What is Digg?62 Comments
- XVampireX, on 10/12/2007, -1/+21When will Linux for Immortals come?
- subgeniusd, on 10/12/2007, -13/+33I am still a new Digger but am already conflicted about the endless river of Ubuntu stories here in Linux/Digg. I applaud the fact that Ubuntu is speading the Linux gospel across the world. I wish them all the best and hope that Ubuntu expands every day into a BILLION dedictated users that never see another Windows splash screen as long as they live.
But can't they give it a rest here at Digg? We got the point. Great OS. Now is there anything else in the Linux Universe of interest to all of you that the rest of us might find interesting? - Darkhacker, on 10/12/2007, -13/+32The funny part is that Ubuntu is mostly a fad. Good distro... yes. But it is far from the best. Hell, it doesn't even have mp3 support out of the box. Naturally I expect the fanboys to digg me down, but they need to realize that Joe Average is NOT going to be pleased with a system that can't even play his music files for him. "But but but..." says the Fanboy... "EasyUbuntu and other tools can easily install such codecs"! Too bad so sad. Unless Joe has a geek by his side to explain to him about codecs and why it won't play, he is simply going to assume it is broken.
- kanavulator, on 10/12/2007, -1/+15It exists. It's called Linux From Scratch.
- phenolholic, on 10/12/2007, -3/+13Windows, the operating system, like Ubuntu, the operating system, cannot play mp3's out of the box. However, Microsoft, owners of Windows, stuff their own mp3 player for Joe Average. Ubuntu does not code their own mp3 player, rather give you a choice of which mp3 player fancies Joe Average. They've included a media player in their public release, but it doesn't have to be Joe Average's cup of tea, and hence Joe has a choice of what he wants rather than pre-built-part-of-OS media players. Joe Average should reap the benefits of choice, non-integrated third party applications, and a free operating system and the entrouage of free third-party applications. Most importantly, Ubuntu isn't for the average computer user, sorry Joe Average.
- joshwalderbach, on 10/12/2007, -0/+9I've had WPA working with my Dell Inspiron 9300 since I got it. Before that my Latitude D600 worked fine as well.
- rabidwalrus, on 10/12/2007, -1/+8Alright, I've come back. Are you listening?
- qartis, on 10/12/2007, -0/+6http://www.slackware.com/
I'm hoping you saw these jokes coming.. - GMorgan, on 10/12/2007, -1/+7I can't see Ubuntu adding MP3 support until the patent on the standard runs out or the holder of the patent opens the patent legally for OSS rather than saying that 'OSS is fine, I'm not going to legally take that position but carry on and I promise I won't sue'.
I don't think there will ever be a corperate addition of Ubuntu, just doesn't fit the business model. Ubuntu needs to be as widespread as possible and in order to do that it needs to have no cost and needs to appeal to GNU lot with its freeness.
If people want MP3 support out of the box they should either get Mepis at no cost or buy Linspire. Mepis basically is Ubuntu these days (well, with KDE so Kubuntu then) with MP3's. - mississippiman, on 10/12/2007, -4/+10I figure Ubuntu will be fleshed out a bit more in the next couple of distros.. But yeah, it still has a long way to go
- inactive, on 10/12/2007, -2/+7Ubuntu is "the distro of choice" currently. There was a time when Red Hat news and even Gentoo was all the rage. At any given time, there is a certain amount of buzz about Linux which is a constant, and that just happens to be coming in the form of a lot of Ubuntu news lately, which is occupying the variable.
Consider that free software doesn't have the whopping megabucks to buy Superbowl ads (and those banners on every webpage advertising Microsoft; you haven't seen any of those lately, have you?). At least free software, making no money off of gaining new adopters, is only shared by people who genuinely believe in the product, and not because they're paid to talk about it. - Jacob, on 10/12/2007, -0/+5works fine for me in ubuntu... oh you must not know how to install the network manager. What you do is go to synaptic search for it, click it and say apply. After that you should be golden.
