Ubuntu Linux 5.04: The Hoary Hedgehog
Now running the Ubuntu Linux 5.04 LiveCD. Hooray, cheers from the auditorium, here we go. Ubuntu - Linux for human beings - is a distro based on Debian which is supposed to be really user friendly and very easy to work with regardless of the place you use it, office or work, laptop or desktop.
Once booted from the CD, Ubuntu requires almost no user interaction until it completes loading up. Most of the hardware installed on my computer was detected automatically (yesterday I tried it on a P2 and it didn’t detect the serial mouse :-/) and everything works just fine. The only piece of hardware not detected is my USB Q-Cam webcam. I think the reason for this is not really Ubuntu’s fault since this cam comes with installation drivers for Windows, so it doesn’t really respect a standard too much.
The applications are a bit snoppy. It has the oh-my-god-how-can-it-be-so-fuckin-bloated OpenOffice.org for creating and editing documents, Evolution for e-mail and organizing stuff and Mozilla Firefox for web browsing. Of course there are also installed the ever present GAIM & X-Chat, but Ubuntu also has a Terminal Server Client and a BitTorrent client, which personally impressed me pretty much. What else? Lots of games, very few accessories, GIMP and a couple of image viewers, XSane for scanning and some aplications for multimedia. The support for multimedia is where Ubuntu fails so bad. It can’t play a mp3 file because it lacks the codec, it can’t play mpeg files because it lacks a codec and it can’t play an avi file because, of course, it lacks a codec. Bad bad Ubuntu!
The administration tools are pretty straightforward, not as good as FC’s but really user friendly. The desktop environment is no other than Gnome 2.10 (but there is also www.kubuntu.org, an Ubuntu distro based on KDE), which is usable, quite stable and user friendly.
I distributed a few CD’s with Ubuntu today to a couple of colleagues, I’m eager to see what they think about it since none of them is really skilled in Linux.
Ow well, as I said a little earlier, I think I’ll just stick to my Vector Linux which is running quite ok.
