Ubuntu v6.0 worth a look

I've deliberatly not posted this in the Linux forum, because I though this might inspire someone who *hasn't* used linux before

I'd been using v5 of Ubuntu for some time quite happily, but I thought I'd take a look at version 6... heres what happened.

First I must explain I got bitten in the arse royally in the early days of v5, luckly I knew how to configure grub manually so didnt need to reinstall windows from scratch like a load of people did....

Anyhow you can imagine my slight trepidation, if its not broke dont fix it! I spent an hour downloading the cd and I have to say I'm delighted with the results.

At first I thought I'd got the wrong cd as its a live cd install, after using the simple networking gui to change the networking details (it defaults to dhcp which most people will be using) there I was chatting on msn to people while installing ubuntu...

Yes thats right you are *actually* allowed to use you computer, while its doing trivial things like installing an OS. (all said an done its just copying files and changing a bunch of configs...)

If you're new to linux or not sure what a partition is, then you'd be better off putting linux on a second hard drive, othewise just leave 10 or 20 gig free and select manual partitioning, and everthing else is very straight forward.

The Ubuntu team have obviously worked very hard on this, and if you are new to linux its *very* well worth a look.
Its very polished and there is tonnes of software just waiting to be installed...

There is also a wealth of information on the forums and wiki too.

The only down side is the help viewer in blitzmax in Linux, but I have a good idea that someone is writing a gtk driver for maxgui, so there will probably be a new (gtk) ide binary floating around before long with a proper html viewer.

So if you've always thought, hmm I'll have to look at linux some time, then maybe now is the time!

What I would like is a Linux that can boot from a data key. I believe there are some around...

HMM, I tried linux a while ago, Fedora Core 3 and aboot-from-CD version- Knoppix I think?

Sounds like this one's worth a look. I'd like to give Max a try on linux :)

I run all my Linux builds under VMWare on Windows XP so I keep all of my functionality of my Windows OS and can use the odd Linux thing when I need to. IMHO this is by far the best way to run Linux, you can have several builds, snapshot them in case everything goes wrong, gain the functionality you want from either OS without rebooting, it's very useful. And when you don't need your Linux OS's for a while you can compress the "disk" file and save some space rather than having a dedicated hard disk wasted. It also means I can install any build of Linux (or any other OS) and still keep working / playing / doing whatever. I can also share information between my OS's very easily, ideal if you are going to be modifiying different builds of an application from one OS to the other.

Darkheart

I have access to Vitual PC - maybe I'll use this. Can anyone recommend a good Linux for MAx?

Ubnuntu or Fedora 4 seem to be the most commonly used, Virtual PC will work too but tends to be less Linux friendly than VMWare.

Darkheart

I've never used Linux, but when I heard about the LiveCD stuff, I downloaded it (half a mb a sec on bittorrent), burned it. It wont work when I start it up in the normal mode "Start or Install Ubunut", I have to select the graphics safe mode (because of my ATI drivers?).

Im too scared to install it cause I don't know what will happen to my Windows :P

you're really not see the power of linux in a virtual machine, but then if its just casual use...

BRL seem rather slow in their Linux support Which is a real shame (skidracer doesnt even know how to configure his xserver correctly with ubuntu! ;) ) and fix's are slow in coming, theres not even a linux demo...

Ah well... It least it compiles stuff, even if the help browser is broken you can at least use firefox for the help!

I've been VERY pleased with Dapper ever since I got my wlan working yesterday.
Wasn't actually that complicated, either... just had to install the new ndiswrapper from source (easier to do here, since all the utilities can be quickly grabbed off the install CD with a short trip to the Synaptic package manager) and use a downloaded driver from Asus.

I've just used it to compile DSLinux... took about an hour.
Then I transfered it over to the ext-2 partition on my CF card, which Windows doesn't know how to talk to :)

Updates are excellent with Ubuntu, too. Completely transparent, and the only time I've been told to restart is when doing a major upgrade from Breezy to the Dapper alpha version.

To anyone looking to keep their web browsers the same, I recommend Google Browser Sync.


Edit:
And it's not 6.0; it's 6.06 :)
The version numbers are actually the release date... I've come to prefer that method since it tells us a lot more than just 5.0, except that it can end up with dates being pretty rigid which isn't exactly good for initial bugs.

Being a complete Linux virgin, I finally took the plunge and installed Dapper on an external drive last week. I must say that the whole process was ridiculously easy. I even found installing the NVidia drivers simple and I'm not sure what all the fuss was about.

I was particularly impressed with how easy it is to add and remove packages, thanks to Synaptic.

All in all, I'm pleasantly surprised at how painless the whole process has been. :o)

The BMax IDE on Linux is a bit of a dog, sadly. I found trying to debug even the simplest of programs next to impossible and the help system, as mentioned, is unusable.

"you're really not see the power of linux in a virtual machine, but then if its just casual use..."

Chris could you elaborate a bit? I've had Linux installs on other partitions and hard disks before and found that most of the time it was usually a waste of a disk or parition as invariably I use XP as my main OS because it has all my games / apps on it.

