desktoplinux.com — The executive editor of DesktopLinux.com installs Kubuntu Feisty Fawn on his "trusty old Thinkpad testbed" and relates his experiences. The verdict? Thanks to a little assistance from Automatix2, Feisty's a real winner!
May 4, 2007 View in Crawl 4
windhawkMay 4, 2007
I have to say, although I use Win at work and have fallen in love with the Mac (which I now have with a Mac Mini as my media hub attached to my plasma TV -- Go VLC!!) I was not happy with what I was seeing in the Linux world. Yes, I use RH extensively in the server room, but it wasn't working for the family as a desktop. So I tried the latest SUSE. Still not happy. Then Feisty came out. I'm really happy, but there are still some rough edges. -- For instance, I can't get the nVidia driver to drive my monitor at its native resolution. The driver only provides options up to 1280 by 1024. This causes me a lot of consternation. -- Fonts still don't look 100% as good as MS.-- My printer driver was not found, but I tried a driver for a similar printer and it mostly works. I don't get the headers and footers in the right place, but it prints.Next I will have to try Kubuntu and see how it goes. But let's not kid ourselves that it was a *cough* seven (7) *cough* step process. Maybe seven overall phases with just a *few* wee steps in each phase. Still, a good guide though.
viperdaimaoMay 4, 2007
Automatix2? I haven't heard good things about that.I've been having a lot of wireless and network card problems since I did a clean Fiesty install. It's working better now thankfully, but it changes behavior for no reason other than I put the laptop on standby.
kirker187May 5, 2007
I dislike when people recommend removing sudo and adding a password for root in (K)Ubuntu. That function is built in to better secure the system. The right thing to recommend is 1) in the terminal use "sudo su" to become root and 2) to launch an application as root, in the Run dialog box, use gksu or kdesu.I also agree with viperdaimao. I encountered problems with Automatix. I haven't tried Automatix2, but it really isn't that difficult to install all that software yourself.
daradibMay 5, 2007
Nearly everything in Automatix2 (except for Google Earth which requires an extra repository) can be installed just as easily through Add-or-Remove, Synaptic, Adept, etc. I hate the fact that Automatix installed software is not updated by apt-get.
thewrkncacnterMay 9, 2007
Automatix and Automatix 2 break systems as often as they are useful. Please don't use them. Visit <a class="user" href="https://help.ubuntu.com/">https://help.ubuntu.com/</a> for solutions to common problems, because installing things yourself is not difficult, and will be less headache in the long run than having automatix mess up your system.From #ubuntu, the community support channel on irc.freenode.netubotu: Automatix2 is a script that tries to install some software, and often fails and breaks systems. We don't provide support for it, and we strongly discourage its use. Problems caused by Automatix are often hard to track and solve, and it might sometimes be easier to !install a fresh copy of Ubuntu. See also !WorksForMe