Ubuntu -- Beyond the Hype

nt

I've used a lot of distros over the years starting with SLS in 1993. I've been running mainly suse lately, but ubuntu 804 is good enough to have replaced suse on my laptop, since it works perfectly, out of the box, which no other distro has ever done, nor has ms windows, for that matter.

I'm also setting up ubuntu server as my firewall/dns/dhcp/smtp box to see how it compares with my current suse 10.3 setup. Ubuntu doesn't have anything like the full on yast for common sys admin tasks, but its superior package management capabilities make up for that.

Everyone loves their distro best, but from what I can see, ubuntu is doing an awful lot of things right,

I don't like yast anyway.

In defense of YaST, at my last job, one of our sales guys actually developed a YaST interface to go with our primary product. As usual with YaST, it worked in both text mode and X.

This was no small task, as YaST is poorly documented. And, given that this guy was in sales and not product development (programming), I made sure everyone knew about the impressive job he did. Once he was finished, his module was included in our SuSE installation package. (And I had to update our user manual... grrrrr!)

I strongly doubt he could have done the same for Fedora or Debian.

the n-curses and the command line functionality of YaST is incredible.

> This mirrors my experience.

And pretty much everyone else's with two exceptions I can think of. :)

> ubuntu is doing an awful lot of things right,

Yes, but well over 50% of that is actually Debian doing things right, so it's not all Ubuntu.

>And pretty much everyone else's with two exceptions I can think of. :)

Make that three.

When I upgraded my Mythbuntu box from Gutsy to Hardy. my video performance fell straght into the crapper.

Bad thing for media pc.

I've only got it about half straightened out now. XVMC is working again, but flash in firefox (which is now 3.0) now renders in full screen like a slide show instead of video.

Grrrr.

> When I upgraded my Mythbuntu box from Gutsy to Hardy. my video performance fell straght into the crapper.

Interesting. just out of curiosity, what sort of video card do you have there? Is the performance still bad, or has that been solved?

Quoting:When I upgraded my Mythbuntu box from Gutsy to Hardy. my video performance fell straght into the crapper.

A known bug, and easily solved. X.org switched the default render accellerator from XAA to EXA. Unfortunately, some drivers don't play nice with EXA yet. Just add this to your "Device" section in your xorg.conf:

Option "AccelMethod" "XAA"

>Interesting. just out of curiosity, what sort of video card do you have there? Is the performance still bad, or has that been solved?

It's got an nvidia 6200 LE.

Performance (except for flash) seems to have been resolved, but I'm not sure that the driver in Hardy is the best. I'm using the same flash as before (10 beta), but have moved from Firefox 2 in Gutsy to Firefox 3 in Hardy.