Re: [OT] Ubuntu 8.10: headaches and nothing else.
OK, to sum, we have a couple of opinions on a client distro. Do we have a recommendation on Debian vs. Mandriva? This is a lappie. What am I giving up by punting on Ubuntu? ___ use-revolution mailing list use-revolution@lists.runrev.com Please visit this url to subscribe, unsubscribe and manage your subscription preferences: http://lists.runrev.com/mailman/listinfo/use-revolution
Re: [OT] Ubuntu 8.10: headaches and nothing else.
Mikey-3 wrote: > > > 2) On a client, why is Debian better? For servers, you could make any > argument for any distro and I'm sure it would make sense on one level > or another, but I'm putting this on my lappie. > > Its better because you don't have the upgrade/reinstall problem in the same form. The Debian releases are much less frequent. Etch, for instance, has been out for a couple of years. Within a release, you get the apps updated. However, within an Ubuntu release, you are not getting the apps updated, just security fixes. You may feel this doesn't matter, because Ubuntu does a new release every six months or so. But it does, because then you end up in Ubuntu reinstall issues, as Richmond and you have found. Debian is better because you are better off doing one major system upgrade very two or three years, and keeping up to date in the meantime by doing upgrades of the apps on a continuous rolling basis, rather than every six months being faced with the choice to stay with the older releases of the apps, or do a problematic clean reinstall. Its not a sensible way of running a distribution. This is why Warren Woodford took Mepis back to Debian: http://www.desktoplinux.com/news/NS6170488551.html I would add that when you do want to do a total system upgrade, when Testing is moved to Stable, on Debian, apt-get dist-upgrade does work. Its been properly tested. Its impossible to do proper testing on dist upgrade if you are trying to get it out every six months. And the forums show that. You have the same issue, though on an annual basis not a six month one, with Mandriva, but the nice thing about Mandriva is that if you don't want to do administration from the command line, you almost never have to. For some of us this veiling of the system in gui wizards is a positive disadvantage, but it has the benefit that if you put in Mandriva for someone, and show them the control center, they feel at home right away. And with Mandriva, at least recently, the clean installs of major releases, as long as you have put /home on a separate partition, seem pretty foolproof. Peter -- View this message in context: http://www.nabble.com/-OT--Ubuntu-8.10%3A-headaches-and-nothing-else.-tp20870256p20890510.html Sent from the Revolution - User mailing list archive at Nabble.com. ___ use-revolution mailing list use-revolution@lists.runrev.com Please visit this url to subscribe, unsubscribe and manage your subscription preferences: http://lists.runrev.com/mailman/listinfo/use-revolution
Re: [OT] Ubuntu 8.10: headaches and nothing else.
Uh, Richmond, yeah. Oops. Just making up for the fact that half the list calls me "Mickey" for some reason. I can understand the other half calling me "ignorant", but I digress... ___ use-revolution mailing list use-revolution@lists.runrev.com Please visit this url to subscribe, unsubscribe and manage your subscription preferences: http://lists.runrev.com/mailman/listinfo/use-revolution
[OT] Ubuntu 8.10: headaches and nothing else.
Mikey wrote: "Sorry, Richard . . ." Who is 'Richard' ? Sure hope he appreciated your apologies. Love, Richmond :) A Thorn in the flesh is better than a failed Systems Development Life Cycle. ___ use-revolution mailing list use-revolution@lists.runrev.com Please visit this url to subscribe, unsubscribe and manage your subscription preferences: http://lists.runrev.com/mailman/listinfo/use-revolution
Re: [OT] Ubuntu 8.10: headaches and nothing else.
