04.20.07
Ubuntu is the bee’s knees
I just loaded Ubuntu 7.04 onto my AMD64 desktop. Very impressive. Kudos to the Ubuntu team for putting together a solid release. Now, I’m very tempted to switch from Gentoo to Ubuntu because it seems so much faster and smoother….but then, I’m comparing apples to oranges. The Ubuntu box is a AMD64 1.4 GHz processor with 512 megs of ram whereas the Gentoo box is Intel Pentium III 800MHz with 256 megs of ram. That’s a major difference.
I tried running Beryl but the video card I slapped in this isn’t up to the challenge (an old Matrox card.) I tried running the Beryl window manager and the screen simply went grey…nuttin’ but nuttin’. I had to Ctrl-Alt-Backspace to kill the X session and login with Gnome. Oh well. Video cards aren’t hard to come by these days.
I do like how the Ubuntu community is more “on top” of releases. For instance, Gaim 2.0.0beta6 is available in Ubuntu 7.04 whereas with Gentoo still has Gaim 1.5 marked as stable and 2.0.0beta6 as unstable. Actually, I masked it so I could install it…and it crashed. Not sure if it was Gaim or the Jabber plugin (I need it to use the Jabber server at work.) Also, I’ve been struggling to get Amarok installed on Gentoo. Some bug somewhere in kde-base/kdelibs (don’t know if it’s a code bug or a bug with the Makefile) is preventing it from installing. Without kdelibs, Amarok just aint gonna happen. With Ubuntu, I selected it in the Synaptic Package Manager and it happily downloaded it and installed it.
Which brings me to another item that’s been on my TODO list: check out Amarok. I’m listening to some selections from the integrated Magnatune.com store because I haven’t transferred any of my music library to this machine (I just built it, damnit.) Very sweet. I like the interface, I like how easy things are. Things “just work” the way I think they should. It just made my list of “must-have” apps for a pleasant computer life.
I’m gonna keep giving Ubuntu and Amarok a spin around the block. There’s so much more I want to check out on it. I need to throw in a CD burner, a new video card, a bigger hard drive (I can easily fill up the tiny 10 gig drive that’s in it now) - hell, I’m gonna try throwing it on my IBM ThinkPad 560 to see how it performs there (this laptop needs a new battery…it won’t even hold the date/time after power off!)
If you run Ubuntu or use Amarok, what do you think of them?
diamond_pick@livejournal said,
April 21, 2007 at 3:04 pm
I’ve been using Ubuntu 6.06 (dapper drake? I disremember) for about 6 months now on my lappy. It’s pretty spiff. There are a few minor things I’ve been meaning to tweak (like the fact that xterm has no scroll bar… WTF! I’ve tried adding that widget to several different conf files for X, but none of them seem to be working), but overall it’s been pretty stable.
This is the first time I’ve used apt-get for anything - in the past, I’ve avoided RPMs and just compiles stuff LIKE A BIG DOG, mostly because I’m only administrating 1 or 2 boxes. Apt-get seems useful, but it also seems like it would be a good attack vector for bad guys.