[GRLUG] My Ubuntu Trial

[Ron Lauzon]

I posted this to my blog, but since that's mainly for friends and 
relatives to keep up with what's going on in my life, I think I'll post 
it here for you to see as well.  Give me a moment to put on my asbestos 
undershorts.  8-)


      My Ubuntu Trial

While at Penguicon, I was around a whole lot of people who were 
promoting Ubuntu Linux. They seemed to really like it, so I decided to 
give it a try here at home. So I wiped Akane and reloaded her with Ubuntu.

First impressions are that it's very polished. They spent a whole lot of 
time making the installation painless for many users. Hardware support 
seems very good.

But can it do everything that Mandriva can? I decided to find out.

First off, I did not turn Akane into a "Motoko with Ubuntu". I only took 
it to a point where I was sure that I could get everything running. So 
once I reached a certain level of functionality, I simply verified that 
someone else got X working on Ubuntu and that they described what they 
did (like VMWare, for example) and left it at that.

Installation:
At first, both Ubuntu and Mandriva are pretty much tied. There are 
differences (Ubuntu gets most of its packages off the web, while 
Mandriva has the option of getting all the packages from the set of 
install CDs). But as far as ease of installation, it's about the same - 
for an normal workstation.

Installing the more advanced things (like Apache) was a bit more 
problematic on Ubuntu. Not that it was hard, but with Mandriva, I simply 
need to select "Web server" from the main installation screen and 90% of 
the packages that I need are installed. Ubuntu requires more attention 
and knowledge to know what packages to install - but, then, anyone doing 
the install should be able to figure that out.

Another issue is that many things that I consider "necessary" aren't 
installed by default and there is no appearant way to install them. One 
was MP3 support. It simply didn't work "out of the box" like Mandriva. 
Now, once online, you can find very simple instructions on how to 
install MP3 support, but still it doesn't "just work" like Mandriva.

Partitioning was also different. In Mandriva, the standard partitions 
are /, swap and /home. This works very nice because the vast majority of 
stuff that you want to save between installations will be on /home. So 
you can safely wipe / and install a new version. Ubuntu only did a / and 
swap, making it more difficult to load a new version without having to 
backup/restore the /home directories.

Hardware support:
A plus for Ubuntu was that it supported my Palm via USB upon install. 
Mandriva still doesn't do that - even with the latest version. However, 
a minus was that Ubuntu didn't support the onboard sound on Akane while 
Mandriva did. This was minor since I just installed the old Sound 
Blaster card and everything worked.

Security:
Ubuntu does security a little differently.

With Mandriva, on install, I am prompted for the root password. Then a 
regular user is created. This regular user is not privileged in any way.

With Ubuntu, the root account is not active - you can't sign in. Only a 
single "regular" user account is created. This first account gets sudo 
anything access. So effectively, this "normal" account is priviledged - 
with only the user's password for the security.

This is out of the ordinary and really doesn't offer any extra 
protection. On Ubuntu you would need to create another normal user that 
is non-prilileged to get what I would consider to be a secure system.

Not to say that sudo is bad. But as a replacement for root/su, it just 
doesn't cut it.

Applications:
Everything that I needed worked (or at least someone showed that they 
worked). Some applications (like the latest Firefox and Thunderbird) 
required special libraries to be loaded - but worked out of the box with 
Mandriva.


Bottom line:
I cannot recommend Ubuntu, but neither can I tell someone to avoid it. 
It offers no noticeable advantage over Mandriva, but neither does it 
have any significant drawbacks.

For schools, Ubuntu is probably a good choice. For "normal users" Ubuntu 
would also be a good choice - but only if an expert is setting up the 
system.
For power users, normal users without an expert and businesses, Mandriva 
is probably a better choice.

The Mom Factor (i.e. if I were to build a system for my Mom):
I would choose Mandriva over Ubuntu - for 2 main reasons:
1. (the biggest) it's the one that I am most familiar with and, so, I 
would find long distance support to be easier.
2. Mandriva is closer to the "it just works" ideal than Ubuntu.

For reference, I am compairing Mandriva 2006 Power Pack with Ubuntu 5.10.

-- 
Ron Lauzon - rlauzon at acm dot org
   Homepage: http://7lauzon.home.comcast.net/
   Weblog: http://ronsapartment.blogspot.com/

   DNRC: Lord of All Things That Are Fattening

   "To be sure, conservative radio talk show hosts have a built-in
   audience unavailable to liberals: People driving cars to some
   sort of job." - Ann Coulter

Microsoft Free since July 06, 2001
Running Mandriva Linux 2005LE