Oh yeah you need to enter your password when they ask for it. - GMorgan, on 10/12/2007, -0/+5Ah Linux From Scratch, the first place you go when another GNU fan screams about how procreation wouldn't exist without GNU. Then you take LFS and create a Linux with the BSD userland and all the madness just disappears and you have silent tranquility knowing that if you were bothered you could post a few screen shots and say Linux without the GNU/ as much as you like.
- lagartoflojo, on 10/12/2007, -0/+4make install? What are your friends using, Slackware 2.0? Is installing software in Windows really easier to you than typing "sudo apt-get install programname" at a command prompt? Or easier than opening a program (Synaptic, for instance) that lists over 18.000 packages ready to be installed by just clicking on them? No going to each program's website, downloading the install file, finding it in your hard drive, following some wizard that asks a bunch of questions most users don't understand, and only then being able to use your program.
When I installed Ubuntu on my laptop, everything worked (including wifi, the included card reader, hibernation, etc). I didn't have to download my printer's nor my scanner's drivers!
As to support, I don't know if your friends looked for it in the right places. Ubuntu has its own forums at www.ubuntuforums.org and there is an extremely useful and friendly community for other distros at www.linuxquestions.org - sdubois92, on 10/12/2007, -0/+4Im using ubuntu right now along side my macbook. Im not one of those Linux geeks who thinks everything but O/S is evil, I just think Microsoft is Evil, well, more ***** than evil.
- rabidwalrus, on 10/12/2007, -0/+4Um, the same way as the other stories do. People vote for them. Like it or leave it. If you don't like the democratic process go back to slashdot.
- montagg, on 10/12/2007, -0/+4I like the line "You have to be a bit of a hobbyist. But you don't have to be a masochist." Very honest.
- nixdoctor, on 10/12/2007, -1/+4If you're tired of Ubuntu stories, don't digg them. That's the easiest way.
- thepxc, on 10/12/2007, -0/+3"Linux for mere mortals..."?
GNU/Linux really isn't all that hard to learn to use. Being a self-taught Linux user of a few years now at the age of fifteen, I can say that it's not that difficult. The problem, though, is that it takes some time, and the mistakes can really hurt you. I'm lucky enough that I have several computers around, so if I break one (nail my partition table, for example), I can take my time learning how things work to fix them. It's not that it's _hard_ to install and maintain Linux. It's more of a "why bother?" type of thing. The only times I've been able to convince someone else to use Linux, is when they bork their Windows install, or they want a specialized distribution for a specific reason. - rabidwalrus, on 10/12/2007, -0/+3What about gentoo? Haven't tried it myself (I always thought compiling the entire system from source was rather stupid and unnecessary)
- transeunte, on 10/12/2007, -1/+3"The funny part is that Ubuntu is mostly a fad. Good distro... yes. But it is far from the best."
Your suggestion is...?
I could really make use of another distro instead of sheer irony. - lowerlogic, on 10/12/2007, -2/+3How do Ubuntu stories still make the frontpage?
- GMorgan, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1Is easier since they dropped support for stage 1 and 2 but still takes some knowledge beyond most people (I'm taking about the minimal stage 3 install via the console here since I did one today, there is a desktop installer but that just gets in the way of me but may be easier for most). There is a guide which works if followed strictly but I can imagine most non technical users making a spelling mistake and borking /etc/fstab or something.
The compiling of everything is useful though is unneeded for most users. Don't forget Gentoo can work like apt with prebuilt packages as well. Personally I find it useful on older machines (the one I did today is an Athlon 800) where you want to squeeze every last drop of power out of the machine to make it more useful. - GMorgan, on 10/12/2007, -1/+2I think the fact that Ubuntu has been top of distrowatch for 2 years solid means its not a fad*. Most the fad comments are attributable to Debian users who are annoyed that Shuttleworth started his own project rather than gave his money to Debian.
*how long must something utterly dominate mindshare before its not considered a fad I wonder. - inactive, on 10/12/2007, -2/+3windows also doesn't have any support for sound or network adapter's, you have to install drivers for it. in ubuntu those two were working after i installed.
