Thread: An article about Ubuntu linux

Found this on Bleeding edge, a computer forum with unbiased reveiws.

Electing Ubuntu Linux

Bleeding Edge has been in election mode over the past few weeks. We know it’s time for a change, but even if the leader of our government is a touch over the hill, possibly economical with the truth, addicted to high taxes and policies that contribute to inflation, you can’t give him the push without just a touch of sentimentality.
He’s been leading us, let’s face it, for around three decades – far longer than John Howard has been in power in Australia. And if we do say goodbye to Bill Gates and that long succession of Microsoft operating systems – an institution we’ve come to know as Billdom - will the incoming government, which calls itself Open Source, be up to the job?
We’ve been diligent about our election responsibilities, having spent the past month or so examining the Linux platform and campaign promises and comparing them with Billdom. We know that it’s going to lead us into
slightly unfamiliar territory, but after several weeks using the Ubuntu Linux distribution which we wrote about in June, we think there’s remarkably little difference between either desktop environment.
The more serious issue, in our opinion, is that there’s a price the Microsoft users pays for the familiarity, beyond the not inconsiderable economic cost. Billdom makes its citizens far too reliant on the prevailing regime, and discourages independence. Users are locked in to constant costly upgrades, as Microsoft changes its formats and retires
its software.

Continue reading "Electing Ubuntu Linux"

August 19, 2007

Electing Ubuntu Linux

Bleeding Edge has been in election mode over the past few weeks. We know it’s time for a change, but even if the leader of our government is a touch over the hill, possibly economical with the truth, addicted to high taxes and policies that contribute to inflation, you can’t give him the push without just a touch of sentimentality.
He’s been leading us, let’s face it, for around three decades – far longer than John Howard has been in power in Australia. And if we do say goodbye to Bill Gates and that long succession of Microsoft operating systems – an institution we’ve come to know as Billdom - will the incoming government, which calls itself Open Source, be up to the job?
We’ve been diligent about our election responsibilities, having spent the past month or so examining the Linux platform and campaign promises and comparing them with Billdom. We know that it’s going to lead us into
slightly unfamiliar territory, but after several weeks using the Ubuntu Linux distribution which we wrote about in June, we think there’s remarkably little difference between either desktop environment.
The more serious issue, in our opinion, is that there’s a price the Microsoft users pays for the familiarity, beyond the not inconsiderable economic cost. Billdom makes its citizens far too reliant on the prevailing regime, and discourages independence. Users are locked in to constant costly upgrades, as Microsoft changes its formats and retires
its software.

