Unbunt-who?
Ubuntu
Now that I’m just about fully converted off of my old PC, I’ve decided to have some fun with it. Some folks wonder how I can consider this fun, but to each his own.
I’ve decided to try to live without Windoze. I’m sure that I”ll have to run it for some things (Stacie really likes the buttons on the front of the scanner that make “copies”), but most of those things can be done in a virtual machine. I won’t delete my XP partitions just yet, but will attempt to use native XP (as opposed to XP in a VM) as little as possible.
I started with downloading some of the live CDs/DVDs for some Linux distributions to figure out which ones I like. I tried Mandriva, Ubuntu, Kubuntu, CentOS, and openSUSE. I really liked KDE in Kubuntu, but am more comfortable with GNOME and it seems more stable and a bit faster. I narrowed my search down to CentOS, SUSE, and Ubuntu.
Next, I decided to actually install the distributions that I liked and take a whorl at configuring them and getting things set up like I like them (LAMP + Parallels + a few other odds and ends). Here is what I discovered….
SUSE
I learned to hate YaST (the configuration utility in SUSE) with a passion and also found that even with a company like Novell behind it, SUSE lacks documentation and the web documentation is not managed at all and the openSUSE wiki sucks (and I am a big proponent of wikis….as you’ll see in a minute).
The SUSE default firewall is a nice addition that the others seem to lack. However, management of the firewall is a bear (using YaST) and any modification that isn’t pre-configured in YaST (like enabling PASV ESPV ftp servers) is problematic and the YaST configuration for those configurations seems unwieldy (i.e. putting the word ftp in the port section rather than the numbers 20 and 21 and rather than putting the word ftp in the in the protocol section).
SUSE also seems to have no vision in terms of versioning releases and to the best of my knowledge had just about no concept of an upgrade.
CentOS
I liked CentOS. It’s basically a stripped version of RedHat, which I’m not about to pay for. CentOS supported several things I wanted out-of-the-(proverbial)-box. It’s use of RPM is great as most decent packages out there have RPM versions making installs and package management (including dependency checks) an easy task.
However, I found that some of the hardware support in CentOS isn’t up to par with RedHat (since it’s stripped of any of the non-GNU, non-Open Source material).
I’m still running CentOS in a Parallels virtual machine on my mac (for fun) because it installed under Parallels beautifully and even the Xconfig under parallels runs nice.
Ubuntu
My favorite of the distributions that I tried. Ubuntu is one of the ‘newer’ distributions (I used Slackware back in the 0.82 kernel days). It’s rather secure within itself, but lacks a firewall. It actually has no root login and uses sudo for most administration functions. I was very skeptical of this at first, but after playing with it for a while, I am now a fan.
Ubuntu has great hardware support and supported all of my peripherals with little or no configuration necessary. I did have to download the graphics drivers directly from NVIDIA, but that is because my video card is one of those that didn’t do so well (AGP 8x by the time most people had switched to PCI-Express).
I also liked the package management which is based on Debian and comes with apt, aptitude, and synaptic on Gnome.
The versioning vision rocks, even if it is a bit slow.
The online documentation is very well done and even the wiki is will managed and therefore finding what you need is not difficult.
So what am I going to do with all of this? Good question and I’m still trying to figure that out myself. I do know that over the next few days, I’m going to be converting all my websites currently running on my mac over to Elvis (my linux box (ask me why I named it Elvis)). I’ve already started that, but I still need to get a search engine, and some web statistics running on the Elvis. On the mac I went with Sphider and awstats which I will probably start with on Elvis. I went with those initially due to the compatibility with OS X, but now that I’m on linux which has much more support for search engines and statistics engines, I would like to branch out and try some others.
I’ll post my configuration (some of it) in the next few days once I get everything up and running. I’ll continue to use iWeb for most of my publishing, but am considering installing WordPress for my blogs and maybe even a forum application (even though it’s not long term, it give me something to do and helps me hone my system administration skills).