Holy %$@! moment with Ubuntu...

[techieMoe]

Wait, hold on. Before you dismiss this, I did not start this thread to bash Ubuntu. Believe it or not, I started this thread to announce that I've had an epiphany. Allow me to describe what happened.

Most of you know I'm not much of a fan of Ubuntu. A while back during a fit of spite at having downloaded, burned and greatly disliked Ubuntu, I took advantage of their "give us an address and we'll mail you as many CDs as you want" offer. I ordered 6 CDs (3 sets of an install/LiveCD for X86 and AMD64).

Until tonight, these nicely printed CDs had sat on my desk waiting to be given away or used as coasters, until I read an article in today's "DistroWatch Weekly" extolling the virtues of Ubuntu....again. It seems like there's no shortage of people willing to sing the praises of this distribution. What this served to do was spark my curiosity about the AMD64 version of Ubuntu that I had ordered, received and subsequently thrown in a corner of my desk.

I decided to play with it on one of my throw-away harddrives. Right away I noticed something....different about it. It may have just been my imagination, but it seemed to be installing more *useful* packages than the X86 version had. One package in particular caught my eye: nvidia-glx. Did my eyes decieve me? Is this included on the disc? I had to see. Immediately upon completing the install I ran a modprobe nvidia and glxgears and BEHOLD! I had 3D acceleration on Ubuntu for the first time ever.

Emboldened by my discovery I began to explore what other packages were available via apt-get from the CD and found a few actually useful programs, (although I was still missing a few things, like the libgtk1.xxx shared object files, which kept me from being able to install Doom 3...)

The point I have to concede after all of this is that perhaps I've been just a tiny bit hasty in my condemnation of Ubuntu. This experience has at least told me that the recently-released 5.10 version of Ubuntu is worth further investigation. I am downloading the AMD64 and X86 versions and I will probably be amending (or rewriting) my reviews of it should the results turn out better. For those of you still enamored with my negative rants of it, I will probably keep the current rants linked somewhere in the new ones (if the outcome is indeed better). More to come.

[a12ctic]

... ubuntu has the best way of installing nvidia and other drivers ive ever seen, all you do is apt-get install nvidia-drivers (or sumehting like that) then apt-get install nvidia-settings

[techieMoe]

... ubuntu has the best way of installing nvidia and other drivers ive ever seen, all you do is apt-get install nvidia-drivers (or sumehting like that) then apt-get install nvidia-settings

IIRC it's apt-get install nvidia-glx and for the GUI tweaking app it's apt-get install nvidia-settings. It should be noted however that this is the same process one would use in Debian, which has existed long before Ubuntu, so I wouldn't give them credit for this particular feature. This package was however installed by default, although the module apparently wasn't running at boot, requiring manual xorg.conf editing and a manual launch of the module.

[chopin1810]

Am I just imaginging things or did Moe really say they ship free CDs? How the hell can they afford this?

[a thing]

I think that's a bad thing. It should be the users' choice to put non-free packages on their system.

[genesus]

I think that's a bad thing. It should be the users' choice to put non-free packages on their system.

They have a choice, use sarge instead of ubuntu...

[techieMoe]

Am I just imaginging things or did Moe really say they ship free CDs? How the hell can they afford this?

Two words: Michael Shuttleworth. He donated something like $10million toward this distro and set up a self-sustaining company (I think it's called The Canonical Group) around it. I wasn't kidding. You really can order pre-printed CDs of any architecture in any quantity from them. They don't come very fast, but they do come. They ship in little cardboard sleeves with an install CD on one side and a LiveCD in the other. Interestingly, if you open up the LiveCD in MS Windows it has OSS software for Windows on it (OpenOffice, Firefox, Gimp, a few others). The link to order CDs is here:

https://shipit.ubuntu.com/

[chopin1810]

Cool. Too bad the distribution it ships sucks (Breezy Badger is actually okay. It's Hoary that really got on my nerves).

[techieMoe]

I think that's a bad thing. It should be the users' choice to put non-free packages on their system.

I disagree, because honestly I don't give a flying rodent's derriere whether a package is "free" or "non-free", I paid $329 for my video card and it works like crap with the OSS drivers. I'm just concerned with what works, and the commercial "non-free" drivers work quite well. Debian does not include them and that is a point *down* for me. But to each their own. As was said earlier, it's the user's choice not to use Ubuntu.

[chopin1810]

I do find that for-profit run distributions are better than pure GNU distros. For example, SUSE 9.3. It's my favorite distro of all time. But it's too slow on my system. Oh well.