I accidentally tripped and fell yesterday. My hand hit the keyboard along the way, and I accidentally installed Ubuntu on the way down. That’s how easy Ubuntu was to install. It was pretty much the geek equivalent of falling off a log.
Okay, not really, but it was almost that easy. Do you know what my hardest problem was? One minute I was updating security packages after the install, and the next minute the computer was off. “That sucks,” I thought. “Maybe Ubuntu isn’t ready for prime time yet.” Then I noticed that several other things had lost power, including another computer.
And I’m trying to figure out what happened when a sheepish cat walks out from behind the computers. My cat Emmy unplugged a power strip. She does stuff like this. She likes to get into boxes:
And any other nook she can find:
After I figured out that Emmy unplugged my computer, it was a pretty simple install.
Nice Ubuntu surprises:
– Detected an ethernet connection + DHCP and hopped onto the network with no problem. Nice detection of USB keyboard/mouse, and it worked to have both a PS2 and a USB mouse attached at the same time.
– Easily found other computers on the network, including network-attached file servers running Samba.
– When I plugged in an external USB hard drive, it automatically detected and mounted it as “usbdrive,” which is great. And if the hard drive has three partitions, Ubuntu will open up one window for each partition.
– The update manager is really slick. It tells you when to download a security update to a package, and makes it really easy.
– Plenty of command-line binaries (e.g. shred), yet the menus are nicely streamlined.
Some Ubuntu issues:
– Not fully cat-proof. Yanking power to the computer in the middle of updating packages can cause problems.
– Video card/screen resolution detection wasn’t perfect. I’ve got a 24″ Dell screen at home, but the highest screen resolution I was offered was 1024 x 768.
My former Linux machine at home was a Libranet install (much respect to Jon Danzig, who died last year, plus his son Tal and the Libranet team for an awesome Linux distribution). Libranet had several ways to tweak fonts and settings, but it wasn’t fall-off-a-log easy. But after you install Ubuntu, just give EasyUbuntu a try. It installs additional software for things like MP3 and video codecs, nice fonts, and installs binary Nvidia/ATI drivers too.
Recently I’ve been using Ubuntu to pull data off all the hard drives I’ve collected over the years and to put the data in one place. I’ve been pleasantly surprised by how polished the distribution is; it’s even nicer than from a few months ago. If you’ve got a computer you can play around with, I’d give Ubuntu a try.
I’m more of a Win/Mac fac.. Unix is far to limited as far as multimedia and other compatibility issues go.
Altough viruses are a bonus. You get none.
Man, the phone with which you took the photos is a really cheap one .. Get a better one ..
Good luck getting wireless networking working 😉 I had nothing but trouble getting my Linksys notebook card up and running, and I know I’m not alone!
Hey I just installed Ubuntu Dapper last week as well. So far I’m pretty impressed. Once you install network manager, wireless networking is a breeze.
That has always been a problem for me with Linux. I could get on my home wifi with WPA only after about 10 commands in the terminal. Now I just select the network from a drop down list. Switching between wired and wireless networks is easier the Windoze.
I do have a Intel 2915 which is pretty standard, anyways I’m happy.
I guess I am limited. At least when it comes to Unix.
Matt,
You didn’t leave your cat at work when you went away did you ?
Maybe it’s been pulling cables out at the plex – worth looking into perhaps that’s what went wrong 🙂
Emmy has the all knowing stare, silly humans. 🙂
Matt,
Not sure if EasyUbuntu takes care of this, but if you have an LCD monitor, the tips in this thread:
http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=180647&highlight=subpixel+rendering
will probably make a huge difference in font rendering and readability.
Unfortuately, Canon doesn’t supply drivers for the photo printer I have and. more seriously, I could never get the wireless working reliably. The printer I can use via VMware Server perhaps, but connectivity is kind of basic… Damn…
Cristian, my annual contract is just about up. Any recommendations for a Verizon phone with good resolution? I prefer LG. No affiliate codes though! 🙂
Dean, mine was on ethernet. But I installed Ubuntu on an ancient IBM Thinkpad 600 a while ago with an external wireless card and it worked out of the box. Strange.
rick gregory, I might just turn off antialiasing altogether. With a big LCD monitor, the fonts are plenty sharp.
