It's finally official...Dell announced on it's website today that consumers will be able to choose Ubuntu (a flavor of linux) to be installed by default.

http://www.dell.com/content/topics/segtopic.aspx/unbuntu?c=us&cs=19&l=en&

i still thinks Fedora Core 6 with Berl rocks ubuntu's pants off

Fedora? Does that still use RPMs?

I prefer debian based stuff (such as ubuntu, kubuntu, etc).

Beryl is nice, but it's 85% eye candy, 10% better for UI, and 5% glitches.

fedora uses yum

I'm not familiar with yum, but I'm guessing redhat/fedora realized the error of its ways and evolved past RPMs?

yeah.. yum is crazy easy and useful..

i've only had it piss me off once. I'm using a server with 8 gigs of ram.. and Fedora Core 6 32-bit only see's 4 gigs.. but you can do a kernal upgrade so that it sees 8 gigs..

WELL.. i did that.. then i set up a bunch of VM's.. they were doing fine.. then i rebooted.. and YUM felt the need to UPGRADE my kernel for me.. i was pissed

so what's the problem with it upgrading your kernel for you?

the kernel that it upgrades to... only see's 4 gigs of memory.. so my VM's crash

I've been playin with vmware it seems pretty cool.

Me too, but whenever i run linux on windows in VMware, it's intolerably slow.

it's much much faster to run your VM's off of a linux box. i have no idea why this is...

THen you have to play around with the memory.. I've found that giving each machine it's own block of memory works better on my machines.. but for some people, allow them to swap memory is faster

I'll give that a whirl, kat.

i find it hillarious that they arent going to offer vista anymore. and i am very happy that linux has made it to the mainstream. i much prefer it over any other os

it's much much faster to run your VM's off of a linux box. i have no idea why this is...

THen you have to play around with the memory.. I've found that giving each machine it's own block of memory works better on my machines.. but for some people, allow them to swap memory is faster

Because you can easily tailor a very lightweight kernel with filesystems optimized for writing to very large files and not even have xwindows installed on the server? :)

But the performance of VMware ESX server (running on their proprietary but linux-based kernel and proprietary filesystem) blows even that away.. like at least double the performance :P

I'm not familiar with yum, but I'm guessing redhat/fedora realized the error of its ways and evolved past RPMs?

absolutely not.. still 100% RPMs.

p.s. Arch Linux ftmfw

p.s. .. how did I never notice this subforum? this shit's what I do :)

Can I get a beta or anything to try out on my laptop?

Can I get a beta or anything to try out on my laptop?

Of Ubuntu? Yes

http://www.ubuntu.com/getubuntu/download

It's a livecd so just pop it in and restart off the CD. It'll take 2-3 minutes to boot the CD and it won't be particularly fast with everything running off CD/RAM, but you can see how well it supports your hardware and such.

It'll alert you about any 'restricted drivers' (no source code available) and it's only one or two clicks to get them enabled and up and running (video card drivers will need to be downloaded so they aren't enabled by default --legally they can't include the proprietary code on their CD).

I keep trying to download ubuntu ultimate, but the torrent tracker is down.

I have kubuntu running on one of my machines with beryl, but beryl loads without a window manager even though emerald is installed. wtf.

want me to mail you a cd?

right now i'm running ubuntu (gnome) gutsy gibbon (will be the october release of the product) on my thinkpad (my primary computer) as well as a few of my other laptops (including the garage laptop :P ).

I tried kubuntu and instantly remembered how much I cannot at all stand using KDE. There are a few KDE apps that are AMAZING (Amarok and K3B specifically) but I can't stand the rest of it. I'll deal with the slight bloat of running Amarok and K3b on gnome, oh well.

Plus the kubuntu version of gutsy gibbon was way crappy .. barely worked.

beryl... you ricer :P you make rob proud

want me to mail you a cd?

do you have the image instead?

right now i'm running ubuntu (gnome) gutsy gibbon (will be the october release of the product) on my thinkpad (my primary computer) as well as a few of my other laptops (including the garage laptop :P ).

How's GG doing? buggy at all?

I tried kubuntu and instantly remembered how much I cannot at all stand using KDE.

What? KDE > Gnome.

Gnome is too mac for me. I hate that stupid bar on the top (despite the fact that you can move it around). Besides, KDE is faster and more tweakable.

There are a few KDE apps that are AMAZING (Amarok and K3B specifically) but I can't stand the rest of it. I'll deal with the slight bloat of running Amarok and K3b on gnome, oh well.

