Ubuntu: An Excellent Beginners Distro

Mpemba Effect · 1 Oct 2004 at 11:47

I've started my vmware distro install-fest for the reason a) I can get a first hand view on poplular distro's on offer b) It'll be easier for me to help forum members with their distro if I had the same distro they're using - and perhaps explain a distro specific GUI method of doing something rather than the usual CLI method I explain (plain because thats the only thing thats common thoughout all distros).

Well after Robmiller mentioned Ubuntu as a up and coming distro gaining good replutation I took al ook at their website. Based upon Debian I figured that it must be at least half decent so I've decided this will be the first distro of many to be vmwared.

Installing-wise couldn't be easier, it doens't use a graphical interface ala Fedora, Mandrake or SuSE but uses a text based menu system like on slackware and freebsd. Nevertheless the install procedure is as easy as they come, very straight forward, I didn't at any point need to go back and redo anything (I should have took some screenshots, I did think about but then didn't). Typically a beginner would just choose the automatic install procedue like I did rather than the manual method of choosing packages, and automatic really is automatic, there was hadly anything to type in, eveything was auto detected and installed - it even detected that I was using vmware and used vmware drivers for XFree.

Upon installing everything Ubuntu ask wether it has a direct connection to the net. If you choose "yes" (which is recommended) it automatically syncs with it's ubuntu servers and uses apt-get to update the entire system. After about 10mins you're presented with the funky looking ubuntu login screen.

Honestly I'm impressed, it looks nice (plenty of eye candy) but at the same time the GUI doens't feel too bloated (and we are talking about gnome here) theres no clutter of menu and icons that all do the same thing, it's just feel simple and nice. I'm yet to work out how to use apt-get but really I think this is the distro that I'm going to be recommending to beginners from now on

Here is a good starter guide for Ubuntu

Mpemba Effect · 1 Oct 2004 at 16:11

Originally posted by wesley
downloading at the mo and will give it a try with VMware

most people recommended fedora and mandrake for newbie but what does make it special for newbie? i guess cos more friendly to use? like XP? lol

thanks for letting us know about this distro

I prefer to call it windows friendly or windows user friend rather than user friendly since user friendliness depends on the user

But yes certain distro such as fedora and mandrake are recommended to beginners since they are more windowsish, in that they have lots of control panels and wizards.

Mpemba Effect · 1 Oct 2004 at 19:38

Not quite sure what you mean by what features. It has all the usual features and apps typical of other distros. But Ubunto has a really good feel to it. Apt-get is one of it's selling points, it's an excellent package manager compared to rpms.

Mpemba Effect · 2 Oct 2004 at 12:22

Originally posted by dirtydog
Upon starting the installation of Ubuntu I am offered the chance to delete the entire HDD, or manually partition. I selected the latter, and then had to manually choose the boot, root and swap partitions. Now yes this was easy enough but I knew what to do; a total Linux novice would not. Suse or Mandrake would have selected those automatically and it would have been the default unless I had overridden it.

I Must admit, I did a fresh install on a virtual machine so no dual boot. Possibiliy this is an issue if it doen't automatically recommend you a partition setup.

Originally posted by dirtydog
The initial install was fast but then it needed to spend 1/2 hour downloading, which wasn't optional. In Suse and Mandrake this is optional; the install CD/CDs can be used on their own and no internet updates are forced on you (yes of course they're advisable but it's a choice).

You were given a choice with ubuntu just before it started downloading. This update imo is a good thing, it ensures that upon install you will have the latest system unlike a lot of people who will wait for the next release of the distro before updating anything. How do you keep you mandrake applications up to date and bug free?

Originally posted by dirtydog
At the end of the install I have to select a screen resolution for Gnome. It started off at something huge like 2500x1400, and I had to scroll down to 1024x768. No hardship for me, but computer novices don't know what their screen size is, and may have just pressed enter at this point, and end up with a blank screen.

I think not, if you take a careful look at that section screen you will see that the highest resolutions are at the top and the lowest at the bottom. However the top ones are NOT seclected but ubuntu has auto selected some of the lower resolution screens automatically. That screen is more of a "confirm" the auto detecttion process rather that "input your resolution". If you just clicked "yes" you will be fine, if you chose the highest resolution you will also be fine since X will fail and it will fall back to the next selected resolution (which will be the ones ubuntu have enabled). The only way you will get a blank screen or an X error is if you selected the overly high resolution and manuallly de-selected the ones at the bottom. I think it's unlike a novice who doesn't know their arse cheek from their monitor resolution will do that, more likely they'd just hit the ok button.

