Ubuntu Linux
I installed Ubuntu Linux last night on a spare 8GB partition on my main machine (Laptop is still running SuSE 9.2, thinking of reverting back to Windows on that though, because of the terrible battery life). Being used to Red Hat based distributions, I thought it was time for a change.
Anyways, installed Ubuntu - from a single CD, which is nice. Unfortunately the installer is a pretty basic text based affair, and the disk partitioning section might be quite confusing to those who haven’t done it before, especially if they have existing partitions that they don’t want to be damaged. I must commend SuSE’s installer in this area, they really couldn’t have made it easier.
Once Ubuntu was installed and updated via the Internet (I wouldn’t like to try this on a dialup connection), I was presented with a very pretty gnome login screen. The GUI is very slick and attractive, but unfortunately lacks a lot of the handy configuration tools that I’m used to from SuSE - for example, to change the default operating system in the GRUB bootloader back to Windows XP, I have to manually edit the /boot/grub/menu.lst file.
The first thing I set about doing after installing Ubuntu was configuring it to mount my NTFS partitions automatically, so that I would have access to all my accumulated stuff from Windows. This was again a case of editing config files - a far cry from SuSE’s automatic mounting of NTFS partitions without any user intervention.
I then went to install a few of my favourite applications, such as xmms, mplayer and VLC. Videolan do not have any packages specifically for Ubuntu, but they do provide Debian packages, so I gave those a try. VLC runs OK and is displaying Xvid video alright, but seems to be lacking sound at the moment - giving this error in the terminal:
VLC media player 0.8.1 Janus
[00000269] mpeg_audio decoder: MPGA channels:2 samplerate:48000 bitrate:128
[00000272] oss audio output error: cannot open audio device (/dev/dsp)
Odd.
Anyways, moving on to mplayer - I installed that and the w32codecs and a few other bits and pieces via Synaptic, which is lovely. I prefer it to SuSE’s YaST package manager. Unfortnuately mplayer is not working! It just freezes when you start it and its process has to be killed to get rid of it.
On the upside, Xmms worked flawlessly. Ubuntu also comes with some common apps like OpenOffice, Evolution and Firefox. I’ll stick with it for a while and see if I can resolve the problems I’ve been having with the above multimedia apps.
