May 2005 – Owen's Photolog

Moved to ubuntu yesterday. After installing and rsyncing my home directory, most of everything was working. Various tweaks were needed to restore things like some font configuration, and I needed to figure out sources.list and install a ton of packages for non-free things, but in general the install was as smooth as I could want. (Not as smooth as that damned macintosh “just hook up this firewire!” mojo which is so beautiful, but we can’t have everything).

First off, I noticed I now have 9 gigs free instead of 4. I thought that after 4 years (my install was 2001-era, upgraded continuously) I’d have more cruft than that, but redhat upgrades are pretty good quality. The other thing I noticed that does not reflect so well on my old system is how blazing fast my machine is now. I have a feeling there were a lot of crappy libraries littered about, and with them gone (and a much cleaner /usr/bin) operations that should be fast now are. Specifically the Run dialog doesn’t take 20 seconds to cache whatever it is that it cached on my old system. Lastly, synaptic and apt put yum to shame. It’s true. Peter says I’ll learn to hate weird questions upon upgrades, but I’ve only gotten one so far (“SMB: would you like to use WINS for DNS?” uh… no?). Ubuntu should really be called Und: Ubuntu is not debian. There is still some annoying separation between free and non-free which only serves as a barrier to installing software that everyone will want to use, but on the plus side I know they will actually commit to and make releases.

Right now the only things I miss about fedora are NetworkManager (the one for ubuntu crashes) and the system-config-* tree. I’m still having trouble figuring out how to configure certain things.

ok enough rambling. (I hearby announce this blog to be an “installfapper” blog).

ps: got netapplet working. yay!

Month: May 2005

distro choices

a big switch