Originally posted by dirtydog
Once Gnome started the screen was running at 60Hz. Okay, even Windows XP does this. But in Windows, and more to the point in Suse and Mandrake, changing it to 85Hz for my monitor is quite easy. In Ubuntu, there was a drop down box for monitor refresh rate but the only option was 60Hz! So what next? Do I need to install a new monitor driver, or a new graphics driver or what? Yes I could work it out but this isn't what a novice needs, nor me for that matter.

Granted that could be a problem, it looks like the folks at ubuntu need to add some modeline to the XF86Config file. They're moving to Xorg so may be they'll sort that in a later release. But refresh rates is no big issue and is defaintely a common problem with a lot of distro's, the amount time someone has asked how to fix a refresh rate problem on this forum is quite lot.

Originally posted by dirtydog
There is no GUI 'add/remove programs' or online update a la Windows Update like Suse and Mandrake both have.

I see one (Computer > System Configuration > Synaptic Package Manager)

Besides being debian based apt-get is one of it's advantages. If you want to install an app called scrot you type:

apt-get install scrot

it gives you a list of dependencies scrot uses and asks for a confirmation to continue. You type "yes" and it does everything for you.

edit: I've only just found out that Synaptic is the GUI frontend for apt-get, so so when you install though Synaptic you will always install the lastest tested stable version and also you don't need to use the commandline to install apps

Originally posted by dirtydog
edit - oh yes, and font antialiasing is turned off by default in Ubuntu unlike Suse and Mandrake which have superior looking fonts out of the box. Ubuntu did score over Suse (but not Mandrake) in getting my Audigy 2 card working out of the box though.

Can't really say but AA seemed to be working straight out of the box here, look at my screenshots - I've changed the fonts to something more to my taste but I haven't plasyed with any AA settings.

Mpemba Effect · 2 Oct 2004 at 13:28

To get AA working you need to use truetype fonts and I don't think the default serif or san serif fonts used in firefox are TTF. So the user will have to manually change the fonts.

Mpemba Effect · 2 Oct 2004 at 14:18

Originally posted by dirtydog
SuSE will download and install the MS Core font pack, maybe Ubuntu will do that too - otherwise I could copy them from Windows I guess.

I don't think it does, it doesn't have any microsoft font on it. But yeah you can copy over the fonts from windows or install the MS core font pack. However I haven't found it in Synaptic.

Originally posted by dirtydog
If you work out how to change my refresh rate I will give Ubuntu another try but it hurts my eyes to use it for long at 60Hz.. I suspect changing the monitor type would do the trick. There is a Windows-like Device Manager but a quick look in there didn't reveal the monitor although I may have missed it.

There is screen resolution manager but like you said it only shows the current refresh rate and theres no t any others selectable. The reason for this is that X don't have the exact horizontal and vertical refesh rates for your monitot so it uses rather conservative values (so not to damage your monitot) as a result you may have poor refresh rates. I can't currently see anyway to set these values in the GUI tool. I'm thinking maybe there was an extra option at the screen where you choose resolutions during install to manually input your monitor specs rather than choosing from the list. Anyway I don't have a GUI fix for this but I can talk you though how to fix this via editting your /etc/X11/XF86Config-4 file.

Originally posted by dirtydog
Another thing is that my FAT32 and NTFS partitions weren't automatically mounted by Ubuntu - or I just couldn't find them

yeah, I can proberbly believe that if the install procedure only give the options to wipe the disk or manual config. Since you chose manual config I can only assume you'll need to manually config your windows partition too. Does the bootloader dual boot ok?

Originally posted by dirtydog
Another observation is that every folder you open, opens in a separate window, Windows 95-style, rather than in the same window. It's either like that by default or I chose that option somehow. I know it can be turned off though - if I can find it

Yeah I think this is a gnome thing, It's really annoying, I'm trying to fix that. I know theres a way to change that behaviour so it opens the folder in the same window but I just don't know how to do it yet <---- gnome noob

Mpemba Effect · 2 Oct 2004 at 14:58

Originally posted by Deadly Ferret
Having done that, would 'apt-get uninstall scrot' be a valid command, or would one go about uninstallation in a different manner?

