Kubuntu, first impressions.

[Colin Pinkney]

Hi there,

On Sunday 03 December 2006 00:32, Renaud (Ron) Olgiati wrote:
> Just finished installing Kubuntu 6.06; first impressions:
Actually Kubuntu is at 6.10 now, which has several enhancements, but in any 
case...

> Impression, Kubuntu has departed from Linux standards, for no visible
> reason:
>
> For instance, why mount partitions on /media/ instead of /mnt/ ?

It is standard for removeable devices:
http://www.pathname.com/fhs/pub/fhs-2.3.html#MEDIAMOUNTPOINT

> The root user has been done away with; in many cases (schools etc) you will
> still need a special admin account; so what is the point of making this
> different from root ?

This can be a point of contention, however, the first user setup is a 'power 
user' that can use sudo by typing their own password. Presumably schools and 
other institutions would know this and this would be the admin account when 
it is setup. Many think that using sudo instead of logging in as root is 
safer for various reasons. For example you have to explicitly type sudo to 
execute a command as root so there is a reduced chance of running commands as 
root when that wasn't the intention and sudo will also periodically ask for 
your password so even if you left a terminal unlocked for a time, chances are 
sudo would ask for the user's password again if someone else were to come 
along try and do something mischievous.

> As installed, the serial mouse did not work, and I had to vi xorg.conf to
> get it working.
>
> As installed, the network cards were not configured; when I ran the config
> it offered me eth0 and eth1, without telling me what card was on each, and
> I had to try an IP adress on one, and go to a console to try to ping my
> firewall, to know which was which.

Sounds like you have a non-standard setup. Most people have PS/2 or USB mice 
which generally work out of the box. Also most people only have one network 
card and in general this is setup automatically too. Yes it needs some work 
on this, but hardware setup is something that most Linux distros have trouble 
with because there are so many hardware configurations out there.

> As installed, because there was no Internet working yet, all the listed
> repositories in /etc/apt/source-list had been commented out; so I had to vi
> source.list to get that working.

Adept, the official Kubuntu package manager can edit the source list file for 
you. No need for the console and vi.

-- 
Colin Pinkney
http://www.cpinkney.org.uk