Wednesday, November 09, 2005
I've been running Linux for a lot of years. I've tried most of the popular distributions and always seemed to run into something that just would not work the way I expected it to. For the longest time I wanted to run Debian because I saw the potential that was there. Unfortunately, my early attempts left me looking for something better. I did run it on a server I had in-house and on a box I used for a firewall for a while. But as a desktop distro, it left me wanting. The other "desktop" distributions left me with a sour taste as well because most of them were RPM based. Being a tinkerer for years, I'm always changing things or installing this program or that feature or trying something new. I was never satisfied with RPM based distros because I nearly always ended up in "dependency hell". Those of you that have been there know what I'm talking about. Then I found Gentoo and was quite satisfied with it. For anyone interested in the true nuts and bolts of how a GNU/Linux system is put together, this is a great way to learn. But as good as Portage is, I eventually ended up with some sort of problem or limitation.
So I moved on to Slackware and was actually quite happy with it. I still am in many ways. This is a solid distribution that I can recommend to any techie. Well worth the effort to get to know. Gone were the days of packaging hassles. Well... most of them anyway. At least I never got my system in a condition where I felt like dumping the root partition and starting over. Still... there were limitations. Some new, fascinating update to KDE or Gnome would come out and I'd end up struggling to get it working, frustrated for many hours. Part of the problem was that I am a laptop user and a lot of the things I needed to work just didn't. I purchased a new laptop (Fujitsu P1120) and was checking out an online forum for it when I ran across a post proclaiming the virtues of a new distribution called Ubuntu. Strange name but I thought, "why not". After some reading and research of a lot of posts in various places -- all very positive -- I decided to give it a try. One of the things the authors of this distribution came across with is that a GNU/Linux distro should "just work". Given that my laptop was a long way from that I figured I had nothing to lose. Learning that it was Debian based was attractive as well.
I've been running Ubuntu since just before Hoary was released and I have to say that I think I've finally found a home. The package handling is wonderful. Things really do "just work", at least for the most part. Though it was not yet perfect, my laptop would suspend and resume just fine. The only real issue from that was that X had problems waking up. ALT-F7 took care of that. An extra step, sure, but it was better than having to shut the thing down all the time. Hibernation worked and suspend to RAM worked. Now granted, much of the credit for this goes to the kernel development team for getting ACPI up to par, but the Ubuntu team deserves kudos for putting it all together in a very functional package. I have to say, there's nothing quite like the discovery that you need a given program or library and find that a simple apt-get install solves the problem for you. Nearly every time. THAT has been much of what keeps me using it.
I'm now running Kubuntu Breezy and I have to say that I'm a very happy camper. One of the first things I did was to upgrade to 3.5Beta. The KDE folks have done wonders and I'm very happy with the environment. Yes, it's a bit power-hungry for my tastes but after I configured the laptop daemon (klaptop) and discovered how well it now works, there was no turning back. My true preference is E17 but it's just not quite there for everything I want to do and one of my primary requirements is to be able to close the lid and hear those two beeps immediately. Well, and see the screen return when I open it back up. Fairly important.
This is just an introduction relating some of my experiences with GNU/Linux and I'll be digging deeper into a variety of aspects in the coming days. Stop by again. I'm sure you'll enjoy the read.
Ubuntu
Kubuntu
¶ 7:58 PM
So I moved on to Slackware and was actually quite happy with it. I still am in many ways. This is a solid distribution that I can recommend to any techie. Well worth the effort to get to know. Gone were the days of packaging hassles. Well... most of them anyway. At least I never got my system in a condition where I felt like dumping the root partition and starting over. Still... there were limitations. Some new, fascinating update to KDE or Gnome would come out and I'd end up struggling to get it working, frustrated for many hours. Part of the problem was that I am a laptop user and a lot of the things I needed to work just didn't. I purchased a new laptop (Fujitsu P1120) and was checking out an online forum for it when I ran across a post proclaiming the virtues of a new distribution called Ubuntu. Strange name but I thought, "why not". After some reading and research of a lot of posts in various places -- all very positive -- I decided to give it a try. One of the things the authors of this distribution came across with is that a GNU/Linux distro should "just work". Given that my laptop was a long way from that I figured I had nothing to lose. Learning that it was Debian based was attractive as well.
I've been running Ubuntu since just before Hoary was released and I have to say that I think I've finally found a home. The package handling is wonderful. Things really do "just work", at least for the most part. Though it was not yet perfect, my laptop would suspend and resume just fine. The only real issue from that was that X had problems waking up. ALT-F7 took care of that. An extra step, sure, but it was better than having to shut the thing down all the time. Hibernation worked and suspend to RAM worked. Now granted, much of the credit for this goes to the kernel development team for getting ACPI up to par, but the Ubuntu team deserves kudos for putting it all together in a very functional package. I have to say, there's nothing quite like the discovery that you need a given program or library and find that a simple apt-get install solves the problem for you. Nearly every time. THAT has been much of what keeps me using it.
I'm now running Kubuntu Breezy and I have to say that I'm a very happy camper. One of the first things I did was to upgrade to 3.5Beta. The KDE folks have done wonders and I'm very happy with the environment. Yes, it's a bit power-hungry for my tastes but after I configured the laptop daemon (klaptop) and discovered how well it now works, there was no turning back. My true preference is E17 but it's just not quite there for everything I want to do and one of my primary requirements is to be able to close the lid and hear those two beeps immediately. Well, and see the screen return when I open it back up. Fairly important.
This is just an introduction relating some of my experiences with GNU/Linux and I'll be digging deeper into a variety of aspects in the coming days. Stop by again. I'm sure you'll enjoy the read.
Ubuntu
Kubuntu
¶ 7:58 PM
