
Feedback to my post is welcome, but please send me a copy in e-mail because I mainly read blogs through the summary sites (like Planet). Thanks.