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Hi, i've heard that Ubuntu distro has become very popular, and i'd like to try it, so i'm gathering some info:

 

- is it easy for beginners (compare to Mandriva/Fedora)?

- does it have graphycal configuration program or is it command line?

- does support some old hardwere like mine (see below)

- any other usefull info - you're wellcome

 

Thanks :D

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Ubuntu does not have a nice gui installer but an "ugly", yet functional one. It takes quite long to install compared to some other distros and It's security approach is something I don't like (no root account but sudo). Gnome 2.12 will drag RAM and might be too heavy for your system but you will have to find that out by yourself. Apart from that it is very polished, stable and easy to use. You can try the live-cd first, before going for a hd-installation. Taat will tell you if it would do the trick for you. And I would read some of the reviews. You can find links to recent reviews at distrowatch.com. ;)

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- debian is its own animal. IMO ubuntu is a little less for beginners than fedora but then some beginners start with slack so that just depends on what you wanna know and learn. Once I learned debian I loved it.

-It uses the Gnome System Tools

-arctic said it well. You could also go with hoary to avoid the recent slowdown, if you do not have to have gnome2.12

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And I would read some of the reviews. You can find links to recent reviews at distrowatch.com. ;)

 

I want to know simple user's opinion and not a review from some guy with 30 years of experience in linux and a monster PC :D

 

(I know that i can read the reviews, thanks for reminding :D )

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I think all of them are easy, some just offer speicfic things to users that aren't available in other distros. That's why I use Fedora/RH they offer a lot of things the "others" don't.

 

- is it easy for beginners (compare to Mandriva/Fedora)? 

- does it have graphycal configuration program or is it command line?

- does support some old hardwere like mine (see below)

- any other usefull info - you're wellcome

1.) I would say its easier for beginners than Fedora

2.) command line

3.) The newer the distro, the more hardware it will support (kernel)

4.) Um, I'd probably use it 3rd or 4th, next to Fedora and RH. Like artic said, d/l the live cd and play around.

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<snip> I want to know simple user's opinion and not a review from some guy with 30 years of experience in linux and a monster PC :D

 

(I know that i can read the reviews, thanks for reminding :D )

 

Hi there,

 

I've been using MDK for around one year (never used Linux before that) & I'm now on MDK 10.2 LE 2005 (the best most stable distro I've ever used). Anyway the other day I downloaded Ubuntu 5.10 & decided to give it a try. Well I've played with it for only a couple of days & to be honest I dont like it. Having said that I'm sure if I give it more time it may grow on me. My advise is if you have a spare hard drive then give it ago. Once you've had enough pull the HD out & try it later..

 

HTH

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I've downloaded the Ubuntu Live, set it up on my 2 boxes and the results were:

 

pentium 4 2.4gHz; nVidia Gforce 4400MX 128mb (XP): no video signal at all, only black screen

pentium 3 550mHz; 3dfx 16mb (linux box): i had only 640X480 resolution

 

How can i possibly fix that?

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I've been using MDK for around one year (never used Linux before that) & I'm now on MDK 10.2 LE 2005 (the best most stable distro I've ever used). Anyway the other day I downloaded Ubuntu 5.10 & decided to give it a try. Well I've played with it for only a couple of days & to be honest I dont like it. Having said that I'm sure if I give it more time it may grow on me. My advise is if you have a spare hard drive then give it ago. Once you've had enough pull the HD out & try it later..

LOL changing distro's is never *easy* ....

 

I'm sure bvc remembers my first Debian attempt ... LOL now its my main distro.

The best thing about Debian/Ubuntu to me is standardisation. I get the KDE graphical tools with Ubuntu and the KDE ones with Kubuntu and they are the same distro to distro unless the distro hacks em...

 

I find them all perfectly adequate... for configuring the system for everyday things.

If its not there its advanced and you have lots ofdvise is if you have a spare hard drive then give it ago. Once you've had enough pull options to config it.

 

I haven't used Mandriva since .. well since it became Mandriva ... so i can't make a 1:1 comparison ...

 

Security sure is strange though... as arctic said!

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Ubuntu is easy for me describe - if you like gnome, you will love ubuntu; if you don't, you'll hate it. Ubuntu is very gnome centric so if you like kde, go elsewhere. There is a kde spinoff of ubuntu, kubuntu, but it's not nearly as tight as ubuntu/gnome.

 

Re newbie friendliness - ubuntu is OK but it lacks the graphical config utilities that you find in mandriva, suse or mepis. If that's important to you, try one of the foregoing.

 

I also hate ubuntu's sudo approach to security.

 

Re your old hardware - you are a little on the light side on ram(192 MB) for most modern graphical linux systems running gnome or kde. It will run but it will be a little slow/unresponsive. Ram is your main limiting factor; not cpu. You may want to try a more lightweight window manager like icewm if you find gnome or kde too slow.

 

Re your present problems with ubuntu and graphics config - I don't know what utilities for configuring your graphics are available with ubuntu. I'd just try something else, i.e. mepis, mandriva, or suse. Mepis would probably be the easiest as it comes with the nvidia driver for your P4 box and is also a live cd so you can test it out before you install.

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The one thing that I really don't like with ubuntu is the sudo-approach because the first user that you create at installation-time is something like root, it just has another name, but it can still screw up your system.

 

As far as I know you only have the gnome-system-tools for tweaking your graphics config, not much as I see, because if your graphics hardware isn't detected properly, you have a big probem.

 

Another thing I don't like, you can't control which packages you want to install, it installs just everything from the cd, and this took very long on a PIII 550 Mhz with 512 MB RAM.

 

Apart from this ubuntu is really nice, but personally I prefer Fedora, Suse or Mandriva, I think their newest versions are all beginner-friendly enough even for a first-time-user.

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I wanted to see what all the fuss is about so I installed Ubuntu recently. It's not bad. For me it did not detect and configure things as well as Mandriva always has. In Ubuntu I had to hand configure the X server for my dual monitor which Mandriva picked up on with no hand configuring at all. I was not fond of it's text based installer. It's straight-forward and pretty easy to use but I've become spoiled on a GUI installer. The real star of the show for Ubuntu is apt-get. It's just as easy to install things with it as it is with urpmi.

Edited by roc19
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i think it's kinda nice. i didn't get kubuntu, but i was impressed (aesthetically) with the themes and such. i enjoyed apt-get, and i always enjoying seeing where different distros put their stuff.

 

it picked up hardware well.

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