Chris BONDE wrote:
Read it! Good.
I have been interested in Ubuntu since I first saw your writeup about it.
Now, can I run it as what I think is called 'live CD' and how would I do such?
Chris
Hey,
There is a nice review of Ubuntu:
http://normspot.blogsome.com/2005/07/03/ubuntu-504-review
<snip>
Cheers,
Daniel.
Hey Chris,
Ubuntu Hoary Hedgehog is released as two cds it has an Ubuntu version of
(I think)the Knoppix Live cd. So yes you can run the live cd. The Ubuntu
CD itself doesn't run as a live cd. However Ubuntu sets up a dual boot
without any problems. (Backup is still a good idea)
Give Ubuntu a yell and get them to send you 20 or so CD sets and give
them away to your friends and neighbours.
At present I'm running Mandriva 2005 LE, Ubuntu Hoary Hedgehog, CentOS
4.0 and SuSE 9.2.
Ubuntu is very impressive, although I'm still unhappy about not having a
separate partition for /home .... although this seems to be a trend for
consumer level desktop, I notice Linspire do the same thing.
SuSE 9.2 is getting a little long in the tooth now. (Heh! over a year
old!! Tsk) But either way it has YAST... Which you either love or hate..
Personally I hate it. Software installs are a lottery
Mandriva 2005 is what MDK 10 should have been and has the advantage of
sheer volume of software it comes with . However I think that Ubuntu is
more picky, so although there may be less of a selection the hope is
that it is better quality. Having said that, In many ways Mandrake is
the GNU/Linux desktop by which all the others are measured and it is
still very good and installing new OOo snapshots every few weeks is a
breeze. Of all the RPM based distros Mandrake is the one that OOo's RPMs
seemed to be designed for.
CentOS is the most stable of the lot. Rock solid but not surprising,
considering that it is just RedHat Enterprise with all the nonfree bits
taken out. However there are a couple of downsides. It sux as a dual
boot. Mandriva mounts your windows partitions and even if they are NTFS
your windows files are available to you in Linux. Very useful. They are
readonly and saving in NTFS is not supported.
CentOS on the other foot, just treats your windows Partitions in the
same way Linux partitions are treated by Windows... ignores them.
Software installs can be a bit of an issue and CentOS shares something
with it's more edgy stablemate Fedora Core in that you have to install
OOo RPMs from the command line.
Which brings us back to Ubuntu. I'm a huge fan of the philosophy behind
it. And Mark Shuttleworth has just pledged $10 million dollars to the
Ubuntu Foundation so that they can take on developers and ensure it's
longevity. I think that in the medium to long term Ubuntu will be one of
the big stayers.
The biggest issue for me is that installing OOo snapshots is a pain
because Ubuntu is Debian based and OOo snapshots only come out as RPMs.
So that requires another piece of software (Alien) to change the OOo
files from RPMs to Debs. (This won't be a problem when the RC comes out,
it's just the beta stage.) And when it comes down to it, an OS is just
there to hang your applications on and obviously OOo is my priority.
When it comes down to it it's what you feel best with. For whatever
reason I always find myself subconsciously sitting at my Mandriva Box
and Mandriva Move is a very good Live CD.
But then when 2.0 is released as a deb... well who knows. :)
Cheers
--
Graham Lauder
OpenOffice.org MarCon New Zealand
(http://marketing.openoffice.org/contacts.html)
INGOTs Certification Assessor Trainer
www.theingots.org