Plus the kubuntu version of gutsy gibbon was way crappy .. barely worked.

beryl... you ricer :P you make rob proud

Beryl is 90% rice.

Can I stil use MS Office? Forgive me for asking such a lame question but it been quite awhile since I played with any of this stuff.

Can I stil use MS Office? Forgive me for asking such a lame question but it been quite awhile since I played with any of this stuff.

Depends on what version. I haven't used Office 2007 under Wine, but I have used 2003.

If there's one thing Microsoft is really good at, it's their office suite (though 2007 is incrreeedibly bloated.. outlook is barely usable with 1GB of ram)

Dana --downloads still not working for you? I find it incredibly pathetic how few seeds there are for ubuntu livecd torrents.. it's the most popular Linux distro out there yet no one is decent enough to seed that shit.

I didn't have a copy of gutsy gibbon 64-bit but I actually do have kubuntu gutsy gibbon somewhere.. definitely on cd if I don't still have the ISO. My uplink is only 384Kbps at home though so it would be veeery slow. Right now I'm only getting 8KB/s download speed on the x64 gutsy gibbon torrent.. granted that's probably the least popular one so I'm not too surprised.

yeah I have the ISO on my thinkpad for ubuntu gutsy gibbon. It's honestly quite stable, I haven't had a single crash or anything. The wireless network manager 'networkmanager' (creative name eh?) prompts me for my WPA2-AES cipher a little more often than it should but it doesn't bug me all that much I guess. There's 10-20 package updates each day, they're really ramping up development and testing for the october release date. Every day the number of open bug reports is dropping :)

but yeah I'll go get the .torrent file and start seeding the ISO.. maybe it'll help :P

Apparently this ISO has 60% seeders:

http://linuxtracker.org/torrents-details.php?id=4323

But my bittorrent client tells me the tracker is down..

I think the reason seeds are so low for ubuntu torrents is that as soon as the download finishes, people burn the cd and restart and forget about seeding

I'm seeding this torrent: http://cdimage.ubuntu.com/releases/gutsy/tribe-2/gutsy-desktop-i386.iso.torrent

right now I'm uploading to just 3 peers @ 15K/s so I bet there's some other seeds.

I'm using 2003, I don't but new office suites untill its been out for a while. Otherwise when we email things to clients they can't open them.

Sweet I will def boot this on my other laptop. Time to do a final back up and see what happens...

bada bing! Good luck. You'll probably like it.

Also, KDE > Gnome. Don't listen to Kansei. He uses emo soap.

PS - KDE = Kooldino's Desktop Environment.

Explain the difference and where I would get both. What the best verison (include link?) of unbuntu for me to use?

Explain the difference and where I would get both. What the best verison (include link?) of unbuntu for me to use?

If you want cutting edge stuff (support for almost all of the latest hardware (minus the Santa Rosa chipset in the latest laptops (including the macbook pro))) and ricer graphical effects (search on youtube for 'compiz-fusion') go with Ubuntu gutsy gibbon. I really, really dislike Ubuntu's divisions, with "ubuntu" (gnome desktop environment), "kubuntu" (KDE desktop environment (it's way shitty don't listen to dana :P)), "xubuntu" (XFCE desktop environment (my fav.. it's lightweight, clean, but full-featured.. yay)), and "edubuntu" (not sure.. think it uses gnome still, targeted towards education customers and such). They're all the same operating system, just a different default set of packages. If they put it on DVD, they could include all of them. I bet they could almost get it all to fit on a livecd but they really load the livecd full of drivers so that everything will work out of the box for most people. you can convert one to another, by installing and completely uninstalling (as opposed to partial uninstall that doesn't uninstall dependencies) the meta packages that have names like 'ubuntu-desktop' 'xubuntu-desktop', 'kubuntu-desktop', etc.

As for the different 'flavors' of Ubuntu, it's all about personal preference. The reason the 'vanilla' Ubuntu release uses gnome is because it has the largest following, the least bugs, and is kept very up to date with new features and trends. Plenty is the same between the different flavors, especially if you use AIGLX/XGL + Beryl + Emerald theme manager, because then the interface even looks the same aside from the taskbar (called 'panel' in most window managers) as the individual windows are all drawn by Beryl and themed by Emerald.

