As promised, I’m here again. I have a review for you, but it isn’t the AO review. I think I’ll do that later in the week.

As you may be able to tell from the title, I’m once again working with Ubuntu. This time, instead of just installing it on a seperate drive and running it once, I’ve nuked Debian and put Ubuntu on as Bell’s operating system. See, after Mako’s presentation, I couldn’t resist. It just seemed to awesome to refuse.

And it *is* too awesome to refuse. The installation, which is built off of Debian’s new installer (but has been hacked to ask as few questions as humanly possible and autodetect more things), was painless. The most complex task was partitioning, but that was only because I chose to do it by hand. See, I wanted to keep my /home partition as it was, so I couldn’t go with one of the quick Ubuntu-does-it partition options. However, Ubuntu could have done it for me if I told it to.

Once Ubuntu was installed, it rebooted, installed a few final packages and updated, then went right into the login screen.

And oh boy, was that a login screen. It was pleasing to the eye and to the ear. It’s much more elegant looking that Debian’s default gdm setup.

I slapped down my login credentials, and away I went into gnome. It adapted to the majority of my old gnome settings, with the exception of the mail-notification applet. This wasn’t in the Ubuntu-supported section of the repo, so I just had to add universe and apt-get it.

Ubuntu came with a decent array of desktop applications. It sported Firefox, totem, evolution, OpenOffice, and the rest of the apps needed for a functional desktop. I installed Thunderbird, since I prefer that to the outlook clone, struggled a bit with the older mail/settings files in the newer version of Thunderbird, and got it all working. (The difficulty with moving profiles between different thunderbird installs isn’t Ubuntu-specific. I have trouble doing it everywhere, Netscape Mail for WIndows included. Gah.)

MP3/Flash/DeCSS support was only one more apt-get away. The process for getting these patent-encumbered technologies setup was MUCH less painful than what one would have to do under Debian.

Next came SSHD. One apt-get and I’m good.

There was still one minor problem, though. You see, Ubuntu uses sudo for everything that needs root. The root account itself is locked by default. So, a lot of the administrative GUIs request my password when they start. The problem is that sudo caches my password for 15 minutes, and there isn’t any obvious button to clear it.

I do not want anyone to be able to walk up 15 minutes after I enter my password and fuck around with synaptic. Really, that’s not good. The fix, however, was easy. I found it in the sudoers manpage. A simple timestamp_timeout=0 in the /etc/sudoers file took care of everything.

There are a lot of improvements over Debian. When apt is running, or when there are updates avalible, an icon appears in the notification area. The mail notification applet only displays when there’s new mail. The dictionary applet shows spelling corrections beside the defenition instead of popping up a new window. Small things like that.

The killer feature, however, is hotplug. Debian probably had it in the repos, but it would be a bitch to set up. Ubuntu has it deployed by default. And oh boy, is this nice.

Now, I do not need to mount anything. Whenever I plug in my DAP or my thumbdrive, it mounts it and displays the filesyetem. When I plug my camera in, it SEES it as a camera and offers to move the images over onto the drive. That’s a big improvement over Debian not even noticing my camera.

Oh, and the same goes for CDs/DVDs. I pop one in, and it mounts it. Boom.

So far, I haven’t come across many shortcomings. The administrative GUIs are far superior to Debian’s, and I still have access to every package in Debian.

So, Ubuntu’s rating: most excellent. Highly suggested for starting out, even better than Fedora. The only thing Fedora has over it is a a proper GUI for the installer. Ubuntu is curses-based, Fedora is a full-blown X interface. But I’m sure something is coming soon!

And on to other business. I’d just like to end this post on a tastey note.

pizza!

Mm, yes, pizza. I made it from scratch. Next time, I’ll take pictures of each step so I can write the Pizza-Making HOWTO.