Gnorb.NET

Note: This review sucks. No, really, it does. And it’s outdated, to boot. Don’t even bother reading it. — Gnorb

Well, after playing around with a few Linux distributions, I’ve decided to take the easy road and just stick with Mandrake. It has everything I’m looking for and a couple of extras to boot. (It’d be wonderful to have a version of “apt” for this thing, but that’s life, I guess.)

One of the distributions I was playing around with was Ubuntu. I was first attracted to this distribution because of its name: Ubuntu. Just rolls off the tongue, hitting just about everything on the way out. Still, I liked the sound. (As silly as this sounds, this was just about the biggest reason I chose the distribution.)  

According to the distribution’s website,

“Ubuntu” is an ancient African word, meaning “humanity to others”. Ubuntu also means “I am what I am because of who we all are”. The Ubuntu Linux distribution brings the spirit of Ubuntu to the software world.

So the creators of the distribution are a bunch of tree-hugging hippies. That’s cool. What’s even cooler is that they’ve made a user friendly, drop-n-run distro that’s commited to being totally free. Very cool, especially for those of us looking to bring the $100 PC to fuition.

The Live-Run Version
My first whack at Ubuntu was via the use of their Live-run distribution, based off of Morphix, which is in turn based off of Knoppix. (Note that Morphix is also the same distribution Sun used to create the Live Run version of the Java Desktop Environment.) Due to its very nature, a Live-run distro won’t let you see everything that a full install will, so I decided to ditch that and go with the full install. Of course, if you have enough RAM (1+ gigs) and a fast enough disk reader, the Live-run version of Ubuntu will give you a pretty good picture of what you can expect.

By the way, here are my approximate specs (I won’t go into all the gory details.)

PC: AOpen XCube EZ
Processor: Pentium 4, 3.0 GHZ w/HyperThreading
Sound card: AC’97 onboard sound.
Video card: Intel Extreme Graphix II integrated chipset
RAM: 2×512MB Corsair RAM (3-3-3-8)
Optical Reader: AOpen 8x DVD Dual
Hard Drives: 2 Western Digital: ATA100 (40GB), ATA133 (120GB)

Installation
When the installation began, I was greeted by a text splash screen. (Hadn’t seen one of those for a while.) The install, as it turns out, is completely text based, like most of the installations for Debian-based distributions I’ve seen. Normally, I’d begin to pout about how all new versions should have graphical install scripts, but Ubuntu’s installation process was pretty clean and simple. Answer a couple of questions and you’re ready to go. It’s a one CD distribution, and since it’s meant for your basic user, that’s just fine.

After the installation is complete, the PC reboots and you’re brought to the second stage of the installation, where you’re asked whether you’d want to get all the packages updated to their latest (I presume stable) versions. If you have a slow connection, I recommend doing this install at night, right before you go to sleep. You’re almost done anyway, so you won’t have to get up too early to finish it off. After that you set up the users and their passwords and you’re done. Simple, right?

Here’s where one of the quirks first got to me. For security reasons, the “administrator” account is turned on by default. Every administrative task is done via the sudo command. From a visual-interface-only standpoint that’s great. It just means that whenever there’s an administrative task, a window will pop up where you can put in the administrator password and go on from there. For those of you living in the command line, things aren’t quite this simple. I know that there are times when I’m doing so many administrative tasks that performing sudo over and over again — and thereby having to put in my password every time — can get in the way. What gets me is that this presumes that the user is going to be idiotic enough to log in as root and stay there for the sake of comfort. If someone’s using this distro, chances are that this wouldn’t be a problem anyway.

Living in Ubunto
So I log in to the system (pretty login screen, by the way), and get dropped into Ubuntu’s default desktop environment, GNOME. This version of GNOME’s been tweaked to make it pretty idiot-proof. All the names on the menu are descriptions, and you won’t find more than one or two programs within any category.

Here’s where we run into another problem: program installation. If I need a program to do something which this computer isn’t yet capable of, like learning katakana, for example, what do I need to do? If I’m a regular user, I find the nearest Linux geek and have him “fix” my system. If I’m the experimental Linux geek, I go to the Internet and search for the program. Being me, I’d want to use apt-get. The problem: apt-get’s only really available through the command line. Distributions like LibraNet and SimplyMepis have created easy-to-use apt interfaces, but that’s something Ubuntu lacks. This is probably my biggest complaint: there’s no simple way to get and add software.

(For the record, I’ve destroyed more systems with apt than I can count. My first Corel Linux system, my first Prodigy system, my first Debian system, my first Storm Linux system — every single one. Speaking of which, I miss Storm Linux.)

Here’s an example of when this became a problem. My favorite movie watching program used to be Totem. Luckily, Totem comes installed on this system! So, I fire up the movie viewer and open up one of my mpeg files.

I can’t play it.

There’s got to be some kind of error here, right? After all, isn’t mpeg pretty much standard accross ALL platforms? In this case, the answer’s no. No mpegs. For that matter, no mpeg’s, no avi’s, divx, or wmv’s. Nothing. Now, if I’m Joe Average, what could I do? Would I go into the Internet? Brave the command line? Or just sit there and forget that movies ever existed?

Sadly the answer is usually the third one.

Conclusion
Basically, it boils down to this: if you’re setting up the computer for a complete computer illiterate, then this might be one to consider. If you’re an advanced user who is comfortable working with Debian, this one might be right up your alley. If you’re in that big hump in the middle of the bell curve (ie. the other 80%) then you can probably forget this one. If you want a user friendly Debian-based distro, spend the $10 and get yourself a copy of SimplyMepis. Heck, I think they even have a free version. As far as Ubuntu goes, I don’t think I’ll be using it much just yet. The distro’s well on its way, though, and it’ll be one to watch in the future. The distro has a “feel good” aura around it, and that’s enough for me to give it another try — in about six months.

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