Ubuntu
April 20th, 2005 by teemow
At the weekend I had a look at Ubuntu. A friend of mine (Sascha of Stillgruppe) told me that he installed ubuntu in 20 minutes and this is of course a big, big argument against my favorite linux distribution gentoo. On gentoo your most favorite tool is portage. It downloads the sources of all the packages you would like to install and compiles everything with your own compiler settings for your exact architecture and hardware and with all the bindings to other packages which is defined by yourself with the so called USE-Flags. So this takes a lot of time, for instance open-office or x.org will take half a day to compile (read this spiegel article about linux and productivity).
There is already a lot of rumor about Ubuntu (read Russell Beattie on Ubuntu). The mother of this distribution is debian, but the problem with debian is that the releases take very long and your debian system is stable and secure, but on the other hand not very up to date. So Ubuntus releases are served every 6 months and supported for at least 18 months. The packages are based on debians unstable tree and of course there is apt-get to manage your packages.
I downloaded the Ubuntu-Live-CD 5.04 to see how a linux for human beings looks like. It’s great! The cd started like normal knoppix or gentoo live cds, just choose your language and you are done. It came up with gnome, my favorite desktop, and all my apps I like to use. The menus in ubuntu are very clean and the desktop looks awesome. If you saw knoppix forget this image of linux with ubuntu your desktop looks great. And for noconsole users there are applications to configure your system and install packages in color and clickable 
What can I say more, I will of course stay with gentoo, but ubuntu is my recommendation for everyone who would like to have a look at linux. The live cd is also a good backup for me. So if my system is down I can use it and its a feeling like I’m still home.
Update: Even the Apple users can have a look. There is a live cd for powerpcs too. Heh, how does it feel to have a completely free software system on your expensive hardware. See some screenshots.
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