Random Thoughts: Ubuntu 8.10, Test Machine Status,…

Wow, it’s been over a week since I last posted…

I don’t like to go this long without writing something, but I’ve been a little under the weather (still am), plus I’ve got a few things stressing me just a little at work (good stress though). I simply haven’t taken the time to post updates to a few things, so I decided to make a little time this evening to catch up.

First things first: Ubuntu 8.10, continued impressions…

I have nothing but good to say about Ubuntu’s latest release. After some initial wobblyness in the RC, to a great initial install, to some “strange” problems after that install, everything is going along quite swimmingly. I have attributed my initial “strange slowness” problems to a bad burn with my initial install. I did a second burn of the ISO (at a slower speed - patience!!!) and all is going along quite nicely this time.

Also, with this install, I’ve decided to tweak less. You may have read some of my Ubuntu tweak posts in the past, and although they may help some, the speed differences with a modern machine, are mostly I think psychological. If many of these tweaks (which I have collected around the web for a number of years) really made a dramatic difference, I believe the distro developers would “include” them by default. All I’ve done is install my “core” group of packages, turn off a FEW services I know I don’t need on and that’s about it. Pretty boring huh? It just works.

As an “Ubuntu Side Note” somehow on my browsing’s on the web, I came across a very interesting blog post by Dustin Kirkland who is a Ubuntu Server Developer, and employee of Canonical, Ubuntu’s parent company. In his post (which was a “reaction post” to a Novell (distributor of SuSE Linux Enterprise, and backer of the openSUSE Linux distro) employee’s remarks about Ubuntu. First off, I don’t know the content of what he was “reacting” too, so I’m not getting into that - I’m simply giving background to the post. In this post Dustin does show some interesting information about Ubuntu, especially regarding Ubuntu’s growing popularity over the more “established” distro’s such as Red Hat and SuSE. After showing some “Google Trends” graphs, he comments:

At that pace, there will soon be more people searching for
“Ubuntu”, than searching for “Linux” on the Internet.

This is so very true! In fact, Ubuntu is becoming SO popular (dare I say “mainstream”), that I have even come across links to Ubuntu related blog-posts and forum-posts when doing Google searches for Windows related problems (which happened to be mirrored on Ubuntu or Linux in general). I think it’s quite amazing that this little distro that sprang up from Debian “Unstable” back in 2004 has made more headway into making Linux a mainstream (accepted) Desktop Operating System (like it should be) than any that has come before it. You can even purchase 4 different Dell models (including the Mini9) from Dell.com with Ubuntu pre-installed! It’s quite exciting.

Another quote from Dustin’s post that I really liked was this where he goes on to say:

Something must be said for the user base that Ubuntu brings to the ecosystem. While some Ubuntu users may have come from Red Hat, SUSE, Debian, Gentoo, etc., many Ubuntu users are first time Linux users. I dare say that some of these individuals are Linux users because of Ubuntu.
I personally know Fedora and OpenSUSE users (I used to be one of them) who actively search the Ubuntu Forums and the Ubuntu Wiki when they run into problems on their respective distributions. The Ubuntu documentation spectrum is simply the most informative, comprehensive, and useful in the Linux business.

I can’t stress enough how very true this is. Ubuntu is hands down, the easiest Operating System (not just Linux Distribution) to get help with that I know of. Another truth from that quote is the number of users of other distro’s that come to, and get help from the Ubuntu Forums on a regular basis. These users are welcomed just the same as the Ubuntu users, and are helped just the same. Sure, just like any web-forum there are some jerks, some people who are simply “clueless” and there are some that try to “out geek” each other, but at the core there are literally thousands of folks willing to help another human being at the drop of a hat. Here are some quick stats from this very moment in time:

Ubuntu Forums:

Currently Active Users: 8859 (means online, on the forums at this very second)

Threads: 959,233, Posts: 6,195,370, Members: 710,005

There are also over 1400 people in the main #ubuntu chatroom on Freenode right now too, ready and willing to help someone (myself included…I’m jayson_r on Freenode).

Be sure to check out Dustin’s Post to read his thoughts and see all of the data he collected as well.

Now, for a change in topic:

I finally got Mom’s new PC built, and my test machine set up. So I now have a “bare metal” platform for testing out new stuff. As I mentioned in the earlier post - it’s an older machine, w/ an Athlon XP CPU, but it’s still quite capable. So, while I’ve firmly commited to (finally) quit my distro hopping and settle [back] into using Ubuntu full time, I hope to continue to keep you updated with what’s going on in the land of Linux, Solaris, and BSD as new releases roll around! Since it has 2 HDD’s I plan to also keep a Windows XP install on a partition of one of the Hard Drives as well, as this machine is one of my older builds (with a decent Graphics Card), and will play CS and CS:Source quite nicely for me as well The new “Mom PC” or “Downstairs PC” build went very well also, and is running Vista Ultimate x64 and Ubuntu Hardy 8.04 64-bit in a dual boot config (I used the wubi installer for Windows to set up the Dual-Boot). I’m very impressed with the E5200 Wolfdale CPU. Although it’s not a “Core2Duo”, but a “Pentium Dual Core” it’s a very speedy chip, and I was able to get 3.0GHz out of it quite easily (with the OCZ Vendetta cooler). It’s a great budget chip w/ around an $80 (or so) street price!