Under Linux, we won’t have to pay thousands of dollars for Windows and programs like Microsoft Office, because the operating system and thousands of programs which use it, are open source, which means that for the average home or small business user they’re free. More importantly, the user community contributes to their development, and shares public ownership of the software code.
While it’s true that there’s no real open source replacement for some programs, like Adobe PhotoShop, for instance (although Gimp does have many followers), our trial of Linux suggests we’ll be perfectly capable of completing most of our everyday tasks without having to pay for proprietary solutions.
Things will be more secure under the new regime, and we’re going to have a lot of fun playing with all that new, free software. And for those Windows programs that we can’t replace ... well, we’re going to allow Bill to continue to run a small corner of our IT commonwealth, which we call Tasmania.
The rest of the place is going to be under the government of a Linux distribution called Ubuntu. We have been flirting with it since 2005, but until now, we didn’t view it as a viable alternative for the average punter.
The latest release, version 7.0.4, codenamed “Feisty Fawn”, has overcome our reservations. In our opinion, the average Windows user won't find it too much of a stretch to adjust to. The advantages, including the financial savings, are a powerful incentive to trying it out, and it’s possible to do so without disturbing your Windows installation.
We do have one suggestion. If you want to make the experience as painless as possible, buy a copy of a book called Ubuntu for Non-Geeks 2nd Edition, by Rickford Grant (No Starch Press, $64.99), which is available from larger book stores. It includes a copy of the software, walks the user through some of the more complex processes, and shows him how to adjust to the different ways Linux tackles common operations. We found it invaluable.
The first thing we liked about the Ubuntu CD was the fact that it contains two versions – the full, installable operating system, and a “LiveCD” version that allows the user to boot up in Linux, while keeping his existing operating system intact.
The live version doesn't have quite the same speed or facilities as a full install, but you can use it to test whether you're going to have problems running some of your hardware under Ubuntu. We found it helpful to have a couple of trial runs before we committed.
The installable version will re-partition your hardware to allow you to dual boot between Windows and Ubuntu if you want to take that route, but we opted for a complete re-format and partition.
We installed it on a four-year-old PC with a 3.2GHz Pentium 4 processor, 1GB of RAM, a Gigabyte motherboard, and Radeon 9700 Pro graphics card. It was not a typical system. There were two DVD drives for instance, and two sound cards, one on the motherboard, and other an Audigy 2 Platinum card. The installation took it all in its stride.
We began the installation process at 4.59pm on a Friday, after spending an hour making sure all our backups were intact. By 5.24pm, newly partitioned and with its new operating system, it had become a much more powerful PC than it had been under Windows XP, and a good deal more stable and powerful that it would have been running Vista.
We thought that we'd be using it only as a test bed, but over the past couple of weeks we've gravitated to it for most of our activities. Unlike the three-month-old Windows XP PC that was our principal computer, it’s been completely stable.
The Windows PC lost touch with the USB printer, then Microsoft Office began crashing, without recovering some of our work.
Ubuntu made it easy to switch, because the installation automatically drops a lot of free programs on to your hard drive, including powerful applications like Open Office. With an installation package called Synaptic, it also makes the process of adding more of them vastly easier than is the case with Windows. Synaptic looks after all the dependencies that a Windows installation overlooks, insulating users from potentially show-stopping surprises. Even more impressive is the fact that most of those programs are updated automatically, along with the operating
system, much more frequently than Microsoft's more limited releases.
You can also install a program called Automatix, that gives users a powerful graphic interface for selecting, downloading and installing other packages, and automatically overcoming the licensing and copyright
concerns that make audio and DVD decrypting and playback such a minefield. It even allows you to write to Windows NTFS partitions on your hard drive.
We found we preferred Ubuntu’s Nautilus file and network browser to Windows Explorer, and we didn’t have any problems mounting peripherals like USB and Firewire drives.
There were some hiccups. The Common Unix Printing System maintained by Apple Inc has simplified the previously complex world of Linux printing, but we knew that we might have some difficulties with our Canon printer, because Canon seems to have a corporate allergy to Linux. As it happened, we hadn't been able to track down a Vista driver for our Canon laser printer either, so we opted instead to spend $129 on a Hewlett Packard LaserJet 1020, which uses the ZJStream protocol developed by Zenographics.
There's a Linux driver for that , and after reading the warning there against using the driver that ships with Ubuntu, we had to resort to the terminal window to install it. That was one of the rare occasions on which we've had to abandon the Gnome graphical user interface that is the Ubuntu equivalent of the Windows desktop, for the command line.
Most Windows users probably find the thought daunting, but – like an increasing number of Macintosh users who also have access to a Unix terminal window - we have found ourselves using it increasingly, simply because you can do some very useful things with a command line. We’ve even found the rare occasion on which we had to compile a program to run under Ubuntu easy, because of the detailed help that’s available on the Web, in addition, of course, to our copy of Ubuntu for Non-Geeks. If only we could buy a book like that to help us choose between the
operating systems that want to run things in Canberra.

Looking at the Vista

Back at the forum, I'm having an interesting discussion with Mr. David. About Vista and whether he wears rose tinted glasses.
Vista is quite a different aesthetic than every previous Windows that came before it. Certainly it is a watershed in terms of whether the Microsoft OS empire will sail on or sink. Empires rise and empires fall. It is interesting to contextualise the demise of Digital Research (CP/M) and the rise of Microsoft on the back of MS-DOS oh, so long ago. Scoble has just run a series of podcasts starting with The rest of the story: How Bill Gates beat Gary Kildall in OS war, Part 1
I would guess a fair number of the computer using public went from Win98 to WXP directly. Traipsed from a good vintage to another good vintage and skipped the unpleasant, tart tasting milestones in between.
When people were running Windows 98, I had moved on to Windows NT 4 after a couple of years. Windows NT 4.0 was a solid and robust system but feature poor and over secure - it could not do USB, device drivers were not prolific in the early days. Microsoft felt that this would not sell to the general public.
In particular, the graphics subsystem was so secure it was unable to host accelerated DirectX games. It's interesting to note that Vista has recently had a scare because an ATI video driver bug allows a breach in security i.e. Vista graphic subsystem security does not appear to be as good as WinNT 4
So, if you were one of those who moved from Windows 98 to WXP, you had the benefit of skipping
WinNT 3.1 > WinNT 3.5 > WinNT 3.51 > WinNT 4.0 > Win2000.
Of course, you might be tempted to say there was no competition to Windows. We didn't have Ubuntu Feisty Fawn nor did we have the platform independent Web 2.0 so Microsoft could take their time to get Windows right.
As Mr. David says - Time will Tell.

Originally Posted by mittadisco

Have fesity fawn on one pc at work - is networked over windows server system (rest run windowz) and ubuntu works fine. The only reason I have windoz at home is I run my accounting software - quickbooks on home PC, otherwise I'd be running ubuntu on everything.

I have my computer dual booting Windows and Suse 10.2, but do everything on Linux except my accounting and the Canon scannner that does slides.

John