Yep, but only to demonstrate how it works, it may be implemented.
Darn, I forgot they also release it for Windows machines. Unfortunately the servers are donations and had no software so Linux it is. I will test how the 2.0 preview version of Moodle works.
Not much, to be honest.
The point i’m making is a little bit like Unintentionally Blank’s point, but with a different focus.
For the most part, you don’t need to mess around with the command line to do everyday stuff. Thing is, though, too many Ubuntu experts bombard newbies with exhortations to learn the command line, to the extent that some newbies think to themselves, “Fuck, if this is what it takes to use Ubuntu, i’ll stick with Windows.”
Also—and i’ve seen this dozens of times on the Ubuntu forums—if someone has a problem doing something, an expert will come in with a long command line instruction and say, “Cut and paste this into the terminal window and it will fix your problem.”
Well, even if it works (not always the case), this sort of thing doesn’t help people learn how to fix things themselves, and it also has the effect of frightening off people who don’t have any need for, or any interest in, using the terminal all the time. They think to themselves that they’re going to need to be able to put together long command line instructions to troubleshoot the most basic problems, and that’s enough to put them off Ubuntu.
I first tried Ubuntu back in late 07, early 08, I think. Pretty sure the version was 7.10. I needed to learn a ridiculous amount of command-line tricks in order to get the computer in a working state and I suffered no end of grief bashing everything together. I finally gave up and went back to XP, which worked on my computer.
I came back to Ubuntu at 9.04 with a brand new computer, and I didn’t have to touch a single command prompt to get everything working. The worst I had to deal with was downloading wicd, since the KDE wireless networking client sucks rocks. Old-school Linux users volunteer command-line solutions out of habit, but as far as I can see Ubuntu is steadily moving away from it. The command line is certainly faster and more versatile than the GUI, but it’s not terribly user friendly.
Yeah I recently installed Ubuntu 10.04 (Lucid Lynx) and you do not even have to touch Synaptic to update your computer, there is a special program for updating with two buttons to check for updates and install the updates, really straightforward.
I’m still used to use synaptic though.
So far I didn’t have to use the terminal to do something.
I’m test-driving lucid lynx for my partner who is pretty much computer illiterate and hate when something doesn’t “just work”.
I gotcha. And yeah, I agree–nothing worse than asking a question, hoping to learn something, and being told “Here, just paste this.” I’m fairly techie and I want to know how it works and why, but Joe User wants to be able to click and make it work. I definitely see this more with other distros, but Ubuntu is prone to it too.
Not entirely pertinent to this thread, but I wanted to see what Kubuntu was like, I’d only ever used GNOME based distros. Installed kdedesktop and it just didn’t grab me. Removed it, but ugh, it left pieces all over the place and fucked up my fonts something good. (THAT required command line stuff to fix, but amusingly, I googled “ugly font firefox ubuntu” or something and found a fix.)
Yeah, I stuck with Gnome, too. KDE 3 was okay, but I’ve never found KDE 4 to be that good.
Welcome to the light side.
There’s a few packages you should install straight away:
msttcorefonts (sudo apt-get install msttcorefonts), basically Microsoft’s fonts like Times New Roman, Trebuchet etc. Open source fonts (and their rendering in many Linux distros) tend to be terrible. The only decent one I’ve found is the Bistream Vera family. Using an MS font as your system font makes things look a lot nicer (change your fonts in System > Administration > Appearance > Fonts).
banshee (sudo apt-get install banshee), the best music player on Linux.
Also, do you have Compiz enabled? (Are your windows wobbling?)
I’ve just gone further down the rabbit hole and abandoned Ubuntu for Debian Sid.
What software can and cannot be run under Linux? Can it be used as a replacement for Windows?
I run testing* as my primary (and preferred) OS. Generally works without a hitch. But sid? You’re a braver man than I, sir. Yow.
*To explain – Debian linux releases are named for characters from Toy Story (e.g., v3 was named woody, next was sarge, current version is called lenny, next release is squeeze). Alternatively, one can use the other Debian naming convention, which is indicative of stability: stable (currently lenny), testing (currently squeeze), and sid. squeeze will eventually become stable, and a name will be assigned for the next release, which will take its place as testing. In case it’s not clear, Sid is the sadistic teenager from Toy Story – and sid is always unstable.
Sorry for the digression, but Ubuntu is a Debian derivative, so it’s sorta, kinda, but not really relevant.