- oldman, on 10/12/2007, -1/+2 What really needs to rest around here is people bitching about what's news! I personally think its fabulous that all subjects are posted. Don't like it No one forces you to read anything, and you can (if you just become a member) opt out of story types in a fairly easy way and you don't have to even see Linux stories if you don't want them. Or stories about what utube is showing, or sports stories or whatever.
- inactive, on 10/12/2007, -1/+2I prefer my RHELv4 over unbuntu. Ubuntus sudo schema for administration isnt for me.
- wfmk, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1The author wrote that it was Linux for mere mortals, and by the third paragraph he was using terminology that mere mortals would not understand.
Ubuntu is indeed nice, but as PJBonoVox wrote, WPA-PSK is a real pain to get working. - Smokezz, on 10/12/2007, -1/+2You don't need a technician to install pretty much any of the newer Linux distros...
- felchdonkey, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1Try running Ubuntu on any modern widescreen laptop. It's still a hobbyist's OS.
I love it, don't get me wrong, but searching Google to find out why I couldn't get the right aspect ratio, then making sure I knew what kind of video chipset I had so I could pick between 855resolution and 915resolution packages, then activating universal and multiverse repositories in a vain hope to find them through apt, finally having to download the deb files myself, and even then having to edit files so I wouldn't have to reset the resolution in a CLI every time I reboot...
It works, just not for 'mere mortals.' - GMorgan, on 10/12/2007, -1/+2Windows doesn't have MP3 support out of the box, for the most part its added by OEM's but standard XP has no MP3 encoding though it does have playback.
- kettlechips, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1Oh no it's officer gxcdesign! Hide your stash!
- Shadowman, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1Windows XP was released 5 years ago! Ubuntu 6.06 was released a few months ago! Obviously Ubuntu will have better support for newer hardware. Is Microsoft expected to look into the future and include drivers for hardware not manufactured yet? Why not complain about how Windows 98 doesn't have drivers for the laptop you bought last week?
- daborg, on 10/12/2007, -1/+2I tried Ubuntu the other day, wanted to see what the fuss was all about. I was even going to install it on some space I had made on my hard drive... except Ubuntu didn't recognize the totally standard RAID-0 configuration of my drives. Game over, Ubuntu. Not sure why it's got such a great reputation.
- GMorgan, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1Really users have it easy today. With VMware you can install a distro, take a snapshot and smash hell out of it with no fear of consequences. Also hardware is so cheap its actually economical to buy an old box and hammer it. There are so many options to make the transition 'easy' these days whereas a few years back you'd be lucky to get your X server running.
- inkysplat, on 10/12/2007, -1/+2I'd say Ubuntu or any other Debian based distrobution using apt-get is infact easier than windows in terms of software installation. Because Apt-get does it all. For example you've got a clean install of Windows you're gonna need bare esstiential stuff like RAR support or Realplayer.. stuff like that yea? Add one line into a config file and apt-get is ready to download install and put it in your applications menu without any user interaction. In windows however its a case of using IE to google for realplayer or a RAR then downloading the setup.exe to the desktop. Running the setup.exe accepting the license, then going through pages (which the user will most likely ignore) and click "next" to anyways. My point is there is less steps to get a program installed in linux than in windows. I'm referring to the comment made about "make install"...
btw Yes Ubuntu is being hyped. You know why? Because it just works. - dacheetah, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1That only explains about half the drivers, since alot of this hardware is quite a bit older. Being a student, I'm often limited to using some pretty old hardware.
- dacheetah, on 10/12/2007, -1/+2"and it might not recognize all of your computer's hardware."
Thus far Ubuntu has recognised every single piece of hardware I've thrown at it, with only two minor draw backs. I had to tell it to use the real nvidia driver, rather than the emulated one, and it wouldn't use WPA encryption on my wireless card.
