initial notes on unubtu

[Matt Zimmerman]

I'm following up to an email from a friend of mine who just tried out Ubuntu
for the first time.  He has previous experience with Debian.

On Tue, Sep 14, 2004 at 01:01:46PM -0400, giles hall wrote:

> I play with it anytime I have ten minutes.  Here are my initial remarks. 
> Let me know what I can get you more detail on.
> 
> I like the Zebra print.
> 
> The installer configured all my hardware perfectly, and hopped on the net
> without even mentioning it.  Neat.
> 
> Partioning:
> 
> In guided partioning, are some people going to get pinched if you don't
> automatically make a /boot for them at the front of the drive?

I think this is only a problem if you choose certain filesystems, and I
believe it tries to warn you in those cases.  Colin?

> I like the diverse file systems choices.  I'm installed with ReiserFS.  With
> lots of partitions, it's painful to change the FS type.
> 
> Booting for first time:
> 
> I got all sorts of Device Mapper errors.

What did the errors say?  There was a similar-sounding problem earlier
(https://bugzilla.no-name-yet.com/show_bug.cgi?id=313) but it's been fixed
for a week or so now; unless you downloaded an old CD image, you should have
the fix.

> NTP on boot?!  Wow, nice touch.  Don't you need to ask if my clock is 
> local or
> not?  What if I'm multibooting with winblows?

We default to assuming the hardware clock is set to UTC.  There has been
talk about automatically changing the default if there are Windows-ish
operating systems present, since we already detect them in order to
configure grub, which I think is a good solution to this problem.

> I'm impressed with the list of packages you are automatically going to
> install.  Some of them, I just don't think I would of selected.  Like, I'm
> not using this machine for sound, but Oggvorbis is going on.  Seems kind
> of persumptious, but then again, this is desktop linux I guess.

Yes.  It's hard to find a desktop system these days which does not have
sound hardware; it's become a core part of desktop functionality, and so we
support it by default.

> The documentation generation is failing all over the place.  All i'm
> seeing is " Not well formed XML over and over again.  The docbook.
> Failed to load external entity.  Looks really messy, but it was too fast
> to see details.
>
> Python-newt 0.51.6-9 gave me python future warnings.
> 
> I got an error message about CUPS.  Perhaps there should be a guided 
> setup for p
> rinters?

This really starts to sound like you have an old CD.  Which one did you
download?

> What if I want to run KDE?  Can't I have the choice?

All of the remaining software from Debian unstable is available in the
'universe' component, which is provided commented-out in sources.list.
Though, if your CD is older, it may not be there.  To get _everything_:

deb http://archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu warty main restricted universe

"main" is what we support (including security updates), "restricted"
contains somewhat less-supportable software which we still attempt to
support (e.g., proprietary drivers), and "universe" is everything else
available in packaged form, without official support.

> Sadly, it did not detect my audio hardware automatically.

What kind of sound device do you have?  Could you send lspci -v output?

-- 
 - mdz