Trying to get the responses all in one: 1) I really hate Solaris, period. I hate it on our Sun boxes, too. Maybe that's because the commands seem very clunky compared to HP-UX. I hate the interfaces. I haven't tried OS, but I can't imagine that it's shed its legacy. 2) On a client, why is Debian better? For servers, you could make any argument for any distro and I'm sure it would make sense on one level or another, but I'm putting this on my lappie. 3) I used to have Mandrake on a lappie, and didn't mind it, but it doesn't seem to have the following that Ubuntu has now, and in my experience, when I can't fix something, there's no substitute for having lots of folks in the community (but I haven't tried Mandriva recently, either). 4) The fracturing of the distros is a problem for overall Linux adoption, IMHO, but that's just my HO. 5) The reason for putting GRUB on its own partition is so that each distro and release doesn't overrun and hijack your settings and preferences. With GRUB on its own partition, your control is much better, especially if you have the possibility of actually multibooting - e.g. in Richard's situation where he's pulling the cord on Intrepid to go back to Hardy. In my case, after my disaster in-place upgrade of Hardy to Intrepid, when I decided to have multiple distros in place, I put Intrepid in first. Then I put in Hardy. The Hardy GRUB is the one that boots, since it is the one that was installed last. This is exactly what will happen with each and every install - the latest will hijack GRUB and you are at its mercy. ___ use-revolution mailing list use-revolution@lists.runrev.com Please visit this url to subscribe, unsubscribe and manage your subscription preferences: http://lists.runrev.com/mailman/listinfo/use-revolution
Re: [OT] Ubuntu 8.10: headaches and nothing else.
Sorry, Richard, I was just trying to help you get around it. There are other issues as well. For example, in a clean 8.1 install, I have HPLIP (a sophisticated manager for HP printers). I decided to uninstall it to try something, except when it uninstalled, it took all my network services with it. Reboot - nothing. Reboot - nothing. Reinstall HPLIP - all's right with the world. Ubuntu definitely isn't anywhere near perfect, or anywhere near the polish of the Big Two, but I really like it, the price is sure right, and Compiz really blows everyone's socks off when I show it to them. ___ use-revolution mailing list use-revolution@lists.runrev.com Please visit this url to subscribe, unsubscribe and manage your subscription preferences: http://lists.runrev.com/mailman/listinfo/use-revolution
[OT] Ubuntu 8.10: headaches and nothing else.
I don't hate Ubuntu. Ubuntu has served extremely well, breathing life into a few extremely low-spec Pentium IIIs in my EFL school. Those computers have been running Ubuntu 5.10 since that distro was released; no crash, no smash, and always does what it is meant to do. Having spent days guttering about in the late 90s, in the United Arab Emirates, trying to get SUSE and Red Hat to do anything at all (and failing completely) I appreciate the Ubuntu Alternate Install CDs like nothing on earth - dead easy; and in a relatively short time I can have a system up and running; and in a relatively short time more I can tweak GNOME or XFCE around to get the sort of GUI I want, or my customers feel conmfortable with. Runtime Revolution standalones work a charm on Ubuntu. However, the other day I bought a Pentium 4, 1.7 GHz, 256MB RAM; popped a stray 40 GB Hard Disk into it and thought: "That's just what I need for RAD with Runtime Revolution in the school." So thought I would bung in Ubuntu 8.10 - - - and ended up with a black screen. That computer is now "strutting its funky stuff" very well indeed with Ubuntu 8.04.1. I suspect that the ".1" may, actually hold the secret of what is happening to Ubuntu: they are getting slack, or, in the urge to get a new distro out every 6 months, their Beta-testing has not been as rigorous as it should be. No doubt, in a while, we will see a "8.10.1". This however, will make people begin to lose faith in Ubuntu; as the idea of bug-fix releases looks like what Microsoft has always been about, and Macintosh seem to be becoming. I cannot cry about this that much as a Free operating system, inevitably, has a price somewhere else. Maybe Ubuntu should stop being quite so arrogant and stop shouting from the rooftops, and release a better, more tightly tested distro once a year, or, even once every 18 months. After all, upgrading (despite the cult of "ever upwards, ever onwards") is a slightly illusory process; it looks remarkably like the theories pushed by people who, willingly, misunderstand Darwin, and would have humanity at the top of a "great chain of being" that is continually improving; another load of old tosh. Now, I have never bothered to upgrade my school computers as they do what they are meant to do - and upgrading is time consuming, requires an internet connexion (which I do not have in the school - i.e. herniated discs carrying machines up 3 flights of stairs), and unnecessary. My initial posting under this heading was merely intended as a warning to anybody in the Runtime Revolution community who was thinking of either installing or upgrading to Ubuntu 8.10 no to. I am aware that there are all sorts of ways, through exotic terminal commands, and so on, to work one's way round the 8.10 problem: Hey, life's to short, I've got kids to educate, programs to write, and so on ad nauseam. Actually GIRARD Damien, I cannot understand why anybody would HATE any particular operating system. I, personally, dislike Microsoft Windows, mainly because it seems resource-hungry, shot full of holes, and pushed by a company with a cynical attitude towards its end-users. However, like it or not, I have to use Windows about once a month, and there are some aspects of that system I rather like. And, quite honestly, apart from FreeDOS running the GEM GUI, I find all systems never quite match up to my expectations; they are shot full of inconsistencies and little quirks: but, then, so am I, and so are you: we are human, and operating systems are made by human beings. [The reason I like FreeDOS with GEM is that it is so obviously a rickety old system with a cack-handed attempt at a GUI I have no illusions about what it can do - so we get along fine!] sincerely, Richmond Mathewson. A Thorn in the flesh is better than a failed Systems Development Life Cycle. ___ use-revolution mailing list use-revolution@lists.runrev.com Please visit this url to subscribe, unsubscribe and manage your subscription preferences: http://lists.runrev.com/mailman/listinfo/use-revolution
Re: [OT] Ubuntu 8.10: headaches and nothing else.
