Weblog entry #109 for ajt
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#109
ubuntu experience
Posted by ajt on Sun 16 Sep 2007 at 15:36
Yesterday I spent a few hours installing Ubuntu LTS on a friends desk-side home server. He wants to have a local (test) Moodle server and a desktop system in the same box. I don't normally work with Ubuntu, I just think of it as a downstream version of Debian sid.
Most things went in okay, Apache, PHP5 (urgh...), MySQL and Moodle. The big problem was that X refused to start. We were using the ATI driver from Xorg, xserver-xorg and gdm were both installed okay, but things just didn't want to play ball. Even with the VESA and VGA driver, X refused to start. The various X apps were correctly installed, when I SSHed in from another box they ran okay on my X server.
I then tried upgrading to Efty in case there was a X bug in that version of Ubuntu, a few hundred megs of data came down the pipe and it upgraded okay. X still refused to start and the logs still didn't show why. I then tried one more package and in the massive list of extras it wanted to bring in were some more xorg bits, so I let that lot go through and then X was happy to start.
Obviously I'm less familiar with Ubuntu than I am with Debian but I must confess I don't think Ubuntu is as superior to Debian as the fan-boys make out. Yes when you compare the original version to Woody or Sarge, Ubuntu had a lot of eye-candy installed and a decent single set of applications, but I don't think it's that much better overall when you compare it to a modern well configured Debian system.
Most things went in okay, Apache, PHP5 (urgh...), MySQL and Moodle. The big problem was that X refused to start. We were using the ATI driver from Xorg, xserver-xorg and gdm were both installed okay, but things just didn't want to play ball. Even with the VESA and VGA driver, X refused to start. The various X apps were correctly installed, when I SSHed in from another box they ran okay on my X server.
I then tried upgrading to Efty in case there was a X bug in that version of Ubuntu, a few hundred megs of data came down the pipe and it upgraded okay. X still refused to start and the logs still didn't show why. I then tried one more package and in the massive list of extras it wanted to bring in were some more xorg bits, so I let that lot go through and then X was happy to start.
Obviously I'm less familiar with Ubuntu than I am with Debian but I must confess I don't think Ubuntu is as superior to Debian as the fan-boys make out. Yes when you compare the original version to Woody or Sarge, Ubuntu had a lot of eye-candy installed and a decent single set of applications, but I don't think it's that much better overall when you compare it to a modern well configured Debian system.
Comments on this Entry
I'm not a big Ubuntu fan, though I've installed dapper on more than a few machines. I'm kind of surprised you had that much trouble, I've never had much of a problem getting X to go on it.
I caution anyone against judging a product on one experience. The first time I installed debian (woody or potato, I don't remember which) I failed to get X to work (turned out later that I thought I had told X I had a USB mouse but had a PS/2 one, so X wouldn't start), so I wrote it off and went to mandrake. Later I got back into Debian after using MEPIS. Now I'm a debian nut.
I caution anyone against judging a product on one experience. The first time I installed debian (woody or potato, I don't remember which) I failed to get X to work (turned out later that I thought I had told X I had a USB mouse but had a PS/2 one, so X wouldn't start), so I wrote it off and went to mandrake. Later I got back into Debian after using MEPIS. Now I'm a debian nut.
[ Parent | Reply to this comment ]
You are of course correct it is unfair to judge a distro by just one brief experience. I've played with Ubuntu a bit more than once, but I'll be the first to admit I don't know it as well as Debian. My problem with Ubuntu is that it's only just a repackaged version of Debian Sid, I can't see the big advantage.
Yes the Ubuntu people have added stuff and tweaked settings but as their successful experiments are incorporated into Debian and stabilised I see little benefit from living on the constant dist-upgrade treadmill that Ubuntu users suffer from. There is something nice about periods of stability of more than a nano second!
I'm not anti-ubuntu I just can't see that much once you strip away the hype. I do wish Canonical all the best in their plan to make money from support and training, but for me Debian is where I am and where I plan to stay.
--
"It's Not Magic, It's Work"
Adam
Yes the Ubuntu people have added stuff and tweaked settings but as their successful experiments are incorporated into Debian and stabilised I see little benefit from living on the constant dist-upgrade treadmill that Ubuntu users suffer from. There is something nice about periods of stability of more than a nano second!
I'm not anti-ubuntu I just can't see that much once you strip away the hype. I do wish Canonical all the best in their plan to make money from support and training, but for me Debian is where I am and where I plan to stay.
--
"It's Not Magic, It's Work"
Adam
[ Parent | Reply to this comment ]
Mostly agree.
Ubuntu make some different choices than Debian.. some may be good, but some I really don't understand (suppressing /etc/inittab, stupid use of device mapper for fstab etc..) and well, you can't really choose what you want at install, it just install all it can. That's the reason why I stick on debian even for desktop/laptop, (usually testing, sometimes I switch to unstable).
I still recommend Ubuntu for new or unexperimented users.
Ubuntu make some different choices than Debian.. some may be good, but some I really don't understand (suppressing /etc/inittab, stupid use of device mapper for fstab etc..) and well, you can't really choose what you want at install, it just install all it can. That's the reason why I stick on debian even for desktop/laptop, (usually testing, sometimes I switch to unstable).
I still recommend Ubuntu for new or unexperimented users.
[ Parent | Reply to this comment ]