For me VMWare gives me Linux when I want it, without having to reboot and I can have multiple flavours whenever I want.

What am I missing out on?

Darkheart

anyone know if linux handles SLI video cards well enough that I should give it a shot?

The problem is even if it does handle an SLI setup well (doubtful as porting new bleeding edge features to linux is rarely I high priority for Nvidia) what are you going to play on Linux to use it?

There just isn't enough stuff available to make it worth it. Sure you can use Transgaming but anything you can play on Transgaming you can play on Windows, usually better and your paying a subscription just to play it on Linux.

This the main reason why I have a Windows XP main OS and Linux VMs and not the other way round. Just for laughs I do have VMWare's Linux VMWare Server product installed on one of my Linux VM's so I can have Windows, Running Linux, Running Windows. Yeah I know, but I'm an I've been working 15 years in IT so...

Darkheart

basically used nativly linux even with a heavy weight windows manager like kde, is much slicker than XP, which is frequently slow, and unresponsive in comparison,

file access is much better to, a case in point would be recompiling all modules in blitzmax, on linux its much faster.

thin your linux out with xfce for the windows manager and it will run on even very elderly hardware, that XP wont even entertain (thou you usually need a decent amount of memory!)
Xubuntu install cd is a ready to go lightend distro btw

If you take the time to learn how to use the shell effectivly, it makes windows command look like a joke, its very powerful.

Before coding a firewall util in C / gtk I prototyped it in perl, this would have been far less do-able in windows

Then theres general security and virus "threat", Linux by its nature has always been a secure multiuser enviroment, before windows XP such things were considered unneeded, but then before XP windows was little more than a toy, that launched games.

If all you do with a computer is play games, you'd be better off with an xbox >:) (thats what I use mine for, theres linux on that too...!)

That only scratches the surface of what your missing, if your prepared to actually learn how Linux works, its amazingly flexible.

The myth that nvidia 3d suport is somehow substantually slower than windows is simply not true, (max opengl aint right cracky unless you run it as a windows exe, yes believe it or not last time I checked the same code compiled in windows runs faster in Linux than a linux compiled app, go figure!!)

Write your app in C and openGL and you can achieve some blistering speeds...

So if all your using you pc for is games and the odd bit of programming you may as well keep to windows, if you want somthing more flexible, that *you* have complete control over then Linux is for you...

The only thing I use XP for these days is to play around with the Wintermute Engine (for making point and click adventure games). The rest of the time I use Ubuntu, and I'm very happy with it. I'd never choose to go back to using XP now for my day to day tasks.

I'm a big [big, big, big, ect.] Linux fan here (Obviously, as I talk about it all the time), and I just finally got the time to try out Ubuntu (Which I'd never tried out before) and I must say it is quite nice, and to all the non-Linux user people that ask me about Linux (When they see my t-shirts :P), I will now suggest this to them. I'm sticking with Slackware for myself though, but I found Ubuntu to be quite nice (Although I prefer something smaller than GNOME, say Blackbox ;)).

This thread was the last straw on the camel's back. So many threads everywhere were popping up about the new Ubuntu, so I gave the Ubuntu distro try :]

Take a look in the Ubuntu 6.06 thread in the Linux part of this forum. A bit more mixed oppinions there. A number of people have been having problems with the latest version of Ubuntu. I had 5, but trying to first update to 6.06 directly from within Ubuntu and failing at the very end of the process, leaving me with a broken install. Then trying to re-install it from scratch, which didn't work either. After messing around for a while, I just gave up and let WinXP gobble up the partition that used to be Ubuntu.

I liked the look and feel of Ubuntu 5.0, but just couldn't be bothered spending more time on trouble shooting the new install. Maybe I'll give it a shot a few versions down the road, when they've hopefully fixed these bugs.

So my suggestion is, if you're new to it, try the cd version first...where you don't need to install anything. If that works, you'll likely be able to install it without much trouble. Also, if GRUB no longer gives you an option to boot Windows, it's probably only the Windows menu entry that has been commented out in the GRUB menu config file. No big deal to fix, but scared me the first time it happened. :)

Ragnar

Don't trust the live CD as a demo of the speed of the OS, though... it's way slower than the real thing.

All my problems with the distro have now been solved, but probably the reason why I have no realy hardware trouble is because the computer it's on has 5 year old hardware.

Still, with all the stuff from NVidia and ATI driver troubles, the graphics and network drivers should really be the two most important things for the installer to worry about... OpenOffice can wait until the computer is started up and connected to the Internet.
I guess a good solution to obvious problems from that would be multiple releases with different configurations of preinstalled software.

Anyway, Ubuntu is no different from Windows in terms of initial bugs. Everyone goes on about how they are going to wait for Vista service pack 1, so it doesn't hurt at all to wait a while for Dapper, either :)
(With the only difference being that Ubuntu doesn't do Service Packs).

@Erroneouss theres a version of ubuntu that specifically doesnt use gnome or kde Xubuntu that would be right up your street!