thanks for the link. It certainly is an eye opener for me as until a couple of days ago I’d never even seen a Linux OS let alone installed one.
My initial struggles sorting out some of the updates & drivers etc would be a fairly typical sort of reaction for a seasoned XP user I would think.
With all the various Linux OS flavors out there, if the open source community really wants to make an impact it wouldn’t be a bad idea to consolidate somewhat, so joe-blogs-minimal-PC-skills has better direction to head. Perhaps that is the nature of open source (to have a myriad of options out there), I don’t know.
My only complaint with Ubuntu so far is the boot time. It takes about 2-3 mins on that boot screen (vs 10-20 secs for XP) on a late model notebook (Asus W7J). Audio drivers suck so far too, but I am going to work on that.
i also have been playing with ubuntu for a little over a year on my laptop. the only reason i don’t exclusively use it is that my Golf game does not work on it and i cannot get/find a way to get the sound on my Fujitsu Lifebook to work with it. Apart from those two issues, i have no problems at all with Ubuntu.
This leads me to a serious question to other ubuntu users out there - have any of you seen the Educational version which they (Ubuntu) creates for schools and educational institutions. This is the same version they are using on the $100US laptop they are giving away to kids in Africa and Sth america (but is different from the standard install). Anyway, anyone want to get together to work on a free, educational learn english distro using the Ubuntu education distro as a basis and market it to cram schools? this is a project that i’ve been thinking about for some time and will most likely involve some coding and packaging of a distro. let me know if you are interested.
I got Ubuntu working on my Acer laptop and i really like it. It’s pretty peppy once its fully booted (boot times are a bit slow). Overall I think its a pretty solid system, especially for linux newcomers. However, I do have a few complaints.
My laptop has an ATI card, which is notoriously bad in all linux systems. The open source drivers work OK, but I dont get great framerates in GL applications. It’s more of the manufacturers fault for not providing adequate drivers for linux users. I have a computer with a Nvidia card, and everything works peachy, including Compiz/Beryl. So if your in the market for a computer, and are interested in using Linux… DON’T BUY ATI!!! Another complaint I have is using SCIM+ATI(proprietary driver)+Openoffice. It just doesnt work unless you play with some config files. I followed a workaround and it all works ok now. However, I if I were a newbie, i would be lost and frustrated. Another thing that really bugs me is SCIM+Skype. It just doesnt work again! There is another workaround for this as well.
If your just doing an English install, and not having to worry about Chinese input and locales, then everything works pretty well. However, if you want to use this distro in a multi-lingual environment (aka. gotta girlfriend who uses it as well), and you don’t want to screw around trying to find workarounds, try another distro. Fedora works well in this case, as well as openSUSE. I prefer the latter of the two personally. Most of these show-stopping bugs are worked out.
For those of you installing Ubuntu Fiesty, I suggest you download and install a very useful application called Automatix. It installs some of the most useful applications out there for linux. http://www.getautomatix.com/. Hey, even Micheal Dell uses it on his Ubuntu laptop… Why not you?
Unfortunately, the title of this thread is Ubuntu vs Fedora. I would recommend openSUSE over Fedora in a heartbeat. But this is a topic for another thread.
Otherwise, if you are somewhat technically astute, give Arch Linux a try. I use it on my laptop. It takes a bit of work but once it is set up…it screams!
I think the 100$ laptop is a specialized OS called SUGAR, based on Fedora. Please correct me if I am wrong. You can download a live CD of it or the VMware image to check it out.
OK, now that I’ve been using Ubuntu for a few weeks (on and off), I thought I’d come back and give a bit more feedback.
Firstly, I was totally wrong to complain about Nvidia drivers, because actually it could not have been simpler to install them. It was just that the way of doing it was unknown to me at the time (see my previous posts for the steps needed to install them).
Secondly, I never did get Azureus working well, so switched to ktorrent, which is great. I’m hitting very good download speeds and am very happy with it. It was suddenly quitting for some reason, but I updated to the latest java offering from Sun and that seems to have sorted out that problem.
Games - Linux has always been famously bad for games, but IMHO (I’m not a huge gamer, so some nice 3D first person shooter will do fine) this has improved greatly. Last night I installed Nexuiz and it is great. In fact, here’s a good link for decent Linux games: rangit.com/software/top-8-linux-games-of-2007/
Lastly, I just want to mention how fantastic the Add/Remove software feature is in Ubuntu. Take installing that Nexiuz game, for example. All I had to do was go into Add/Remove, look it up on the list and click “Add” (or whatever the option is called) and it literally did EVERYTHING else.
OK, that’s all for now. As you might have guessed, I’m pretty happy with this latest offering from Ubuntu.
I’ve been living in Taipei for five years now and just got around to joining forumosa, so I was quite surprised to find a linux thread here.
gg1965,
I’ve had somewhat similiar interests marketing an educational solution using a linux based product. Can you elaborate more on your idea? would you be giving the software away or charging the cram schools? Who would be creating the educational content itself? Perhaps we can work togther.
Just to let you know a new downloadable magazine about Ubuntu is available from here: http://fullcirclemagazine.org/ (click on “Download” at the top).
I have already downloaded and read issues 0 and 1. Very good info for beginners. Highly recommend giving them a read. And issue 2 should be out any day now.