Last night when Gentoo's emerge refused to work, again, I got fed up and decided that I didn't want to compile every program I used and I didn't want to fight with libraries that constantly went missing. I tried movied to stable instead of unstable but it didn't make things much better. The Gentoo boxes I have run remind me of Windows, they run great for a few months, then when your worlds file has too many wierd entries and revdep-rebuild just won't fix the missing libraries, it is time for a reinstall. After my success with Debian on my lab machine, I decided I would try out the latest offering from Ubuntu.
I am not dissapointed. The install was flawless, except for when our switch froze and I had to kill two test apt-get procs, but they should have timed out eventually. Everything worked out of the box, with upgrades and new installations a cinch. Within an hour I had everything configured the way I like it, including: Xorg, Gnome, GUI apps, Samba, NFS, Squid, IPTables, Sound, NVidia Drivers. It took a bit of time getting used to the Gnome Desktop and figuring out where everything is. Also none of this required me to reboot, once, suck on that Windows. I particularly liked the automatic update client, and I love the privledge seperation of the root account and the sudo setup, but that is for another entry.
My configuration is mostly finished but I have four gripes:
- The default media apps for video and music are awful. Mplayer and Beep are a must.
- My volume up and down buttons modify a useless mixer setting and I don't know where to change this. Similarly the Stop and Play buttons only work for the awful default media apps.
- I can't seem to make gnome-terminal open with the --hide-menubar switch by default, even though I set it under "Preffered Apps".
- I can't find any decent ftp Ubuntu repositories. Admittedly, I haven't looked very hard.
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