Hi Greg
On Monday 19 November 2007 18:58, 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 :)
Good on ya... I could never get the Live CD to boot on my regular test machine, and the last one I tried didn't want to know on *this box (AMD64 X2)
It strikes me that, unless I'm missing something, it's not quite as user friendly as I was led to believe;
Can't comment...
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.
`cat /proc/cpuinfo` should spit out a bunch more info, but then I'm kind of a command line junkie ;)
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.
Possibly the required kernel drivers are not loaded - But then I tend to disable most power management options as it interferes with the running of certain applications (not the sort of thing you'd want to run).
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?
Never seen/used "Update Manager", but Synaptic tells me when updates & new stuff is available for Debian.
o Disappointed that something as basic as NTP isn't installed by default. Even (spit) Windows has had this since NT4.
Yup. NTP is pretty simple, doesn't take up much space, and is a handy utility to have - Installed here, and runs on each boot..
So, is Ubuntu not quite as ready for the mainstream as I thought, or have I missed something?
Well.... Ubuntu is based on a Debian testing snapshot, so bugs are to be expected. Bt to be fair to the Ubuntu guys, the do do a lot of testing and feed bug fixes back to Debian.
To end: At times, Linux is more of a religon/perversion/"way of life" than just another operating system.
Regards, Paul.