Ubuntu Upgraders: "Feisty Flake"

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AgenT · #21 Post by **AgenT** » 2007-04-21 14:42

Sounds like pure marketing. Create a second distribution that is free so that the main and popular distribution can then be jammed packed with all the non-free and propriatary software that will fit into it. And when people start to complain, the marketing folks can say: "but look here, we have a free as in freedom distro!". The "new" distro being just gNewSense with a new name (gNubuntu?).

It just sounds like an excuse to create a fully fledged propriatary distribution, go back and dismiss everything that the distribution stood for and the creator promised (staying true to the debian spirit, staying true to freedom, humanity to others, etc.) and have an "excuse" to do it. But that should not be a surprise from an organization who always championed freedom software yet their only major software being close-source and proprietary (launchpad). Not to mention their anti-Debian behavior.

jml · #22 Post by **jml** » 2007-04-21 17:35

Just to add my two cents, I think that the there is a place for both philosophies. In 1999 when I first tried Linux, Redhat and Mandrake were "relatively" easy to install, but their package management applications drove me nuts! Let me tell you RPM hell is real. I had heard that Debian had better package management, but I was never able to get Woody installed. If it were not for distros like Mepis (pre-Ubuntu,) and Libranet, I probably would have given up on Linux. Now I will admit that Etch has made huge advances in ease of installation, maintenance, and use. I run it on my work laptop at home and love it. The stability and speed can't be beat.

But for new users, Linux has a few issues that make the transition from other proprietary OS's difficult: Wireless networking, 3D graphics drivers, multimedia support, proprietary codecs to name a few. In so far as the the "easy to use" distros make new users' transition to Linux a bit less painful, I see that as a good thing. I suspect that many Ubuntu users will gradually migrate to Debian or other distros when the outgrow the need for the hand holding that new users find helpful.

Joe

llivv · #23 Post by **llivv** » 2007-04-22 08:54

I think you make a very good point jml. In theory, if it's easy to migrate in steps the path to desktop market share also increases in steps. I see a problem with this theroy, only because of what I have noticed here the last few days. Users come to the forum and make apparently sincere requests for help in their first post. But in their second post they begin to reveal their true nature, going so far as to start bashing debian regarding things they have tried both with debian and with other dists already.These things were obviously not mentioned in their first post for whatever reason. And I believe some actually have been lead to believe that this type of behavior is the way to enlightenment. I guess their are pros and cons to the step by step method of migration as well as the complete change of OS lifestyle approch. but it does create a lot of hostility within the various Linux communities as well as between users of other competing OS's Either way I guess it better than letting a commercial competitor force feed it's own hacked up proprietary version to it's users, and than setting them upon unsuspecting communities.

rennen01 · #24 Post by **rennen01** » 2007-04-22 14:14

I use Ubuntu 6.10. I am going to wait for all the bugs to get worked out before I upgrade.

As far as the guys saying they got tired of upgrading every 6 months, I have a simple solution: Don't upgrade every 6 months

Burnside · #25 Post by **Burnside** » 2007-04-22 16:50

rennen01 wrote:I use Ubuntu 6.10. I am going to wait for all the bugs to get worked out before I upgrade.

As far as the guys saying they got tired of upgrading every 6 months, I have a simple solution: Don't upgrade every 6 months

Unless I'm mistaken not upgrading means no more security updates to your packages, right? That's a big deal.

plb · #26 Post by **plb** » 2007-04-22 18:26

No, each release is supported for 18 months is it? With the exception of the LTS.

jml · #27 Post by **jml** » 2007-04-22 23:48

plb is right. Standard Ubuntu releases have security updates for 18 months after release. Ubuntu 6.06 LTS distro offers "Long Term Support" Three years for the desktop version, and five years for server version. The only problem a person faces by not upgrading regularly, is Ubuntu is "designed" to do upgrades in order. So if for example you choose to not upgrade to Feisty Fawn, if you decide later to upgrade to the one released after FF, you have to upgrade to Feisty Fawn first, then upgrade to the release you really want. (I have not confirmed this, but I did read about this on the Ubuntu Forum.)

While Etch is my main distro on my home computer, I travel with a 13" laptop that I bought from System 76. In comes with Ubuntu preinstalled, and it comes with all of the hardware configured to work out of the box. My personal impression of Ubuntu 6.10 is generally favorable, but it seems to run just a bit slower than Etch. And, I do what rennen01 does. I wait a week or two before I do a dist-upgrade in Ubuntu, to let the dust settle. Luckily most of my Debian skills apply nicely to Etch.

