UBUNTU South Africa

[maddog1]

I ordered 6 cd's from there site and i will check it out as soon as they arrive and by the why zencoder I love the jpg's as specially the ubuntu one.

[sweet_angel]

Ubuntu..it's ok I like it...what about CentOS? www.centos.org clone of red hat linux enterprise 3 and 4 server.
I've been using centos 3.5 version for testing server, it's stabil too like ubuntu...I've tried to install Centos server for my old sister school and they love it..so far.

[thehorse13]

Heh, funny you mention. I have CentOS 3.5 running in my lab. I'm still looking for time to upgrade to 4.1.

I'm happy with it thus far. I have quite a bit of tests to run though.

[XTC46]

*waits for cds to arrive*

[aCk]

How do you guys find configurability of this OS? Having installed it and played for a brief while it seems the configuration options are limited. Everything looks to be read only when your logged in as a user meaning even trying to change your X11 options is a pain. Plus the update service seems to have a number of broken files which lead to very little being installed overall?

Thoughts?

[foxyloxley]

I'm still waiting for mine too

me LIKES freebies

[zencoder]

Originally posted here by aCk
How do you guys find configurability of this OS? Having installed it and played for a brief while it seems the configuration options are limited. Everything looks to be read only when your logged in as a user meaning even trying to change your X11 options is a pain. Plus the update service seems to have a number of broken files which lead to very little being installed overall?

Thoughts?

Well, to configure it extensively, you're going to need to be familiar with Debian, since that is the basis OS for Ubuntu.

It has a little bit more security than most Linux installs, at least in ideology. By default, it disables the root account (no password, it's given an illegal character in the /etc/shadow file, which disables the account from interactive login.) The first user you setup, during the install process, is automatically given SUDO access to all system resources. The Gnome configuration (not sure about KDE on Kubuntu) is aware of this and uses gnome-sudo for priviledged commands.

As for broken files, I have no idea what your talking about. It uses the very robust apt package management system, and configs a single repository of your installation media type when you start (i.e. install from CD-Rom, it defaults to CD-Rom for repository.) Do some reading and add a few repositories, and you'll see a world of difference. You do have to be a touch careful when adding gnome priviledged applications that are not standard to the Ubuntu distro...many of these want to use gnome-su to verify authorization...this will cause failures in Ubuntu, but is fixed relatively easily if you know how to configure Gnome applications.

It's not perfect, but no Linux distro (or windows, for that matter) is; if you want an alternative to Redhat (not just a derivitive) that is easy to use, this is my first recommendation.

[aCk]

<-- just got back from setting up debconf5

The package issues are caused by one of the default sources being broken right now.

As for the root issue, its easily solved "sudo passwd root".

Even still there are certainly greater limitations to this distro than to a default debian install, having spoken to a couple of debians developers about the distro they seemed to like it, however still felt debain had the best setup (unsupprisingly lol). I will keep plugging away tommorrow when I have had some sleep, currently Ive been running for about 27 hours, things are a little blurry.. *shakes fist at debconf*