Yes and no. Depends what you want to do, and how sophisticated your needs are.
For basic email, internet, music and video playing, and word processing, it is absolutely good enough to replace Windows. The email and web browsers available are some of the same names that many Windows users recognize (Thunderbird, Firefox, Opera, etc.), and adding a few easy-to-install packages allows you to play just about any music or video file that you’re likely to come across.
It’s the compatibility stuff, and some of the more complicated or unusual things, that present some problems.
For example, the standard word processor in Ubuntu is OpenOffice. It works great for basic documents, it reads and writes Word document format, and i’ve never really had any trouble with it. But power users who produce documents with complicated formatting report that OO has trouble dealing with the more difficult stuff. Importing heavily-formatted documents from Word can result in some weird stuff happening to the document.
Another area where Ubuntu struggles a bit, i think, is video editing. There are some non-linear editors available, but i’ve never found one that really works very well, and lots of other users report the same thing. Even the much-maligned (IMO, somewhat unfairly) Windows Movie Maker seems to do better than the video editors available to Ubuntu users.
Image processing can be done with good results, but it requires learning new programs or being satisfied with simple stuff. The GIMP is a very powerful tool, but it has a pretty steep learning curve, and users familiar with the layout of Photoshop will find the controls a bit hard to get used to. But simpler tools like Picasa are available, as well as a few other Linux-specific programs, and do a perfectly decent job.
Some people try to sidestep these compatibility issues by running Windows software on Linux. The free way to do this is using the WINE compatibility layer, but the success of this strategy depends on the software, and some programs are much easier than others to get running in WINE. Some don’t work at all, or are so buggy as to be effectively useless. It’s also possible to implement this using a paid service like Crossover, which is essentially a corporate, supported version that allows users to run programs like MS Office and Photoshop in Linux.
On a dual-boot machine, I’m not sure there’s a decent GUI for configuring all aspects of the GRUB2 menu - when the kernel gets updated, the menu gets bigger - and any customised changes get overwritten (even with the template-based boot menu, this still happens).
Support for proprietary codecs seems spotty. I don’t think theres any solution to decode WMA 3 audio under Linux. Not even VLC player was able to handle it.
As a rule of thumb, the more proprietary the software, the more difficult it is to run it under Linux, unless the company specifically develops a version for it.
If something is open source, it’s almost guaranteed that you can run it under Linux, either natively or in wine. But for things like iTunes, you’re boned. Theoretically there are Linux apps that mimic iTunes, at least as far as organizing your iDevice, but I’ve never had success with them.
If you have to use certain applications, do some research to see how well they run under your desired version of Linux. On the other hand, if you just need a program that’ll do, say, spreadsheets and not Excel specifically, there’s a ton of options available.
I put my Ubuntu on my netbook a few weeks ago. The last time I had installed Ubuntu it was 8.04 IIRC, and I have to say it’s come leaps and bounds. I don’t know if its just my specific hardware configuration, but everything works as it should straight out of the box. There’s some weird issue with my screen fading to black when it turns off after inactivity. It eases into black like a old man getting into a bath instead of going from on to off in one step.
The only other complaint I have is that I can’t find a perfect photo manager. F-Spot is exactly what I want, but it’s slow to the point of unusability (it’s a word, look it up). Shotwell has the speed but lacks two features I really want, hierarchical tags and photo rating.
Check out Cairo dock if you like docks and want some pizazz.
From a netbook standpoint, I’ve been playing around with Jolicloud…I f’d up and got an Aspire One with the crappy slow little 8 Gb SSD drive, it’s working VERY well with that handicap.
What I would really like is something designed to run Windows software without all the luggage that drags down computer speed.
Put the damn OS software on a chip so there is no boot-up time.
With a reasonably modern computer with a reasonable amount of ram, Sun’s Virtual Box is a GREAT…FREE… way to dip into Windows when you need to…
Well, it’s really a mix of all three. I needed some specific packages from Sid and Squeeze, so I installed those then immediately disabled the repositories. The OS thinks it’s Sid anyway. Last time I installed Debian I kept the repositories active. Absolute disaster when I tried to do a system update. I learnt my lesson.
Of course, I forgot, VMware has a FREE vmware viewer product…in XP it only lets you play back pre-made Virtual Machine images, but in Linux (Ubuntu/Redhad/Etc) it also lets you create them.