Joe

Pobega · #28 Post by **Pobega** » 2007-04-23 00:36

jml, just a suggestion; I'm using a System76 laptop too, and I find Debian suits my needs a lot better. All you need to know is what extra packages to install (915 resolution, and all of the ipw3945-related packages for my wireless) and how to configure everything (Which I assume you know) and you'll be all set.

The one thing I didn't like about System76's driver installer is that it pulled in a lot of non-free packages without warning me first (Run vrms to check!), but otherwise I love the company; No complaints!

jml · #29 Post by **jml** » 2007-04-23 02:27

Thanks for the great Idea, Pobega! Which laptop are you using? In addition to the graphics and wireless drivers, were you able to get things like memory card readers working? On many levels, I like Debian better than Ubuntu. Once I get my courage built up, I'll take the plunge.

Pobega · #30 Post by **Pobega** » 2007-04-23 11:09

jml wrote:Thanks for the great Idea, Pobega! Which laptop are you using? In addition to the graphics and wireless drivers, were you able to get things like memory card readers working? On many levels, I like Debian better than Ubuntu. Once I get my courage built up, I'll take the plunge.

I'm using a Pangolin Value, and it works perfectly fine.

3d was no problem because this laptop came with an Intel video card, so I didn't have to bother with the non-free nVidia/ATI drivers (And the Intel ones seemed to work out of the box on Debian, too!).

For the wireless drivers I needed to install a few packages from contrib/non-free, so I enabled them in my sources.list and ran:

# aptitude install firmware-ipw3945 ipw3945-modules-`uname -r` ipw3945d

Then I added the line "ipw3945" to /etc/modules, rebooted, and my wireless worked perfectly.

As for the memory card readers, do you mean the little thing in the front with the letters "SD" on it? If so, I haven't found any use for it yet, so I haven't tried to get it working; But you can try it from a Debian LiveCD or something, and if it works out of the box in Ubuntu 6.10 (Without the System76 drivers) it should work fine in Debian.

Or, you can email System76 and ask them to package their drivers for you, without the restriction of only being usable on Ubuntu.

jml · #31 Post by **jml** » 2007-04-23 15:59

Thanks again, Pobega. I had forgotten about the Debian Live CD project. I'll download it tonight when I get home and try it. The only thing I use the SD slot for is to download images stored on multiple SD cards. When I only have one card to download, I just connect my camera to my Darter and download directly. Its just more convienent to work with multiple cards without having to deal with the camera. I'll give that a try as well after I download the cd. By the way, as an avid StarWars fan from back when the first movie was new, I really like your Avatar.

Joe

Pobega · #32 Post by **Pobega** » 2007-04-23 16:03

jml wrote:Thanks again, Pobega. I had forgotten about the Debian Live CD project. I'll download it tonight when I get home and try it. The only thing I use the SD slot for is to download images stored on multiple SD cards. When I only have one card to download, I just connect my camera to my Darter and download directly. Its just more convienent to work with multiple cards without having to deal with the camera. I'll give that a try as well after I download the cd. By the way, as an avid StarWars fan from back when the first movie was new, I really like your Avatar.

Joe

Aw man, I wish I was around for that, but being 17 means I missed out on a lot of nostalgia; DOS, Unix, the internet, 70's music, and Star Wars! I've always been a fan since I was young, but to be perfectly honest I hated the new three; I thought they were garbage compared to the originals.

GMouse · #33 Post by **GMouse** » 2007-04-23 16:37

If you can find an old IBM PC somewhere, then you, too, can enjoy the pleasures of DOS.

I mean that only half-sarcastically. It was rather nice, in its own way, to run a desktop computer from the command line only. There were graphical programs, but they didn't use a mouse (didn't have one to begin with) and they were all in monochrome (green). I still remember playing "Where in the World is Carmen Sandiego" and how the coffee dispenser in the game's office would always drop a cup and pour coffee into or on it in a variety of funny ways.

Oh! And there were once these joke programs that I had. Some of the best emulated the shell, even going so far as to be able to navigate the directories and execute programs as normal, but they had something definitely off. For instance, one version spent the whole time leveling insults at the user, it was called UUDOS, and another kept trying to hit on the user. I really miss those programs, and wish that I could find something similar for Linux, now that I'm reunited with the CLI.

