[svlug] Fedora or Ubuntu for novis

[Alan DuBoff]

On Thu, 11 Sep 2008, Don Marti wrote:

> Either one will do fine.

Not to dispute you Don, but help me understand something.

When I installed Ubuntu recently I was missing a bunch of stuff, 
and I had to start adding some things, and/or running into stuff 
that wasn't installed by default. As an example, codecs, some 
media didn't seem to work...but it's been a while and I don't 
remember exactly what was crippled, but to me it was. It seemed 
it required that I get them from somewhere else, do you know if 
that's true?

I still have not figured out exactly what Ubuntu has or doesn't 
have, but the version I installed seemed crippled to me, until I 
uncrippled it and went and got what I needed. I normally 
wouldn't use Ubuntu, but I wanted to look at it.

Finally I completely uncrippled the laptop and installed Debian 
using the netinstall image (small download) added KDE and 
openoffice, maybe one or two other pkgs with apt-get (minicom 
for one), and I had most of what I needed, I could play 
quicktime, the windows media codecs were installed per firefox, 
and all the stuff seemed to work. This system was working by far 
better than the Ubuntu. Everything was working, X was in the 
proper resolution on the laptop, sound is working, wifi is 
working, etc...

The version of Ubuntu that seemed crippled to me was version 8, 
maybe there's another version available. Do they have a 
non-crippled version of Ubuntu do you know? Or one that works 
well out of the install?

Anyway I know all of our milage varies, but Debian tastes better 
to me...

--

Alan DuBoff - Software Orchestration