Love @ first sight
Few days ago in some blogs, I read about Ubuntu. The strange name made me curious to know more about it. On the website there is enough information abuout their name and their purpose. I think the initiator of project has taken the marketing strategy of some of successful Linux distributions to his heart.
Well, open source doesn’t mean free beer. You may need to pay for it. Its all about freedom to use it. Well, I will not drive myself in explaining whats the open-source. But my whole point is, there is nothing wrong done by Red Hat, Novell, Sun, SuSE and Mandrake by selling their distributions.
To give a serious try, I just downloaded the ubuntu for AMD64 platform. The whole distribution was only on a single CD. You can find a live version of Ubuntu too! I burned it and started the installation. Its having very less differences than the Red Hat installation version. But without much questions it got installed into my system. I liked the way it got installed. Initially it installed only necessary and very frequently used packages like browser, mail client and other stuff. Most of the times, Red Hat made me impossible to download their distribution due to its heavy size. It will deliver you all the packages whether you want them or not. And at the time of installation you need to swim in the sea of package lists to identify what really you need. Otheriwise spend around 6-7 GB space on your hard disk for complete installation. I really dont mind to have all of them, but there is no choice, and thats only complain. Everytime I need to run for the burned CDs from some vendors or order them. I could easily add/remove programs from the system without any command line operation. I think, this is good for the persons who are habituated of using Windows control panel.
I was very glad to see that without any complex with windows, ubuntu team included MyComputer into their desktop. Actually, its needed. Non techie people find it very hard to locate their files on linux based systems in the beginning. The lay man’s problem is to learn linux by making anologies with windows and that creates very big problems sometimes. When linux has a cleaner implementation of file system people want to make it complex by splitting everything into drives and in MyComputer as root folder. I find Linux or any unix has very simple concept of ‘/’ file system. Every device is a file. If you understand this phenomenon very well, you dont need the concept of MyComputer and its related things.
But ubuntu team has finely integrated the things which will make any beginner or windows user to adjust with it quickly. My network card, graphics card and sound card was detected without any problem and everything started running smoothly. I simply fallen in love with ubuntu in first sight. Belive me, ubuntu is great desktop for business workstation. Where you can have office suite, email client, higher security than windows and competent software bundle. Worth to give a try. I think, there is a little room for improvement in the themes section. More choice for user interface and sound alerts should be provided in basic installation. Rest things are simply rocking.