{"id":140,"date":"2004-12-15T09:44:07","date_gmt":"2004-12-15T09:44:07","guid":{"rendered":""},"modified":"2004-12-15T09:44:07","modified_gmt":"2004-12-15T09:44:07","slug":"","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.sungate.co.uk\/?p=140","title":{"rendered":"Testing out Ubuntu"},"content":{"rendered":"

There is a new kid on the Linux distribution block, namely Ubuntu<\/a>. I downloaded a demo live CD yesterday to try it out.<\/p>\n

So, I booted up from the CD. Some live CDs suffer from being slow to load applications, because they’re loading files off the CD rather than the hard disk, so when I saw the boot option “copy contents into RAM before booting”, I picked that. My machine has 1GB RAM and would have no trouble holding the contents in RAM. This took several minutes to boot, of course, during which time I nipped off to make a cup of tea, but after that everything loaded up on demand very quickly.<\/p>\n

First impressions: looks very clean, which is probably the result of the Gnome<\/a> desktop. I usually prefer KDE<\/a>, and this experiment with Ubuntu probably won’t change that, but I was happy to test it out. All my hardware appeared to be detected properly, but as I didn’t have much time to test everything, that may not have been the case. One thing I did notice was that the screen appeared flickery, like it does when the refresh rate is set too low. The System Tools option said that it was running at a resolution of 1024×768 (lower than my usual, but still quite reasonable) at a refresh rate of 101Hz. I couldn’t change the refresh rate through this interface, but in any case, 101Hz should have been fine.<\/p>\n

Tested out all the obvious applications: Firefox, X-IRC, Evolution, Gaim etc. All good, although a surprising lack of choice, especially when compared to other live CDs such as Knoppix. The Ubuntu live CD runs to 650MB and I find it hard to figure out where all the space went. Of course, with a proper installation rather than a Live CD, you can install as much as you want. Maybe the lack of choice is a deliberate Ubuntu design decision.<\/p>\n

I think I’m in the “I don’t quite ‘get’ Ubuntu” camp at the moment. It is based on Debian<\/a>, which is good, but I don’t understand why the work involved in producing Ubuntu can’t be used to improve Debian instead. Well, maybe it is<\/i> to some extent. I guess that perhaps Ubuntu serves those users who want to use Debian on their desktop, but dislike the long time between releases. The choice of Gnome for window manager will annoy some (the KDE users) and endear others, as with any application holy war.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

There is a new kid on the Linux distribution block, namely Ubuntu. I downloaded a demo live CD yesterday to try it out. So, I booted up from the CD. Some live CDs suffer from being slow to load applications, because they’re loading files off the CD rather than the hard disk, so when I… (read more<\/a>)<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-140","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.sungate.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/140","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.sungate.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.sungate.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.sungate.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.sungate.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=140"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.sungate.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/140\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.sungate.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=140"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.sungate.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=140"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.sungate.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=140"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}