Ubuntu: “Humanity towards others”

A couple of months ago, Uphaar told me about a new Linux distro which was shipping for free their installation discs worldwide. I had never heard about Ubuntu before, but there isn’t really a reason why i wouldn’t want free cds, so i filled the form up, selected the discs i wanted: Intel/x86, PowerPC, AMD64/EM64T, the number of each, and submited my “order”. Then, I forgot about it.

Ubuntu

On monday when i checked my mail, i had my copy of The WHIR, and a big white package, filled with CD’s in paper cases. Ubuntu arrived.
I had ordered 10 Intel/x86 cds, 5 PowerPC and 3 AMD64/EM64T. 18 cases total, and the Intel/x86 ones, came with 2 discs, the Live CD and the Install CD. The packaging is nice, with their logo, and some information in the back. Unlike Slackware, it is graphically appealing.

The Live CD has a really good feature, you can open it in Windows, it’ll open a nice menu, and let you install OpenOffice, Firefox, Thunderbird and other OS applications. And, the Live CD feature works perfectly, just reboot the computer with the disc in the drive, make sure it boots from the CD and you’re in Ubuntu in a couple of minutes. Very useful, i’ll be carrying this Live CD with me all the time, with a copy of Firefox in it, and a way to show Linux to my friends in their computers without doing anything to their harddrives, it’s a must-have.

On to the Installation. I normally have 2 partitions in my laptop, Windows XP and Slackware. However, i’d been using Linux less and less lately, basically because of all the load Slackware puts on the user, making me do a million things to do the most basic tasks. In other words, i was ready to change distros. I had tried FC3, but, it just didn’t cut it for me, im a sucker for nice gui’s, and FC3 didn’t have any.
I was ready for Ubuntu. After booting to the Install disc, i was greeted with a simple menu, which looked much like the Slackware installation. The install process was painless, asked me for the info it needed, it perfectly deleted my old Linux partition and created a new one. In other words, the setup was a breeze. When it finished, it ejected the cd, and rebooted. GRUB worked perfectly, and i booted Ubuntu for the first time. It’s got a very nice log in screen, kinda like the one in Mandrake, and nothing at all like the black screen of Slackware. Once in Gnome (which has been themed aswell), i noticed this guys really did put a lot of effort into this distro, everything worked, real usb plug and play, battery indicators, etc. A real beauty.

The applications are not many, but are enuogh. Synaptic, the package manager is easy to use, and very impressive. There are a few minor things, like, no mp3 support out of the box (patents, bah), but Synaptic should fix this easily.
Haven’t yet tried wifi, but it seems it’ll work.

Networking. One of the problems i always had with Linux distros, is that i never got Samba to work. Ubuntu is not using Samba, but right now i’m connected via Ethernet to my Windows box, which is using dial up. The setup was actually too easy, just share the connection in windows, and tell Ubuntu to connect using Ethernet. Done. (As expected, my winmodem doesn’t work out of the box, but, the manual installation is quite easy).

All in all, Ubuntu is pretty much my dream-Linux OS. Order your CDs now, it’s still free. Did i mention this is the first release, ever, of Ubuntu?