If you don't really care that much about ricer graphical effects (you can very much install them and it's easy.. just not preinstalled) you can use Ubuntu Feisty Fawn (7.04) which is the current release (the version number means 2007, April) and be on your merry way. At least in Gutsy Gibbon (7.10), I found that kubuntu was missing a lot of packages for controlling the new aspects of the distribution.

As always, there's an awesome forum for any information you could want, a wiki with plenty of how-tos, and a bugtracker:

http://ubuntuforums.org/ (and like always, yes I'm active on that forum.. )

https://wiki.ubuntu.com/

https://launchpad.net/ubuntu/+bugs

(lol @ being so long-winded, but only electronically)

Edit: forgot to mention where to get it all:
http://www.ubuntu.com/getubuntu/download <-- for Feisty Fawn and also Dapper Drake, the "long term support" version.

http://cdimage.ubuntu.com/releases/gutsy/tribe-2/ <-- for all the Gutsy Gibbons Tribe 2 (alpha release but it's honestly not that buggy) stuff. I think that's the right page, it gets blocked at work under the "Illegal Peer-to-Peer file sharing" category. way to fucking go assinine filtering. parent company who has no grasp of high-technology FTL

Explain the difference and where I would get both. What the best verison (include link?) of unbuntu for me to use?

KDE and Gnome are just two of the most popular desktop environments for Linux.

Kubuntu is a version of ubuntu that comes with KDE rather than Gnome.

It's really a matter of preference, but I feel that KDE is a neater, more responsive interface than Gnome.

http://www.kubuntu.org/

http://www.psychocats.net/essays/kdevsgnome

Quick Question I downloaded the beta... will I only be able to run the os from the CD? Will I need to download ultimate?

I haven't run the beta yet, but generally what happens is you run it from the CD, however, there is an "install OS" icon on the desktop that you can click on to initialize installation to your HDD.

I cant this fucking wireless to work for the life of me.

Got it. Broadcom FTL

What was the issue?

Did you get the OS installed?

The issue is that it recognizes it and all the normal tests show that it exists but it doesn't connect. I browsed through the forum to find a tutorial for my exact device (must be a common issue).

After dealing with the headache of not doing this stuff in gazillion years I'm glad I did it.

My only dumb move was backing my hard drive up with a windows based software... dumb.

lol.

Well, look up virtualbox or vmware.

What are you guys doing for iPod stuff?

i used amarok. but i actually switched back to windows mainly for itunes

I pretty much hate iTunes. I'm trying to setup up banshee right now... I'm trying to rip my iPod to my computer. Since I need to organize my backup drive so I can easily transfer what I need.

http://scitech.teambio.org/2007/07/14/windows-guy-tries-ubuntu-704/

i LOVE itunes. plus i get itunes cards as gifts for basically every occasion

What are you guys doing for iPod stuff?

Why, I'm running linux on my ipod of course :)

I hate you :)

This has been the most frustrating thing to me... It like learning a new language.

Is there anyway you could think of running WD sync software on linux? Vmware?

P.S. Any good WYSIWYG html editor?

I hate you :)

This has been the most frustrating thing to me... It like learning a new language.

Is there anyway you could think of running WD sync software on linux? Vmware?

I'd run vmware server (they have 32 and 64bit linux installer packages on their site) for that. Was the backup you did a full system backup like symantec ghost would do? You could boot the virtual machine off an ISO virtual cd to restore your former computer to a new virtual home.

vmware actually has a free product for just that task (vmware converter) but it's too late now. If you restore your backup to a virtual machine I wouldn't expect it to really boot.

honestly you could save yourself a ton of hassle if you have some old spare computer to run windows on.

P.S. Any good WYSIWYG html editor?

use VIM ;)

A realistic suggestiong to your WYSIWYG HTML editor question is:

try a few.

Amaya, Nvu (I don't know if it is back in the ubuntu package repositories).. there's quite a few out there.

also: http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=402541

Yea that what I figured with the WD. I have my work computer that i'm using to transfer things around. The problem lies in the software within the drive, if you use it you have to continue to use it in order to access the files (dumb). Right now I continue to copy the file to the windows computer and then drag back onto the drive.

yeah the WD software stores the stuff secretly (I think just in some big scary file in a hidden folder) so that you can only access it through the button.

at least that's how the 500GB mybook I use at work is.

I'm actually running a virtual machine stored on a USB drive right now.. it's the slowest thing imaginable, but I needed to get a user's former computer setup up and running for them to transfer their old files to their new computer.. and there was already a ghost image of their computer on the drive.