Advance and Be Mechanized

I installed Ubuntu Linux in a second system, a $75 barebone refurbished with components from a failed Asus Pundit that was very cute but it will shut down every now and then and lately it wouldn't even boot. By the way, the barebone is an MSI MBOX P4MAM-V, just to confirm that it's Linux-compatible.

I updated some multimedia issues in my previous Ubuntu post. The problems with Totem (DVD playing) is a legal issue: Multimedia support
The no sound problem with Totem was solved again with:
# apt-get remove totem-gstreamer
# apt-get install totem-xine

The way Ubuntu manages the root account is a non-standard Unix arrangement, made for simplified desktop use and somehow controversial.
The root account is disabled by deafult and administrative usage is encouraged through the sudo command; the first user has root powers, as explained in this FAQ answer. It's just a bit confusing because usually when you su or sudo in a Unix system you do it from an unprivileged account, and so you enter the password for root, but in this Ubuntu setup the first user account created after or at installation has administrative rights, so in Ubuntu when doing sudo you enter the user's password, not root's.

Some commands and graphical control applications are missing when compared with other distributions like Red Hat / Fedora. For instance, there's no command like chkconfig to view what services would be started at boot time. The Debian equivalent is update-rc.d, but this command is limited to the installation or removal of the initialization scripts, it won't summarize the current status of the /etc/rc?.d directories. The tool that we can use is rcconf, that is not packaged in Ubuntu by default but can be easily installed with the usual "apt-get install rcconf".

There's no firewall (netfilter/iptables) configuration tool, and this was a conscious decision made by the Ubuntu team as explained in this FAQ answer. Again, it's easy to install a firewall configuration program with the powerful Debian package system, for instance: apt-get install firestarter and voila, the firewall wizard is installed under Applications -> System Tools.

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