I don’t know about Verizon. We have Vodafone and Orange here in Romania.
I have a Nokia N72 (Vodafone network), which has a 2MP camera, and really makes GOOD pictures (for a phone).
As far as Verizon goes, if I had to choose a phone that works with them, I would choose either a BlackBerry (but not for the camera) or XV6700 (I could not find a single smartphone in their offer, that has a camera above 1.3 MP)
You can customize your own phone anyway ..
Nope ..
Hi Matt,
I run Ubuntu on all my computers including this dell inspiron 9300 notebook. On this brand new notebook wireless networking works out of the box with no configuration.
The NVIDIA drivers don’t work on installation so you have to tweak them a little bit, but since NVIDIA makes great drivers for linux it is an easy taks and now I am running at 1900×1200 with great accelleration.
What kind of graphics card do you have in this box?
I also have deployed Ubuntu on 9 workstations that our business uses and it is great. At first it is a little intimidating for our ladies, but in a couple of days they are flying around the OS like long-time linux geeks (with their shell in the shop).
Christian – you should take another look at Linux. It’s come a long ways. I watch DVDs on my laptop, burn DVDs, edit video, do all my web develoment in Zend Studio Server, use Photoshop (couldn’t get to love the GIMP), and rip MP3 etc.
Google Earth now has a version for linux and it runs AWESOME!
For our business Linux will save us tens of thousands in licensing fees over the next few years! I think that people who tried Linux in the past should give it a second go. You might be surprised!
Nice to hear, David! That’s wild that it works well enough for average folks in your shop. It doesn’t feel quite Mom-ready to me, but I was amazed at how far it had come since the last install I did a little over a year ago.
I think it would be interesting to see an XP-lookalike skin on Ubuntu. If you did it well, a lot of people might never notice. 🙂 I was also impressed with SBackup; I didn’t realize that that was a Summer of Code project.
My box has an Nvidia card; wish they’d go ahead and open the drivers all the way on that.
Matt, mine was a Linksys WPC54G card, and if you do a quick search you’ll see the horrific steps taken to not only install the card. But it wasn’t only the install that was tedious, also every time I booted up, I had to type commands to manually find my WLAN and then connect to it 🙂
Aha. That didn’t take much looking:
one Ubuntu Windows XP theme and another Ubuntu Windows XP theme.
Nice find! I might try the XP Luna Lookalike to make the transition easier on new employees.
The truth is that we hire ladies who aren’t extremely tech savvy anyway. The only apps we run are web based with some folks running an email client, so as long as they can get moving with Firefox and Thunderbird we are good to go. I don’t think they really know the difference between open office and ms office and we could always run codeweaver’s crossover if this was really an issue. It would still save us bundles on licensing.
One trick that I used when deploying the system was keeping windows on the older hardware and installing Ubuntu on the new systems. That way they became the boxes in demand . . . Now we have enough employees who feel confident on Ubuntu that new ones should get their penguin badge through osmosis.
David, that’s sharp. Then the Ubuntu boxes are the sexy ones.
My experience echos yours. I was clearing out a Win2000 hard drive and I had so many applications installed back then! Now it’s pretty much Firefox and Putty for as an SSH terminal.
Matt, a nice rabid Rottweiler should sort the cat problem out quick smart 🙂 Then, rather than being left wondering why PC’s aren’t working, you’ll know exactly why by the slobbering mess of chewed up plastic on the floor.
I had SuSe linux on a box downstairs a year ago and the only reason I didn’t put it on all my computers was that it wouldn’t run Macromedia unless I paid for it to run in emulation mode or whatever they call it today?
Damn you Matt, that skin you found is going to make me have to sneak downstairs when the wife and child are asleep and give this distro a go!
Weee
I envy you for such a nice serendipity. 😀 I installed Linux as my OS too but I used fedora core 5. Unlike you it wasn’t that easy to mount a USB drive.
How do you install or mount USB drive and other applications such as skype when you’re using fedora core 5 anyway?