When I install XP on the same hardware, I have to spend hours finding drivers for everything. Granted since I have to format fairly often with Windows, I am getting good at keeping these drivers in a safe an easy to find place on my external HDD, and have even incorperated some of them into install CD (using nLite) but still don't get as much hardware out of the box as I do with Ubuntu.
(That said, I'm still using Windows more than Ubuntu, as there are some things that for the moment are that much easier in Windows...) - tadda, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1Perhaps, but you aren't one of the mere mortals if you're working with RHEL 4 and have a technical opinion about why one distro is superior to the other.
- dick-richardson, on 10/12/2007, -1/+2@Darkhacker
Your argument would carry more weight if Linux were included by OEM's. Someone downloading an alternate OS and installing it will be able to do the necessary research to learn how to enable mp3 support. - MrCoke, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1the fact the title says "mere mortals" means that this is only for geeks that talk like that
- sk545, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1Ubuntu default install (if you get that far) isn't great. Right after you install it, you're faced with two things: 1) Fonts suck, and you have to find the right guide to correct that. I still haven't figured it out. 2) If your resolution is 1024x768, you will get huge ass menus. Just right click on the desktop when running that resolution, and you will see. Apparantly, this has no fix, besides making the resolution higher which i refuse to do.
Fix those, and i might try it again. - williamdyer, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1@rabid
Compiling makes a lot of sense, really. Java apps are compiled on demand to suit the machine they are running on, and nobody complains about that. Gentoo just takes the same idea to Linux. Jave, of course, does not have the dependency management requirements Linux has, but compiling on demand applies just as well to source code as to an intermediate language like byte codes or MSIL. - admiralpro9, on 10/12/2007, -0/+0I don't think many of you understand some of the newer advancements Ubuntu has made either. When I switched to Kubuntu Edgy (testing release) and ran Amarok (music player), the mp3 could not play. Obviously, as the users above stated, it doesn't play out of the box. But then a little box popped up, asked me if Amarok should install the proper codec (the message didn't say 'shall I do a sudo apt-get install libxine-extracodecs from the multiverse" it was in English for Joe User) . Afterwards, it worked and I was highly impressed. I started using Ubuntu on Breezy and its been a great OS so far. The best way I can describe it is the type of OS that will leave you with problems that take a while to solve, because the solution is so plainly in front of you.
- XVampireX, on 10/12/2007, -1/+1Check out Sabayon Linux: www.lxnaydesign.net
Preconfigured Gentoo with anaconda installer/live cd/xgl/proprietary stuff. - vonskippy, on 10/12/2007, -2/+2Gosh Mr. Obvious, tell us something we haven't heard at least 9 million times before.
- GoneSouth, on 10/12/2007, -2/+2It's true that Ubuntu *is* the latest fad as far as Linux distros go. But as a guy who's done redhat, then did suse, and has recently switched to ubuntu, the great news for the linux community is, each new distro seems to be a leap compared to the previous. It took me a week to just get X/twm working on redhat 6 (and there was no "desktop" per se). When I switched to SUSE 8, X/KDE worked right out of the box but it took me another week to get file sharing/samba working like i wanted. When I switched to Ubuntu 6, networking was easy, but I've been screwing around with codecs for weeks now. Maybe the next cool distro will get it right... =P
- inactive, on 10/12/2007, -5/+5I'm treating Ubuntu as spam nowadays...I got the point months back
- joshwalderbach, on 10/12/2007, -2/+2@Darkhacker: Now I'm not an Ubuntu fanboy, but getting MP3 support for Ubuntu is simple. Very simple. It doesn't take any more technical knowledge then it would to say hook up an answering machine to your phone that didn't come with one built in.
Windows doesn't even come with support for WoW! Gawd. Unless your like someone who has a license, a car, can afford high gas prices, afford insurance, are of legal age and have a valid credit card, you can't even play WoW on a Windows box. Geez. - tech42er, on 10/12/2007, -2/+2Thank you GMorgan. It's not Ubuntu's fault, so get your facts straight. And, Ubuntu isn't for everyone, only for people who can use it!
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