Comments on: Ubuntu Linux followup

By: Scott Wells

Scott Wells — Fri, 27 May 2005 11:37:51 +0000

Yeah, Mandrake (nor Mandriva) was the easiest to install, but Ubuntu is the easiest to add new software.

By: graham

graham — Fri, 27 May 2005 08:34:29 +0000

Thanks for the update, Scott. Think I’ll wait a few months! :-)

What would you say is the easiest version to install? Mandrake? (I have no experience partitioning whatsoever.)

By: Scott Wells

Scott Wells — Wed, 25 May 2005 12:00:31 +0000

You’ve gone right past me, since the only successful parition I’ve ever done was with Mandrake. Looking back, all I can say is that Ubuntu’s partioning was about as difficult as plunging a tentpeg though someone’s head. (The passage you mention was a pet favorite at my seminary.) But if you worked with Knoppix, Ubuntu might really be a good choice since through the grapevine it seems that it is what some Knoppix people are now choosing. I don’t know anything about the other distros — plus I’d rather use one with strong community support: a reason I left Mepis for Ubuntu.

By: James Field

James Field — Wed, 25 May 2005 06:30:18 +0000

Does the Ubuntu installer include a live partition resizing tool (like Partition Magic for Windows) that will let you strink your NTFS volume and then format a new reiser-fs or ext-2/3 volume and swap partition? Does it have something like captive-ntfs that lets dual-booters access their Windows NTFS volume? Those were my main with Knoppix. Switching from livecd to a hd install was a pain even if you understand partitions pretty well and booting from a livecd it was impossible to access most of my data easily because it was on an XP NTFS volume. Also it did not like the funky soundcard on my HP Pavillion.

Lately I have been wanting to try some of the media oriented distros like dynebolic, Planet CCRMA, or Agnula. Alas, I don’t get to use linux much at work and don’t use the computer for much other than blogging at home.

Geeking out about GNU/linux is much more fun than finishing my OT exegesis paper on the prose and poem texts about Deborah, Jael, Barak and Sisera.

By: Scott Wells

Scott Wells — Tue, 24 May 2005 23:00:01 +0000

How does the Ubuntu installer compare to Mandrake?

Not well. I mean it is good enough if you want to zap your whole drive and trust the defaults, but unless you’ve got some experience (and a free machine) this isn’t a good option for most newbies.

That said for those still with me, one it was installed, it was a breeze. I mentioned Ubuntu has cute names for its releases. The free disk I got was for the perfectly useful, but not awe-inspiring Warty Warthog. That it, once the basic system installed from my CD-ROM, it took the open network connections — we have DSL — to grab the rest of the software from a set of “warty” repositories. Well, when I upgraded to “hoary” repositories I didn’t have to reinstall the whole thing, but just let all the constituent bits of software update — it took about 45 minutes with a DSL line — and blam! Like a new computer.

By: James Field

James Field — Tue, 24 May 2005 16:26:36 +0000

How does the Ubuntu installer compare to Mandrake? I felt like Mandrake was not that different from installing XP from scratch, but then again, how often do any normal users do that? Disk Druid is only slightly weirder than using Disk Utility to format your drive to install Mac OS X for the first time.