thelordharry wrote:Anyone here use Ubuntu, of any flavour? How do you get on with it? What have you found to be the pros and cons? Any tips for a Linux newbie?
Thanks.
Hi, I'm CPH!
I generally get along well with it; the biggest difficulty is just getting used to the different ways of doing things. I've been using various Ubuntus for over a year.
It seems you have some awareness already of the fragmented and modular nature of the Linux world. I've only briefly seen the Netbook remix, having never owned a netbook myself. The Linux kernel is the Linux kernel wherever you go but its the functionality apparent to the user and the programs that make the OS to the end user. The standard netbook remix seems to be based off a lightened and restructured Gnome desktop; though a KDE-based version is in the works the Gnome version may be more stable because Gnome is generally a bit more stable than KDE right now (they've matured Gnome 2.x for about 7 years now while the KDE team has recently uprooted everything to produce their version 4.x).
Relative to other distributions of Linux, Ubuntu is regarded as user-friendly and well-supported, with good reason. Though Canonical tries to monetize Ubuntu by selling support packages, most support is available free through Google -- ubuntuforums.org, etc. Also, Ubuntu has the benefit of a huge collection of free software available in its repositories made available to the user through one of the various package management apps. There are over 25,000 packages there of various sorts, all available to the netbook remix user as well as the "full" version.
A small bit of history may become relevant here: Ubuntu originated as a fork of Debian. Now there are several similarities and differences between parent and child distro here: where Debian is rather conservative and focused on stability, Ubuntu is one of the more adventurous Linuxes in incorporating the newest packages (though you still have to award it fairly high grades for maintaining stability despite this), also where Debian has never had a regular release schedule, Ubuntu has a new version every six months (x.04 release in April, x.10 release in October where x is the year). Most Ubuntu releases are supported by updates for 18 months, though "LTS" or Long Term Support releases are supported 3 years (on the desktop versions). The upcoming 10.04 release will be an LTS.
There is generally compatibility between Debian and Ubuntu packages as you'd expect; packages are made in the .deb format. Such packages can be found even outside of repositories as downloadable .deb's -- for instance Google Chrome is downloadable as a .deb among the other formats available at the download site. In this case you click on the downloaded .deb file to launch the installer (where installation means 1) unpacking, 2) copying binaries to their proper location, then 3) clean-up/editing the program menu to include the new program. the actual executable binary needs no other "installation," in the windows-registry sense as it's just click-and-run).
Ubuntu is generally one of the better Linuxes when it comes to driver support, so it should pick up most common devices out of the box. However, as to playing media the -stock version of Ubuntu lacks codecs for mp3 files and such, due to legal issues rather than technical. Go to a package manager and install the package "ubuntu-restricted-extras," which will pull in many of these needed codecs. Though a netbook lacks an optical drive, it's similarly true that Ubuntu lacks support out-of-the-box for commercial DVD playback for the same (legal) reasons; the package "libdvdcss2" will cure this, though it's found in a third-party repository (specifically "Medibuntu" @
www.medibuntu.org).
Your default browser should be Firefox, though Chrome is available as I mentioned above.
As to Win 7, I've never seen how well it handles a netbook, though I'm somewhat surprised to hear such a negative review since it seems to fare quite nicely on full-sized computers, even with as little as 1 GB of RAM (though I haven't used such a machine for an extended period; I'm only relating what I've seen at the computer shop where I work).