On 20/11/2007, Wayne Stallwood ALUGlist@digimatic.co.uk wrote:
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 ?
No; the last distro I installed was Gentoo. Never really trusted these modern GUI things ...
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
Indeed. And as that is clearly stating cpu Mhz: 996.828 I was surprised that System Monitor wasn't displaying it.
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.
I was hoping that with a relatively new acpi version of 20070126 ("cat /proc/acpi/info") things would be OK, but I guess not.
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.
Indeed. Hence a nice easy to use tool (cf. MS Windows) would have been handy. Especially if I'm going to leave it running 24x7. Perhaps I should just dig out an old laptop ;)
No it is not installed by default but does that really matter ?
I've actually subsequently spotted the Ubuntu Desktop at least has ntpdate installed by default which given it's a desktop OS makes sense (my assumption is that Ubuntu Derver would have ntp proper).
I can't recall NT4 having NTP available in the default installation :)
Hmm, on reflection maybe it was part of the resource kit, back then!
Greg