Kubuntu, first impressions.

Daniel Pittman daniel at rimspace.net
Sun Dec 3 08:54:01 UTC 2006


"Renaud (Ron) Olgiati" <renaud at olgiati-in-paraguay.org> writes:

> Just finished installing Kubuntu 6.06; first impressions:
>
> Impression, Kubuntu has departed from Linux standards, for no visible
> reason:
>
> For instance, why mount partitions on /media/ instead of /mnt/ ?

As others have pointed out this is actually a move to /more/
standardisation, not less, and is part of the FHS that most
distributions have agreed to follow.

> 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 ?

Run 'man 8 sudo_root' to get the detailed explanation from the Ubuntu
developers; if you look at their disadvantages summary you will note
that they do identify that some "special cases" don't fit so well with
this.

The Ubuntu Server project is, by the way, addressing that particular
foible (directory service integration) in an organised fashion, and one
which the other client variants are likely to benefit from.


> Impression, Kubuntu is for geeks;
>
> As installed, the serial mouse did not work, and I had to vi xorg.conf
> to get it working.

Serial mice have never really been possible to autodetect and, frankly,
are no longer really a supported or interesting item.

Directly connected and external dedicated hardware is almost uniformly
PS/2 these days, which is automatically detected.  Other mice are USB
and, again, are automatically detected -- and hot-plug capable -- out of
the box.

> As installed, the network cards were not configured; 

That should have happened out of the box -- even with multiple network
cards.  If you submit a bug report including the install log I am sure
the developers will be interested in fixing the problem.

Assuming, of course, that you didn't have the machine disconnected from
the network and answer "leave it unconfigured" to the network questions.

> 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.

Multiple network cards is not a common configuration, and is less well
tested.

If you had a cable plugged into only one interface then the installer
would have defaulted to that, and the LiveCD should have found it and
used that after installation.

If you had cables plugged into both then, yes, you need to tell Ubuntu
which you intend to use as your primary interface -- and configure the
second by hand.


As to the lack of information on which card is which, well, that is an
unsolvable problem.  The best that could have been done was to tell you
what hardware was driving each port, which is highly technical and in
many cases identical on both ports in a machine.

There is no way, short of magic, to tell which physical connector on a
machine is related to which Linux interface -- because there is no
standard 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.
>
> How is the non-geek user, fresh from MS Windows, supposed to deal with
> things like that ?

Normally people don't install Ubuntu without a network connection, on a
machine with two network cards, and expect it to intuit what
configuration it should use out of the box.

The comment on the 'sources.list' file is probably relevant, and you
might choose to file a bug report on it, or on the other issues you felt
were in the installer.

Those bug reports or enhancement requests are the only way that you are
likely to see things improve, by the way.  

Regards,
        Daniel
-- 
Digital Infrastructure Solutions -- making IT simple, stable and secure
Phone: 0401 155 707        email: contact at digital-infrastructure.com.au
                 http://digital-infrastructure.com.au/





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