Personnaly, I hate Ubuntu. As Linux user, my favorites distributions are those: - Centos (Redhat Enterprise Linux Free) - Debian As Centos is RHEL, everything is working fine, it does not have the latest technology as other distributions but it is really stable. And updating works! Debian is really fine for servers (Without GUI or anything useless for a server). There is also OpenSolaris that is becoming great. But it is not mature for desktop usage. (But ZFS is really cool). Peter Alcibiades a écrit : All this is a reason for going with Debian proper rather than Ubuntu. You get continuous upgrades. Whereas Ubuntu, you have Debian in the background, but you have to do clean re-installs every time you do a major upgrade. So with Ubuntu, you have all the disadvantages of Debian and none of the advantages. If going with a release type upgrade, there is a lot to be said for Mandriva or PCLinux. 2008.1 was a pretty good release of Mandriva, and you can choose from KDE 3 or Gnome in the One versions. 2009 is KDE 4.1, so its probably worth waiting a while for a KDE 4.2 release, as lots of stuff is still incompatible and there is still a bit of work to be done on usability. Mandriva updates, you can just clean install without formatting /home, and its pretty reliable. If going with a Debian derivative there is a lot to be said for Mepis, which does do continuous upgrades. I would go with Debian Etch by the way, if going to Debian - there is no percentage in even going with Lenny until it becomes Stable. On older machines, there's a lot to be said for Zenwalk. Xfce & Slackware based. Or Debian with Fluxbox. The blackout might be a misconfigured xorg issue. I've met this with installing Lenny. Problem is that dpkg-reconfigure does not seem to give you proper access to the xorg parameters in their currently packaged version of xorg, so this means editing xorg.conf by hand, which is no fun - and I could not make even this work last time. On /home and partitions, yes, /home should always be a separate partition. If you have configuration problems, dpkg-reconfigure. I can't see any reason to have /usr/bin on a separate partition. It used to be recommended to put /usr on a separate partition, but I always thought it more trouble than its worth. Still less reason to put Grub on one. What does this get you? ___ use-revolution mailing list use-revolution@lists.runrev.com Please visit this url to subscribe, unsubscribe and manage your subscription preferences: http://lists.runrev.com/mailman/listinfo/use-revolution
Re: [OT] Ubuntu 8.10: headaches and nothing else.
All this is a reason for going with Debian proper rather than Ubuntu. You get continuous upgrades. Whereas Ubuntu, you have Debian in the background, but you have to do clean re-installs every time you do a major upgrade. So with Ubuntu, you have all the disadvantages of Debian and none of the advantages. If going with a release type upgrade, there is a lot to be said for Mandriva or PCLinux. 2008.1 was a pretty good release of Mandriva, and you can choose from KDE 3 or Gnome in the One versions. 2009 is KDE 4.1, so its probably worth waiting a while for a KDE 4.2 release, as lots of stuff is still incompatible and there is still a bit of work to be done on usability. Mandriva updates, you can just clean install without formatting /home, and its pretty reliable. If going with a Debian derivative there is a lot to be said for Mepis, which does do continuous upgrades. I would go with Debian Etch by the way, if going to Debian - there is no percentage in even going with Lenny until it becomes Stable. On older machines, there's a lot to be said for Zenwalk. Xfce & Slackware based. Or Debian with Fluxbox. The blackout might be a misconfigured xorg issue. I've met this with installing Lenny. Problem is that dpkg-reconfigure does not seem to give you proper access to the xorg parameters in their currently packaged version of xorg, so this means editing xorg.conf by hand, which is no fun - and I could not make even this work last time. On /home and partitions, yes, /home should always be a separate partition. If you have configuration problems, dpkg-reconfigure. I can't see any reason to have /usr/bin on a separate partition. It used to be recommended to put /usr on a separate partition, but I always thought it more trouble than its worth. Still less reason to put Grub on one. What does this get you? -- View this message in context: http://www.nabble.com/-OT--Ubuntu-8.10%3A-headaches-and-nothing-else.-tp20870256p20879415.html Sent from the Revolution - User mailing list archive at Nabble.com. ___ use-revolution mailing list use-revolution@lists.runrev.com Please visit this url to subscribe, unsubscribe and manage your subscription preferences: http://lists.runrev.com/mailman/listinfo/use-revolution
Re: [OT] Ubuntu 8.10: headaches and nothing else.
