Review of Ubuntu 7.10 Gutsy Gibbon.

My god I did not know whether to laugh or cry, this is an absolutely awful review, terribly amateur in every possible way, the language and grammar, which I can see past, but it sadly also follows through to the remarks that are made. Most of which make as much sense as classing Ubuntu as not been up to scratch as an operating system because it cannot boil some water and make you a cup of coffee in the morning!

I will not dissect the review as I have wasted enough of my time just by reading it. The mistakes and flaws are obvious to anyone that actually uses linux, and probably even those that have never even heard of it.

As good as the Internet is at letting everybody have a voice, some voices are best left unheard.

May I immodestly plug my own mondo review of Ubuntu Server, which in typical Canonical fashion is drowned in hype, with precious little actual information? This is what I think distro reviews should be like. Part 3 will appear next Monday:

Ubuntu Server: Attractive Choice, Paltry Documentation http://lxer.com/module/newswire/view/95084/index.html

Ubuntu Server: Considering Kernel Configuration http://lxer.com/module/newswire/view/95853/index.html

Nice review TC. I am a little puzzled by the Ubuntu server push. Why would you prefer it to vanilla Debian or indeed Red Hat (and clones)? What exactly is the added value they are bringing to the table? In other words if I was a sysadmin in a small business say why would I even consider Ubuntu?

The desktop angle make sense to me and jibes OK with Canonical's massive hype-er-drive since desktop users need to be sold on something and making things easier is an admirable goal for Ubuntu. But the server angle??? Looks like Shuttleworth covering his a... by apeing Red Hat...

Any thoughts?

Edit: BTW I suspect the terse documentation derives from the personality of the lead developers particularly Zimmerman who is a man of few words.

Good question, montezuma. Why indeed? As part 3 is going to say, it's a nice basic set of packages, and no X like a proper server. But they're the same packages as in the Desktop edition, which means they're pulled from Debian testing, Sid, and Experimental. The Debian security team does not support those. The multiverse and universe repos are enabled by default, and they are not supported by anybody. Ubuntu's security team, as far as I can tell, is three people, which does not seem to support their claim of "Ubuntu is designed with security in mind." http://www.ubuntu.com/products/whatisubuntu

So on that basis alone I might, cautiously, use it as a training or LAN server. But definitely not an Internet-facing server.

As far as documentation, Ubuntu has a separate documentation team. They have a lot of good people, and they try hard. But I suspect they are not given the support and leadership they should have- Mr. Mark seems more into funding half-truthful hype.

Quoting: So on that basis alone I might, cautiously, use it as a training or LAN server. But definitely not an Internet-facing server.

Odd, you wouldn't trust it on the internet? But this is linux right? Seems overly cautious to me...

herzeleid, are you serious?

Having all kinds of either completely undocumented and/or unsupported software automatically included would make me cautious too.

Which begs the question, can you be overly cautious with an Internet facing server? :-)

Quoting:Which begs the question, can you be overly cautious with an Internet facing server?

No. It's all a matter of what constitutes acceptable risk. The are only two knowns:

1) All software has bugs 2) The only safe machine is a machine not hooked to a network

The rest all comes down to how important the server is, what it's going to do, etcetera. Acceptable risk.

I'm still stuck on "because it's Linux, you don't have to worry about security patching and untested, bleeding-edge packages." I do hope that was that some subtle irony or something!

> 2) The only safe machine is a machine not hooked to a network

You forgot the part about not having any users. :)

Heh :-)

>I do hope that was that some subtle irony or something!

Either that or somebody planning massive server cracks once everybody has decided they don't need to keep their patches up to date...

Ya never know.

Small question: Doesn't a hardened version of Ubuntu exist?

Found this: https://launchpad.net/~ubuntu-hardened and this; http://packages.ubuntu.com/dapper/admin/harden-tools (which directly takes you to a Debian site);

anyone knows the state of the 'Ubuntu hardened' project?

Not because I'm going to use Ubuntu anyway, just curiosity.