My clients important documents are stored in my USB and they’re in constant communication with me through skype. I’d like to achieve a long-term bond with them but now that I used another OS, is this still possible? Or am I just too obsessed with Windows?
Matt,
Your cat,
Is quite fat.
I believe you should inform Emmy that cats are not entitled to one free lunch in the cafeteria at GooglePlex, much less second helpings.
Since cats don’t listen to humans or pay them any regard, I realise telling Emmy this would be a pointless endevour, therfore I suggest you request the chef remove the fish dishes from the menu.
Pete
I tried installing Ubuntu on my Dual Xeon box a couple weeks ago. It started up and then gave me IO errors with the CD. Tried a different CD drive… no go. Tried another CD of Ubuntu… same thing.
I guess I’ll have to wait for my “Official” CD’s to come in so I can try it again. Until then, CentOS is working fine for me.
Matt,
I have been using Ubunutu since 5.04 and gotta say I think its the best distro out there for 90% of ppl brave enough to install it and not linux-nerd enough to write their own 🙂 The problems you have with vid drivers is an old one and generally you need to intall the “Universe” and.or “NonFree” repositories. My laptop has a 17″ panel @ 1440×900 and it worked ok however without hardware acceleration etc… Once I installed the driver package from ATI for the x700 card it flew at full res. and accelerated. You may also want to look into Crossover Office ( Google it 😉 lol! ) to run youw x86 Windows software; I run without any problems Macromedia’s suite, I.E., Outlook, and all those seo … ehhh uhmnnn nevermind… You get the idea lol
Uhmnn one thing… your kinda up there on the google totem pole … I think you might be able to spring some scratch for the kitty to have its own lil cat-house rather then making it sleep in a cardboard box and play under a shelf ? huh? lol **just kidding**
Nice cat.
Do you serve them fried, baked or broiled?
Just kidding, a big cat compated to my 9lb. siamese, he’s he smallest cat I’ve ever owned and won’t eat ANY human food which is nice as I used to have to fight my last cat for anything left defrosting on the countertops, she liked steak.
Your cat upluged the computer
Wow I know plugs in the USA are smaller – thats one strong kitty I wouldn’t want to stand in her way when its feeding time 😉
Matt, what is the deal with Ubantu then? I’ve been hearing lots about it for a year now, but it just sounds like lindows but with better street cred?
I use Gentoo on all of our boxes, and though a little “involved”, it’s a pretty tight distro. I’d be up for giving U a look over though…
The resolution problem happens if Ubuntu can’t detect your monitor settings during the desktop install. Rather than prompt you for them, it sets a default maximum of 1024×768.
The problem doesn’t happen using the ‘alternate’ install CD.
There isn’t a user-friendly way to fix it unfortunately – you either edit the /etc/X11/xorg.conf file or run ‘sudo dpkg-reconfigure xserver-xorg’.
Hopefully this will be fixed in the next release.
Your cats are used to sitting in boxes ?
Hmmm – are we talking some Pavlovian thing here caused by your constant testing of the Schrodinger cat experiment ?
PETA may need to have a chat with you 😉
Yeah I remember trying out a Live CD of Ubuntu last year but couldn’t get it to change display resolutions and gave up.
Dave – Really clever idea way to make the Linux boxes the desirable ones.
Matt, question for ya – We know having a UK site hosted in the UK is a good thing, but just wondering, does the site being hosted in the UK have any negative impact on rankings in other countries? If we have a US-oriented site (with .com tld) but hosted in the UK (or Canada etc), would it be disadvantaged in any way by not being hosted in the US?
“clever idea way” – bah I can’t speak English 😀
Can someone tell me why hard drives die if you let them sit for a year? No spin then a funny grinding sound here, grrr. I can understand the power supply eating it but hard drives? 🙁
Did you kept them in a static free environment ? Dust free, no major temperature shifts ? No major air humidity ? 😀
Where’s the GUI for setting up Dual Screen 🙁
I’m not vey experienced with Linux, and thought I’d give it a go. Setting up Dual Screen monitors seems a pain in the ass compared to Windows.
So I tired SUSE 10.1 instead.