[/nostalgia]

ghostdawg · #34 Post by **ghostdawg** » 2007-04-23 17:37

Well, maybe some do have a point with Fiesty Fawn. I just installed the final release and now my WD external hard drive is not being picked up.

It gets to the point where it scans USB stuff but stops at the external drive.

I can't figure out why not, since the last beta release worked fine without a hitch.

O well!

Lavene · #35 Post by **Lavene** » 2007-04-23 18:16

GMouse wrote: Oh! And there were once these joke programs that I had. Some of the best emulated the shell, even going so far as to be able to navigate the directories and execute programs as normal, but they had something definitely off. For instance, one version spent the whole time leveling insults at the user, it was called UUDOS, and another kept trying to hit on the user. I really miss those programs, and wish that I could find something similar for Linux, now that I'm reunited with the CLI.
[/nostalgia]

He he. I used to write several such joke programs in PASCAL and put them in my coworkers autoexec.bat. Most of them was rather clueless when it came to computers and it sometimes really freaked them out. Like simulating a 'format c:', refuse to finish booting until the user said something nice to it, demanding a raise etc etc.

It was amazing how far I could push it some times and how gullible some people was regarding anything having to do with computers.

And of course, the stupidest was my boss. I had made a small program that, as it finished booting, printed "Your mood today is:" and some random mood. And one day he claimed ecstatically that the computer always got it right!!

Tina

jml · #36 Post by **jml** » 2007-04-23 20:07

Any "old" apple II users out there. Do you remember a program called LISA? It purported to be a computer pycho-analyst and was a hoot. It actually had a relatively simple "AI" algorythm that only took a few minutes of playing with it to figure out, but the most fun was introducing my friends and family to LISA and watch the amazed looks on their faces at the intelegence of my computer. I better stop now befor I dust off an old Lava Lamp.

Joe

esaym · #37 Post by **esaym** » 2007-04-23 20:50

rennen01 wrote:I use Ubuntu 6.10. I am going to wait for all the bugs to get worked out before I upgrade.

As far as the guys saying they got tired of upgrading every 6 months, I have a simple solution: Don't upgrade every 6 months

Yes, but the releases are full of bugs that never get fixed. So you have to upgrade to the latest version just for bug fixes

Thats ok though, it lead me to debian-testing

regeya · #38 Post by **regeya** » 2007-04-26 20:03

soldierboy wrote: I'm not trying to troll, just to let everyone know. I've been trying to help new users over there all that I can, but this release seems to be quite premature to me. The dist-upgrades are going horribly wrong, so folks are going for clean installs and those are failing as well. What say you?

I tried to dist-upgrade to Feisty, and it went badly. I tried a fresh install of Feisty, and that went a lot worse.

To be fair, they caution people to not dist-upgrade and use their GUI upgrader instead, and problems were caused by a.) my root being on LVM2 and b.) the Feisty installer incorrectly identifying my UltraATA controller as a SCSI controller.

However, the Etch installer had no such problems. So I'm going Kubuntu -> Etch.

I love Kubuntu, but yeah, they seem to be going through growing pains. I'm thinking that a predictable release cycle combined with big changes every time just don't work.

swirling_vortex · #39 Post by **swirling_vortex** » 2007-04-27 22:14

Feisty installed & ran fine for me, but I didn't like the modified installer. It also seems that every Ubuntu release runs a little bit slower. There's a noticeable difference between the boot times of Feisty & Etch. (Where was the even faster startup time Ubuntu Feisty promised us?)

That's why I put MEPIS 64 in place of Ubuntu (alongside with Etch of course). The 6.06 packages are really stable now, along with MEPIS's own updated stuff.

In my opinion, Ubuntu should do the standard 6 months of making the distro & another month or two of just serious bug testing & refining, which would also benefit Debian as well.

PurplePenguin · #40 Post by **PurplePenguin** » 2007-04-27 23:00

It's my first post at the Debian forums... I made the switch from Ubuntu to Debian the day after Feisty came out. I had tried Etch on a spare partition the day it was released and really liked it, so after hitting a couple problems with getting Feisty up and running, I cut and ran to Etch.

It's great! My home directory is on a separate partition, so the change has been slight (cosmetically, anyway). Although I like to play with new distros, they'll be staying on my spare partitions... I'm here for the stability.

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