Greg Thomas wrote:
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.
The "System" tab in System Monitor tells me I have 487.9MB RAM and an Intel(R) Pentium(R) M processor 1.60GHz - so I guess it depends what CPU you have, maybe your CPU doesn't report it's speed correctly or something??
But I already knew both those facts, because I bought this laptop (albeit a couple of years back now.)
It also tells me what release of Ubuntu I'm running and that I only have 1.4GB remaining disk space.
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.
My power management preferences allow me to control when the computer/display are put to sleep from inactivity and what happens when the laptop lid is closed, on both AC power and Battery, among other things.
And who cares about disk spin-down times? All I need to be able to do is access my data from the disk.
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're sort of the same package manager, as in they manage the same packages. Update Manager is the one which comes up in your system tray telling you there are updates available. Synaptic is where you can go to install new packages (Applications -> Add/Remove, is another place). Update Manager will tell you if there are updates to things installed by Synaptic, they use the same database. It's just an issue of names I suppose..
o Disappointed that something as basic as NTP isn't installed by default. Even (spit) Windows has had this since NT4.
*shrug*
So, is Ubuntu not quite as ready for the mainstream as I thought, or have I missed something?
It is ready for the mainstream, but it seems to me that you're not as mainstream as you think are.
-Simon