Advance and Be Mechanized

I just installed Ubuntu "Warty" in my Dell Inspiron 8200 laptop on top of my old Red Hat 8.
The summary: it gets an 8 out of 10; I'm keeping Ubuntu, bye bye Red Hat.

I've been working with Linux for over 6 years but mainly in the server side. I had a dual boot in my laptop with WinXP Pro and Red Hat 8 that I was using mainly for some security tools like Nessus. Since Red Hat branched its distribution in the paid version and the "amateur" Fedora project, I was wanting to look elsewhere and specially to a Debian distribution and its apt package management. My version of Red Hat was getting old; it couldn't recognize my (crappy D-Link) wireless card, and Firefox wouldn't install because of some missing libraries.

Yesterday I took the plunge and installed Ubuntu from a single downloaded CD image to my old Red Hat partition.
As a nice surprise, the Nvidia video card was recognized and the video settings and everything just worked fine into the great 1600x1200 native resolution (before I had to download and install an rpm from Nvidia). The other nice thing is that my wireless card was also recognized, although it didn't work at first.

After some troubleshooting, I got the wireless working only by disabling the WAP encryption. Anyways, because I'm a security paranoic, I had a MAC address filter in my access point among other measures, so it should be still somehow secure, or at least someone war driving would pick first any of the other 6 wireless open networks from my neighbors. I read in Ubuntu's FAQ about typing the key with dashes like: 1234-5678-9A, but that didn't work either.
The networking setting dialog is kind of weak though. And when both wireless and regular eth are connected, the connectivity is lost.

I found that some dialogs don't have the OK button, just the "Close" one and changes are kept, but it's not consistent (besides, some have an "Apply" instead of "OK").

I showed the desktop to someone who has never seen any Linux desktop before and she immediately clicked the world icon to browse the Internet and she said she liked the desktop (I chose the Ocean Blue theme).

Firefox works great and with Gaim I don't need to install the Yahoo messenger client.

OK, now on to try the apt-get thingy. What? there's no nmap? no Nessus? OK, I just did an initial "apt-get update" , "apt-get upgrade" and then I could grab both "apt-get install nessus", "apt-get install nmap". So that's really great. Actually there's a GUI for apt (Synaptic). But first you have to uncomment the repository sources in /etc/apt/sources.list . I don't know why this is not done by default.

I couldn't listen to any music or watch a DVD movie, but then (San Google) I discovered that there's some IRQ allocation conflict in my laptop between sound and parallel printer, and the whole thing (at least the sound, haven't checked is printer) is solved by adding "acpi_irq_isa=7" to the boot command in /boot/grub/menu.lst

So now I could play music, but the Totem DVD wasn't working yet (actually I was able to crash the system). After searching the Ubuntu forums I tried uninstalling totem-gstreamer and installing totem-xine, and now it showed the FBI warning at the beginning, but then it crashed (I'm getting closer). I know if I read a little more documentation and I apt-install the right program/codecs whatever it would eventually work, but the point is, viewing DVDs in Ubuntu it's not ready for your mother yet. Update:The issue of (not) playing DVDs has to do with encryption and licenses fees for the media players. Commercial Linux versions like Xandros and Linspire (previously Lindows) have an incorporated licensed media. There are free / open source programs that break this encryption but their legal standing is not good or unclear in some countries (amazing but true).

This multimedia stuff is not ready yet from the default Ubuntu installation; I wanted to burn a CD with family pictures but the only program available is a music ripper. Update: I don't know how I missed it, but upon inserting a blank CD a new window for the burner opens, I just dragged-and-dropped the folder I wanted to copy to the CD and that's all!

Another thing I couldn't do in Red Hat 8 was to mount my Windows ntfs partition. Now it worked without any problems. I added a line in /etc/fstab to mount automatically:
/dev/hda2 /home/fernando/win ntfs auto,rw,exec,user,umask=000 0 0

OpenOffice seems to work fine, and Evolution looks great, who needs Outlook?

My flash thumbdrive was really plug-and-play; I plugged it in the USB slot in the back and when I moved my head back the new icon of the drive was already in my desktop. By the way, maybe it would be a good idea to add some basic icons to the desktop in the default distribution, like "home" and "disks". For example when my Windows partition is mounted its icon is shown on the desktop but it's alone.

The root privileges are treated differently than standard Unix, I guess as not to confuse novice users.

So there's some post-installation issues, and some of them are addressed in the Ubuntu documentation and forums, like: http://www.ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=3713&highlight=mp3
The Ubuntu Guide: http://www.ubuntuguide.org/ and the Debian reference documentation: http://www.debian.org/doc/manuals/reference/reference.en.html are some excellent sources.

Besides the package management (apt versus rpm and maybe yum) the other noticeable difference is the initialization runlevel scripts. In Red Hat there's also the "service" command, like in "service network restart" that basically calls the network script (/etc/rc.d/init.d/network) but in Debian style it's /etc/init.d/networking

Another good point is that I only needed one single CD for the installation of Ubuntu, instead of the three usually required in Red Hat. The installation process itself is not as graphical as Anaconda or YasT, but I don't particularly care; the crucial steps to me are the partition and the video detection and in Ubuntu it was explained better in the first case and it worked better in the latter. Since Ubuntu is aimed at desktop users, it doesn't have package selection options at installation time, so this step is simplified. (hey, it doesn't even come with gcc by default!).

There's no iptables firewall rules by default, but there are no listening ports after installation either. Red Hat always had something open that you have to close after the first install, although in every new version they reduce the number of open services.

OK, that was my experience of one day with Ubuntu Linux, so far I'm keeping it. It's a a nice general desktop distro.