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Comment of the Day - January 5, 2006 - Fundamental Mistake in Article About Ubuntu
Posted by tadelste on Jan 7, 2006 7:36 AM · 3 comments LXer.com -Article; By SNF
SNF comments on Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols article: "First, the good news: although they go by different names, there's really no fundamental difference between the Ubuntu brothers. "
[ed: While Steven is one of our readers most popular newswire authors, he writes alot. In this case, I agree with SFN's comment. -tadelste]
Although his review is much more even-handed than most reviews of
Ubuntu (they tend to run towards fanboy adoration or distrowar
ignition), the above statement makes it clear that he is missing
something.
In my experiences, Kubuntu is still falling short of Ubuntu. Not
because the KDE or Gnome interfaces are better but because there are
still some things that Kubuntu isn't doing well. The desktop resolution
problem that he mentioned comes to mind. I had that problem twice with
Kubuntu but have yet to experience it in Ubuntu. (BTW, the notion that
it's a common problem because there's a HOWTO about it is nonsense.
There are Ubuntu HOWTOs for a gigantic number of things, both common
and uncommon.)
I don't think this is a failing of the Kubuntu project. One needs to
keep in mind that Kubuntu was something that somebody came up with
after Ubuntu was already established. They are running behind Ubuntu
but I'm sure they will catch up as time goes on.
From there, the review spirals a bit. He says this about sudo,
"When you're putting the Drupal CMS (content management system)
together, for instance, and I have to enter my password every single
time I want to work on MySQL, Apache, Drupal, or PHP configuration
files, it gets a little old."
I've heard this many times and it's simply not true. You enter your
password the first time. From that point on, you don't enter your
password unless you are inactive for 15 minutes. So the only way he
would need to enter his password "every single time" is if he waited 15
minutes between each command.
I suppose that the 15 minutes time limit could be different in Kubuntu.
Maybe it's gone completely. In Ubuntu though, the 15 minute limit is
alive and well.
This is not a knock on Mr. Vaughan-Nichols. I generally find his
articles to be informative and well thought out. I just think his
initial premise of Kubuntu and Ubuntu being identical save for the
interface is misguided.
Lastly, there's this,
"One of my gripes about Kubuntu is when you want to get your hands on
the command-line controls. Maybe everyone doesn't want a Linux
distribution that has a default terminal window at the top interface,
but I do."
Perhaps I'm just missing his point. Is he saying that he wants the
terminal to be sitting on top of the desktop at all times? If that's
what he means, I haven't seen a distro that does that by default yet
(except, of course, for a distro that doesn't use an X server at all).
If he means he wants to be able to access the terminal easily, can he
not do that in KDE? If he doesn't mean either of those things, what
exactly is he talking about?
The sudo timeout can be a little tricky. It works within the same shell instance, allowing me to do many consecutive "sudo" things within the timeout period after just one password challenge. If I start Synaptic within that timeout I'll still have to render the password again. And if I start a new shell and use sudo there, I'll have to supply the password yet again even if I'm well within the time limit on my original shell. The notion of a login session that applies to all the programs I'm using while I'm logged in isn't the way sudo manages authentication, and that is as it should be.
For the user who needs to do several things that require root privileges, the simplest thing to do may be to just get a root prompt:
sudo -s -H
and keep that session around until finished. Needless to say, if you need to walk away you should control-d that session first!
"The notion of a login session that applies to all the programs I'm using while I'm logged in isn't the way sudo manages authentication, and that is as it should be."
That's pretty much where I come from as well. Being bothereed by the fact that sudo doesn't allow you to just login as root and stay that way has that whole "the stuff I was saving in my Deleted Items folder has been deleted" feel to it. (That's just fresh on my mind because I'm hearing that a lot lately)
It was a pretty poor review. However Ubuntu and Kubuntu are exactly the same apart from the desktop environment. The X packages are exactly the same as is the installer so you shouldn't have any X configuration problems on one that you don't get on another. sudo is the same. If he has suggestions for where to put a shortcut to Konsole that doesn't get in the way of non-console using users I'm happy to add it.
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For the user who needs to do several things that require root privileges, the simplest thing to do may be to just get a root prompt: sudo -s -H and keep that session around until finished. Needless to say, if you need to walk away you should control-d that session first!