On Mon, 2007-11-19 at 18:58 +0000, Greg Thomas wrote:
I've just installed an Ubuntu box on an old PC (could do with an extra 256MB, but hopefully that will be sorted later today; thanks, Matt :) )
It strikes me that, unless I'm missing something, it's not quite as user friendly as I was led to believe;
Are you comparing Ubuntu to other distributions or is this your first direct experience of Linux ?
o There's no obvious way to get out system information; Device Manager will tell me it's a PIII, but not the speed. System Monitor will at least tell me the installed RAM, but again not the CPU speed.
I am sure there must be a gui tool somewhere that does this...people who have used linux for a while tend to just type cat /proc/cpuinfo and cat /proc/meminfo but I appreciate that to a newcomer this is less than obvious.
As others have pointed out System Monitor will hint at the correct processor type but not always the clock speed.
o "Power management" is a bit of a grandiose name, given that all it will do is turn off the PC or the monitor. No disk spin-down times, fan speed controls, etc.
Power Management is generally very dependant on the hardware you have..not all ACPI implementations are equal and many are not even close to spec. Without the luxury of the 3rd party chipset drivers Windows has getting the full feature set that your hardware supports can sometimes be a bit of a challenge. You probably need to do a quick search of the Ubuntu forums to find details specific to your hardware or chipset. Hard drive spin times I am again afraid I only know how to do with hdparm and this is a tool that should be used with caution. man hdparm will tell you all you need to know but I would stress that this is something best played with later rather than sooner if you are new to Linux.
Oh and be careful with aggressive spindown times for Desktop hard drives. It is often the case that they are not rated for as many start stop cycles as laptop drives and aggressive settings could cause an early failure. The head-platter gap is maintained by an aerodynamic artifact of the platter spinning and there is actually contact with the platter at rest..so spin up and spin down do account for some wear.
o There are two package managers (Update Manager and Synaptic Package Manager). The former, at least, tells me when there are updates available. I don't know yet if it will include extra packages installed by the latter (e.g. Apache WWW Server). Why two in the first place?
They both look at the same database but are intended for different purposes... Anything you add via Synaptic will be updated by update manager as long as the package repository stays added so it knows where to look for updates. You might want to review what repositories are selected in Synaptic by the way (settings, repositories)
o Disappointed that something as basic as NTP isn't installed by default. Even (spit) Windows has had this since NT4.
No it is not installed by default but does that really matter ?.Right click clock, adjust date and time, change from manual to internet time and you get a popup telling you it needs to install NTP support once more click on the yes button and you are done (unless you are intending to sync to a local time server)
I can't recall NT4 having NTP available in the default installation :)