The graphics drivers were at least as easy to install and get working as in Ubuntu (not quite as nice as Windows, but I know it took them a while as well) and then there was a lovely GUI to enable dual screen! Lovely.
I’m much prefering SUSE to Ubuntu at the moment. Anyone who says Linux is easy to use, when you still have to type command line things and edit text files to get stuff working is living on a different planet.
And XGL is meant to be lovely, but of course, it doesn’t work on dual screen resolutions yet…. So I’ve no idea…. and I’m certainly not sitting there with one blank monitor jsut to see some flashy desktop effects.
Linux still isn’t ready for mainstream desktop usage…..
“Did you kept them in a static free environment ? Dust free, no major temperature shifts ? No major air humidity ?”
Are you mad – that’s where my fine wines go !
I’ve been trying to install Ubuntu on my iMac via Parallels for days with no success. I think I need more memory or a dedicated computer. 😉
The Kitty just was trying to play with the mouse.
You can use my dog to keep the cat away so you can use your computer.
Cool! You are a cat person too!
I have never had a cat take down my computer, but I do find a lot of cat hair in the fan when I clean out the case.
The only other problem I have with my cats is they like to stand on the keyboard. And that can be pretty bad when you are talking in IM. 🙂
Hey Matt – you already use the Google customised version Goobuntu at the office, don’t you?
Mark Shuttleworth has done a great job assembling a team of some of the finest open source guys in the world to create a product that is deservedly getting close to ‘prime time’….
My only complain was with the wireless. I have a linksys card in my desktop, and it isn’t recognized.
Everything else worked great. I am thinking of putting in a 2nd hard drive, then reinstalling both Windows XP and Ubunu (on separate drives).
Any recommendations on how to share files between them? I have a 200 GB external drive (USB). I’d like to share it between the machines. What’s the best FS to format the USB drive with?
Hi Matt –
I’ve also gone through problems with video cards and resolutions on *nix. Usually, just changing your xorg.conf file and adding new resolutions and refresh rates does the trick. But, if its also due to the Nvidia drivers, I found an extremely easy-to-follow how-to for getting all that stuff working: http://doc.gwos.org/index.php/Latest_Nvidia_Dapper
Chris_D, my linux desktop is actually relatively ancient. I’m attached to it, though.
Ubuntu is probably the 2nd easiest or most ready “out of the box”. Go check out Xandros sometime. I use the Open Circulation edition and it picked up my DSL connection with no issues, my ATI card and any drives I plug in. Install was 20 minutes with no issues. When it comes to the whole wireless card thing, yea Linux does have issues. And that’s really too bad, but it will get figured out.
And about the whole limited comment; not true. I have recorded 12 hours worth of guitar using Audacity, play games, image editing and have compiled AVI’s and MPEGs. Didn’t cost me a dime for software, just my time and effort to find the software and compile it.
Somebody’s gotta test it. Didn’t the real Schrodinger forget about the cat in the box while he went on vacation?
Matt
Looks like Emmy likes her Cat Food 🙂
Did Emmy sign a release for use of her picture?
If not then she could sue the pants off you and then chew and claw them up.
Those look like expensive pants, I wouldn’t want that to happen to you.
I installed Dapper about a month ago. I think overall it’s very nice and very polished, and it will probably be my desktop Linux distro of choice. I’ve been using Linux a full time desktop for a few years now (still keep Windows for games…) Its stability might be a little off vs. previous setups. It’s frozen on me twice, and I’m not sure why. I’m used to high stability on my Linux desktops; so it was odd to get totally frozen. But it’s pleasant enough to use that I’ll put up with it until it can get fixed.
The problem with Linux on the desktop, even Ubuntu, is that it works as well as the time that you’re ready to put into it. Recent advances have made things a lot easier vs. the past, but for even slightly exotic setups, you might have to do a lot of Googling to get things working correctly.
For instance, getting Twinview to span my dual monitors with the Nvidia drivers was a pain in the butt. A fair amount of search engine digging was required to get it working properly. If you go to the ubuntu forums, you can see that it’s a common problem. But once I paid my dues, it’s been quite pleasant. I’m not a power user by any stretch of the imagination and managed to get it to work; so it’s not brain surgery. But I can easily see how people wouldn’t put in the time.