Something that I also tried that doesn't work as well is putting /boot in it's own partition. After fiddling and fighting with it, what I really wanted to do, and finally settled on doing, was putting GRUB in it's own partition, and letting each distro have its own /boot directory. ___ use-revolution mailing list use-revolution@lists.runrev.com Please visit this url to subscribe, unsubscribe and manage your subscription preferences: http://lists.runrev.com/mailman/listinfo/use-revolution
Re: [OT] Ubuntu 8.10: headaches and nothing else.
I'm a Hardy->Intrepid survivor, so here goes As someone who has gone through a variety of issues with a Hardy to Intrepid upgrade (I started a thread on the Ubuntuforums about it), the most common problem is with unused package uninstalls. If toward the end of the Intrepid upgrade you answer "yes" to "uninstall unused packages" (or whatever the question is), you are faced with a variety of woes, and most of them are bad. What winds up happening is that necessary packages for Intrepid are not installed, either, and you wind up with mush that you have to bootstrap back up. It can be done (I did it, and I figured most of it out myself because I wanted to learn how to do it), but by far the easiest thing to do is to do a fresh install of Intrepid over Hardy after making a boot/install CD. Things that were also recommended: 1) Make a separate partition for GRUB (HIGHLY, HIGHLY, HIGHLY recommended). 2) Have separate partitions for each major release that you're using (also highly recommended) 3) put /home in its own partition (recommended, with some reservations - fresh installs with old setting files - it's just like using 3.0 and 2.9 on the same stacks - sometimes things don't go well) 4) consider putting /usr/bin in its own partition (I think it's /usr/bin - where you put applications that you install, isn't it? I forgot). I haven't done this yet but it makes sense, and I will do it with my new box when it arrives. I have not gone back to Hardy since (finally) successfully upgrading to Intrepid. I've only visited Vista once or twice since doing it, too. Don't go it the long way and try to fix your Intrepid install. Just do it from scratch. It doesn't take that long, it's a lot less hassle, and it actually works better (there are drivers that get installed with the fresh install that don't come even with the upgrade that doesn't break your box). As you know, Ubuntu is not for wimps. There are things that still don't work after three releases (Gusty, Hardy, Intrepid), for example, wireless can be hit or miss. However, as you also know, it's screaming fast and the eye candy doesn't suck either. ___ use-revolution mailing list use-revolution@lists.runrev.com Please visit this url to subscribe, unsubscribe and manage your subscription preferences: http://lists.runrev.com/mailman/listinfo/use-revolution
[OT] Ubuntu 8.10: headaches and nothing else.
Talking about reinventing the wheel . . . I tried to install Ubuntu 8.10 on a Pentium 4, 1.7 GHz, 256 RAM and got the "black screen of death": subsequently found out 2 things: 1. This is an all-too-common problem. 2. Ubuntu have not responded to all the piles and piles of moans about this fact. Now installing 8.04 But it looks as if Ubuntu has had its day; or, maybe this is a sneaky signal that it is about to go commercial? A similar thing has happened with many people who have upgraded from 8.40 to 8.10 over the internet. sincerely, Richmond Mathewson. A Thorn in the flesh is better than a failed Systems Development Life Cycle. ___ use-revolution mailing list use-revolution@lists.runrev.com Please visit this url to subscribe, unsubscribe and manage your subscription preferences: http://lists.runrev.com/mailman/listinfo/use-revolution
