First day with Ubuntu

The jury's still out but from what I can tell from a day's tinkering with Ubuntu I can sort of see why it's become so popular. It installed fairly cleanly and I was a little excited to see the login screen and get going rather quickly... and with the sound and screen and most things working. I remember having to do a lot of config file editting to get Redhat working on my old Toshiba (especially the video) and I had all kinds of problems with the sound. I remember moving over to the enlightenment system (still experimental back then) but Rasterman's esound stuff worked pretty well. Anyhow, the only setup problem I had was getting my wireless to work. My Linksys PC card wasn't set up for me. After some digging I finally found an excellent step-by-step guide that did the trick (wasn't about my particular card but close enough). After that was resolved, I could finally unchain my laptop to my switch and move it to the TV room.

Mental notes from a first day's playing with Ubuntu

• Hey, sudo isn't so bad afterall! No need to keep a root terminal up. Menu'd items work after typing in the password. Fairly straight forward even if it means I'll eventually hate my password from all the typing.
• The system really is more for the commoner... gcc and g++ not installed by default??!!? Now that's a first.
• It defaults to Firefox 1.0.7, not 1.5. What's more is there seems to be a dependency on this version of Firefox. I had to do some trickery (found online) to get 1.5 installed and usable. That worries me.
  
• The community seems nice and large, some fixes and tweaks were readily findable online.
  
• Ugh, package managers. The dependency problems creep in. The package manager app I find quite good but there seems to be stuff missing. See below.

The first thing I did after getting the wireless set up was try and install Ruby. Fine. Go to package manager, select all Ruby related packages. Install. Uh... Interactive Ruby (irb) doesn't seem to be listed in the manager. WTF? Ok, download it from somewhere else. Dependency problems from hell. Look online, do a few more things, try some apt-getting. Nada. So I delete it all, all the Ruby related packaging, and just download the source. Looks like I'll be managing Ruby by myself. This is, incidentally, how I found out my normal compilers were missing.

Ok now for Openvpn and something else I can't recall right now. Package found, great! Uh, looks like the dependencies aren't quite there. I needed to get the -dev packages for some other things.

I admit, managing software manually from source is often the way to go but takes more time and effort grabbing the right things. So I can appreciate package managers for what they do right when they work right, which I guess is most of the time.

So far though, it hasn't been so bad. No matter what distro I use there's bound to be a lot of fixing and tweaking and such. So it's a good thing to start from a system where as much works as possible when one doesn't want to invest the time in starting more from scratch (though that can be its own reward at times) and Ubuntu seems to have a lot of the raw equipment setup stuff down fairly decently (my particular wireless card excepted of course).

I'll probably switch later.