But for the naysayers, if you look at the growth curve of Linux desktop ease of use in say the last 5 years, the improvements have been very rapid. Its future is looking pretty good.
I installed the same distribution just a few weeks ago on a HP laptop, the only issue at installing was me not being sure about the partition scheme proposed by Ubuntu for the 40 GB HD: Which partition was meant to be 15 and which 25 GB? But somehow I figured out right.
However, so far I didn’t get the built-in WLAN card to work, the configuration dialogues seem quite sick. But I already downloaded (though not yet installed) an additional package called GTKWifi at sourceforge that should do. Interesting link to check out the font rendering, I didn’t like that very much, too.
If you have been in contact with SuSe or RedHat before, Ubuntu appears quite reduced at least for the beginning, I didn’t yet dig into too deep. But I prepared another Kubuntu CD to install on one of my Macs.
David,
[quote]use Photoshop (couldn’t get to love the GIMP), and rip MP3 etc.[/quote]
VMWare, Wine or…?
Just curioced what do you recommand.
Stephen, Emmy is a perfectly cat-sized cat. The camera adds 10 pounds. 🙂 Eli, I bribed her with food. 🙂
This really seems like an easy install – about a year ago I installed Debian and probably lost a few years of my life while doing it – good thing I don’t smoke, actively at least, eh?
The reason I started pulling my hear out (only after the third day) was that I didn’t bother to read almost any instructions – if I did I would know what to do with my nvidia card from the start. Just imagine how lost I was when after more than 5 years on Windows all I get is a terminal… and without any other pc in close range to log on to the internet and seek an advice from Ms. Google…
I guess I’m just that kind of a guy… when everything else fails, I read the instructions 😉
Then once I got my desktop environment running, everything went smoothly (more or less) from there… whatever problem I encountered dear Ms. Google kindly spitted out another bloke with the same problem that was already solved… well, almost.
Now, after a year, I wouldn’t be able to find my way back to Windows, even if I wanted to – no, no, Linux IS much more natural for me now. Like you say Matt, I’m attached to it now. And I like it.
P.S. Aaron, if you’re referring to Macromedia Dreamweaver then if you ever try Linux again, make sure to try Quanta + (http://quanta.kdewebdev.org/) – I found that as a great alternative to Dreamweaver.
Matt-Thanksfor the review. I found Ubuntu a few months back and it is indeed a great piece of evolution for linux IMO.
If you get a chance, try the Edu/Kids version Edubuntu. I have it running on my kids machines and it cames loaded with a lot of nice learning games and kid friendly features.
Dude,
Stand by your cat brutha!
Frodo and Lilo are often accused of being slightly more plump than one might expect….I say screw that my kids are just big boned but gorgeous….
Stand by your cat 🙂
Matt, could I ask if you possibly deal with the question I asked about IPs/countries next time you have a grab-bag session? There seem to be a lot of people confused and worried about this issue.
Sorry to bug you, I know you must be horribly busy answering questions from half the interweb 😀
Hello…. I know this isn’t a grab-bag session… sorry! but I’m going to ask it anyway… Is it ok for me to republish this blog entry on Linux.co.uk?
Just send me a yes or no email… thanks!
I use Ubuntu at work and home, and have to agree with you – it is stupidly easy to install. If the LiveCD plays games to install though, try getting the “Alternate Installer” CD. It won’t be as graphically friendly as the standard CD, but it should work.
Also, as for partitioning – I tend to leave it on auto, it seems to get the right values and setup without any prompting!
Love how you discribed the ubuntu installation. “accidentally tripped and fell ” eh? I’ve installed the previous incarnations of Ubuntu myself and had some trouble with my video card. Haven’t checked out the latest version. I’ll try to “accidentally fall” on a free computer’s keyboard here in the office.
Cristian, my annual contract is just about up. Any recommendations for a Verizon phone with good resolution? I prefer LG. No affiliate codes though!
