Per Ubuntu

I have been running Linux in some form or another for a few years now. Messed around with Red Hat, looked at various others, but settled on Suse. Why, well mainly becuase as a German based distribution Suse had good and early ISDN support. That and the relative simplicity of Yast (Yest Another Setup Tool).

Starting with something like 6.4, Suse has generally got better nad better over the verison. 7.3 was good, the * series better, the 9 series up to 9.3 was really getting there and then 10 came out (under Novell's stewardship) and it all went pear shaped. Actually I'll re-phrase that the 9 series got gradually worse and 10 was rubbish.

WHat went wrong? Well, by the time we got to 10 (yeah, yeah community release and all that but it's no excuse) it became more difficult to customise and administer than previously. Options started disappearing and the whole thing became more locked down. Now, this might have been a good thing, except the downsides of Suse, specifically the package install side, didn't improve to compensate.

So looking around, what could I use. I had always been mightily impressed with Debian's apt package management and the quality of the Debian repositories, but was uncomfortable with what I felt was the somewhat hair shirtedness of the Debian crew. Of course there was always Solaris (recently open sourced of sorts), RH, yuck, BSD and NetBSD as security has always been important. I looked, tried (ah, the wonders of VMware) and then, by chance I downloaded a copy of Ubuntu - and was hooked.

The install is not as good as Suse, but I don't care I will hack away at getting the right configuration because it seems to suit me just fine. I am a real fan. It does everything I need, with minimum fuss and bother.

On the plus side, the install is quick and clean with a working system up and running is a really short itme. The package management is fantastic and does more that I could hope for (it sorted out gftp even though it seemed to have desperate conflicts). It has good version of the software that I use regularly - mostly office apps and the occasional web development tool. It just works.

On the negative side, it didn't use and SMP kernel for my dual core system, it got totally screwed setting up my dual screen configuration, and I wasn't convinced enough to try the 64 bit version (on AMD 64 x2 4200). But getting the displays working only took a short while (RTFM) and the smp kernel was downloaded and installed in a flash.

Now to try it as a server.......