I just did an evaluation of Ubuntu Linux, which is a new ‘internationalized and free’ Linux distro. I downloaded the iso image from bittorrent, burned it to disk, added a 3gb drive to bell, and rebooted into the installer.

The installer, which was a boring-old ncurses-based interface, asked three or four questions, then went right on with the install, no bullshitting around. It detected all of my hardware without any problems, installed its base system, and then asked if it would be OK to put grub on the MBR. I told it no, since I didn’t want it fucking with my Debian kernels, so it finished the install and spit the CD out. No problems at all, so far. And it was easy, almost automatic.

I booted into Debian, modified my menu.lst to include Ubuntu, and booted into it.

Upon first boot, I was greeted by the firstboot script’s ncurses-driver interface. It told me that there would be no root user, and that if I ever needed root access, I could use sudo. The it helped me set up a user account. And then it went on its merry way selecting an apt mirror and downloading ~500 packages in 20 minutes.

Again, a bare minimum of questions asked, and nothing a newbie couldn’t handle.

After 27 minutes or so of downloading and installing, a graphical login prompt appeared along with a very loud sound effect. I almost had a heart attack, but I knew the sound was working.

I logged in, and by default, it started GNOME. It looked great, and the menus were clean. That’s more than I can say about a default Debian install.

So I started kicking around. I put in a music CD, and it played it automatically. I slapped in a data CD, and it mounted that all by itself. I plugged my USB drive in, and that was mounted for me, too.

However, it was unable to play a DVD–even a DVD without any CSS bullshit. I don’t know why, but totem lacked a vital plugin. There is no excuse for this, since Debian has support for DVDs without CSS, and the Debian people are so politically correct that it’s almost painful. After that, I tried an mp3. No luck, Ubuntu wouldn’t even consider playing it.

I took a look at the software it came with. There was a decent selection of stuff. gAIM, XChat, FireFox 0.9.3, Evolution, OpenOffice, 15 or so gnome games, multimedia applications, the gimp, xsane, and a few other things. Not bad at all. I started up FireFox and found my way to a site that used flash. No luck with that. The Ubuntu site says that the free flash player sucks, and the good one is pure evil. There was also a lack of java.

After screwing around for a few more minutes, I decided to return to my beloved Debian enviorment. Ubuntu was alright, but it wasn’t anything worth getting excited over. I initiated a shutdown and watched things die.

Something that surprised me were three deamons being stopped during shutdown. A RAID monitoring deamon of some sort, a LVM manager deamon, and the rsync deamon. Why would these be enabled by default? I’m obviously not making use of RAID/LVM, and I can’t think of a reason to have an rsync deamon running on a desktop box.

Ubuntu was OK, but it really isn’t anything special. It just acts like a slightly-more-crippled-but-pretty Debian. Easy to install, OK to use–until you want multimedia, that is. It lacked Synaptic (and a centeralized control panel), so newbies would have trouble figuring out how to install/update/configure their systems. Definitely not a distro for ma and pa.