Matt, What was your cell phone number again? 😛
Seriously, my contract is up in October and I am going to switch to Verizon as well (from Sprint). Verizon was the only carrier that had service during the hurricanes here in S. Florida. Nextel/Sprint brought in some COWs & COLTs (Yes I am still talking about cellular phones and not a rodeo) to help Cellular On Wheels and Cellular On Light Trucks but the response people such as FEMA had priority so we were never able to get through. Anyway I will be looking for a new Verizon phone and since I am gadget-aholic I will be watching for any ideas people post about it.
cute cat ^^
Installing Ubuntu is “the geek equivalent of falling off a log”
I think you’ve summed it up there perfectly Matt. My own experience of Ubuntu was this…
I kept hearing all the hype about Ubuntu, so I read up on it and realised 6.06 was around the corner, so I waited for it to be released.
The day after the release I installed the Live CD and started using it, you know just to see what the fuss was about.
Three days later I was still running off the Live CD, so I thought i might as well install it to the Hard Drive. I booted in to Windows XP, backed up all my data, then formatted the hard drive and installed Ubuntu.
That was it, no more Windows and I havn’t looked back since.
I later installed Ubuntu on my Internet Gateway machine. I uninstalled Windows 2000 and that machine was converted too.
I still run Windows XP on my games machine and Windows 2003 on my development and live web servers, but I do all my .Net development on Ubuntu now so I suspect I’ll install Ubuntu/Apache/Mono on my web servers as soon as I get the chance.
So from now on it looks like Windows is just for games, but I can see that machine being replaced with an XBox 360 if console games keep improving at the rate they have been. I can forsee consoles being nearly as good as PCs for gaming in the not too distant future.
Anyone want to buy a job lot of Windows licences.
🙂 lol, Matt, perhaps I can explain, cats are inherently well versed in the fine art of entanglement http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantum_entanglement.
I liked Ubuntu so much that I can’t possibly go back to Windows. It was really easy to set up, worked with all my hardware and every day was like christmas because I kept finding new , free and amzing software that wasn’t full of spyware 🙂
I spent most of your review laughing myself stupid. The cat pictures were cool and I agree. It is not cat proof.
Compared to other installs, Ubuntu made me feel stupid because I went into it thinking that the installation was going to be extremely complex which caused me to go on a witch hunt looking for all of the bugs. I came back empty handed, clicked install, waited all of 15 minutes and it was ready. About 95 percent of everything that I would have needed to setup in Windows was already done. After putting up with windows for years and its constant need to die / screw up / take over and ruin what I was doing, this literally left me speechless. Ofcourse there were a ton of updates and that sort of thing but Ubuntu knew what it was doing so I let it take control. I was comfortable and felt confident that all was okay.
I experienced afew problems. I installed the nVidia drivers from easy kubuntu (Stupid move as Ubuntu already installed them and it was working fine). What happens, the screensavers stop working. Not all but most where rendering was needed. The sound also screwed up alittle. Still got to get that working.
Overall, Ubuntu is awesome. Clean, clutter free. Seriously give it a go. Dual boot it with windows if you are afraid to totally let go. It does it with ease.
For all of those bitching and complaining, put your energy to something useful. Like helping in an objective manner.
Remember you are part of the solution, or part of the problem.
Cheers
Murray
I bought a really cheap computer. It was a old Compaq iPaq which is a business desktop. I recieved Xubuntu with it and I really think it is a very good Linux distro. Installed very easily and upgrades easily too!
That’s one fat cat!
Nice to see you paying your respects to libranet! If it wasn’t for Libranet, I wouldn’t be uing Linux today. I had spent 4-5 months scurrying around in RPM hell, when Libranet introduced me to the magic of apt at a time where debian itself was nearly impossible to install.
I’ve been trying to convince The Ubuntu team to try and lift xadminmenu from Libranet and bring it to Ubuntu. Debianbased distro’s could really use a decent master controlcenter and Libranet had it. So far, they don’t even answer me…
Ubuntu is so slow(even you reconfigure the whole system),gent00 is far faster than all distros(10x).Portage owns
ehehe it looks garfield 🙂
ehehe what a cute cat 🙂
ubuntu is my distro. ubuntu rulez