[GRLUG] My Ubuntu Trial

[Roberto Villarreal]

That was a nice write-up Ron.  Informative, and void of flames.  It would be 
interesting to hear others' accounts of attempting a side-by-side comparison 
like you did.  

Though, for what it's worth, I was the recipient of a Mandriva box (from 
you)... I ended up having to wipe up and put Debian on because I couldn't get 
something to work.  It had something to do with configuring stuff with the 
GUI, as the box was for my computer-dumb father.  I was able to get it to 
work fine with Debian's GUI equivalent though :-).

Roberto

On Monday 15 May 2006 7:05 pm, Ron Lauzon wrote:
> 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.