Ubuntu second impression

It just keeps getting better. Not only was espeak already installed and working right out of the box, but many plugins for Firefox just drop in place. Hulu, LiveLeak, YouTube all work normally.

Then one thing happened that I will remember and brag about to people who ask me what Linux distribution to use. When I double clicked a DiVx movie for the first time, the movie player simply downloaded the proper bits and the movie started playing. This light came from above and angles sang in harmony.

I made the right decision in dumping Fedora. Now I have to update my server. I wander if Deluge is available for Ubuntu through the stander software repositories.

Ubuntu at Work

We have some European customers who want to use Ubuntu. Hey, I'm all for it. I've read some articles a while back that said Ubuntu was not ready for the enterprise. I must say, I think they are wrong. Red Hat kicks as in the enterprise and is kind of blah in the user interface. The user interface is difficult because making one that doesn't suck takes time and trial and error. You have to be willing to use what works and try new stuff that you can then give up and go back to what worked before.

In order to install Ubuntu you really need to have access to a full repo to get the whole experience and usability from the OS. It is required to be honest. I'm in charge of this sort of thing at work. We will not use Ubuntu for full development, but I intend to have our network set up to support builds testing at the least. This means I have to mirror a software repository on our internal network.

With Yum you go to the correct file share, download the piles of RPMs that you need, and run 'createrepo' command on the folders. Then you point your clients to those files created by the command and you are pretty much done.

With Debain (father of Ubuntu) based distributions, you must first download the text files that are really a database that point to all the correct DEB files on another share. All the DEB files from all version and fixes and updates and whatever  are all piled together in one place, so the whole repo is something like 300 gigabytes. Either you dissect the text based database (not even XML for goodness sake) to get the files you need and just download those files. Then regenerate the database with some command. Or, you use a command called 'debmirror' that kind of does that for you,  but you must have a Ubuntu or DEB based machine on the Internet to perform the task of downloading.

The DEB download is running as I type at the house. I checked this morning and it was at 13% after 8 hours. Not promising. How am I going to get it to work?

Speed vs Quality, Philosophy

One of the reasons people like Debain based distributions of Linux is because they are rock soled. One of the reasons people hate the Debain distributions is because they don't sit on the bleeding edge and have the latest software. These are mutually exclusive relative to the amount of time effort and money you spend to keep the distributions moving and well tested.

Ubuntu is pretty solid, pretty up to date, and well supported. The community has done a great job of explaining things in terms that nearly anyone can follow to get things done. The community support is nothing short of fantastic for Ubuntu. Fedora has a place where a community can discuss things and come up with instructions, but it just doesn't work. Mainly, people complain that Red Hat contributes so little to the Fedora project. Half the time I was using Fedora, I used the instructions from the Ubuntu forums to get things done.

In the days of making everything work by hand, I would say that I wanted speed over quality because things would break in a major way every time the developers opened their mouths. You had to jump through ten hoops to be able to edit a text file. you had to hunt down an obscure C library and link it in an offhand way to get a mouse pointer that didn't disappear when it moved left. Why not go hog wild and get the latest stuff?

Things have changed. I'm 40. My priorities are different. I have a family to pay attention to. I have a full time plus job that knows it is a crap economy and that we have few options. I want things that work.

Complaining

Over the last couple weeks,  I found myself asking the question "Why am I not using Windows at home?" The stress of trying to keep Fedora running had drained my faith in open source. It can work. It might kill you, but it can work.

So many things do not work with open source.Flash, a non-free closed source collection of machine consuming crap that brings your half the content on the web, but shouldn't, only kind of works on open source platforms. There are no killer games.

When someone says "You can use a computer to ..." They mane Windows or Mac. People pay a fortune to Microsoft so Microsoft may advertise back to them so they will buy more Microsoft products. I suppose that is how capitalisms works. I'm not a communist. People should get paid for what they do. Companies should not be able to rule the roost. International corporations are not even living beings and have more freedom to make money and control people's lives than any living breathing human.