I like the idea of being able to install or uninstall with such a simple command.

PS: Did anyone else think, when seeing the name: Ubuntu, Ubuntu, they drink it in the Congo?

Almost, it's

apt-get remove scrot

But like I said Synaptic is the GUI frontend for it which is perfect for beginners. Heres me upgrading all the packages on my system to the latest versions (equvielent to "emerge world" for us gentoo users). You first open up Synaptic and click "Mark All Upgrades" I then chose the "smart" method. At the bottom of synaptic it give a little summary like so and so number of packages to install / upgrade. To test I also decided to remove all the gnome games (thus the "2 to remove"). When you click "Apply" to downloads all the packages that need upgrading automatically (The screenshot went a bit funny there, I think it was because of the drag down menu I used to take the screen shot).

http://www.selman.demon.co.uk/linux/screenshots/ubuntu-update-download.png

once downloaded it installs it

http://www.selman.demon.co.uk/linux/screenshots/ubuntu-update-success.png

Note that I'm even updating the kernel here and Ubuntu even installs it and updates your bootloader for you ... however I haven't yet rebooted to see if it actually has done it properly ;p

Mpemba Effect · 2 Oct 2004 at 15:00

Originally posted by dirtydog
Oh another question! Ubuntu didn't prompt me for a root password during installation, so how do I log in as root?

Actually that bit threw me as well, fortunately it's in the ubuntu faq. You just need to set the root password by typing

Code:

sudo passwd root

I would have thought there should be a not somewhere during or after the install but hey

Mpemba Effect · 2 Oct 2004 at 15:23

Originally posted by dirtydog
Update: I just chose 'run as different user' from the system tools menu and ran gedit as root, edited the file and restarted X with ctrl-alt-backspace.. the refresh was put to 85Hz automatically, hurrah

Good job mate. I see you figured it out all by yourself

I've rebooted and yup the kernel successfully updated

Although it's only a very minor update, a first I thought it didn't update since the version numbers were the same but then I noticed the dates were different

Mpemba Effect · 2 Oct 2004 at 16:26

Personally I just use the user account and use "sudo" whenever I need to do something as root. What you want to do is add the mp3 partition to your fstab with the user / users and umask flags so that normal users can mount / umount it. You should then be able to access it from your normal user account. If you really must have root access on the login screen go to

Computer > System Configuration > Login Screen Setup > Security

and tick "Allow root to log in with GDM".

edit: a bit like this

Mpemba Effect · 2 Oct 2004 at 21:12

As a guess I'd say you have a corrupt iso image. Did you check it with md5sum?

Mpemba Effect · 2 Oct 2004 at 21:54

Originally posted by FishFluff
Hmmmm, I tried this today and i wasn't too impressed.

Now probably a lot of the problems are that I've used Gentoo for a couple of months now and everything in Gentoo seems to be done a different way to other distros, like for example the network settings not being at "/etc/init.d/net". Just little things like that at first. Also I'm not a fan of Gnome, I used it ages ago on Redhat 7 and although it's improved dramatically since then it just doesn't feel right after using Fluxbox, was pretty nippy though.

Perhaps in hindsight I should have tested it on a desktop system rather than a Thinkpad, but it failed to configure either wireless network card in the machine (both of which Knoppix picked up) and there was no ACPI functions at all. I'm now installing Gentoo on the lappy instead as if I have to go through a bunch of hassles to get a distro working right it may as well be one I already know

On a positive note though, the install was very quick and painless, it picked up all the hardware including a CF card reader plugged into a PCMCIA slot (except the wireless cards) with no problems, Gnome felt nice and fast (especially compared to the previous XP install) and I wa pleased to see it didn't install 7 applications which all do the same thing like Mandrake does. I'd recommend it to someone who has already used Linux a little bit, but perhaps not to a total beginner.

7/10

I dunno, I quite like it and I've used only gentoo with fluxbox / pekwm / pure shell for the past 2.5 years and freebsd with fluxbox / shell before that. I've installed RH9.0 on a virtual machine sometime back but it got removed quite promptly. Don't get me wrong I'm not going to convert from my beloved Gentoo but I really think it's a superb distro, perfect for the beginner. I'm just amazed on how fast responsive gnome feels, I know my machine is a 3.5G P4 but this is installed on a virtual machine with only 225MB of RAM given to it. So It might not autoconfigure some of the more exotic hardware like your thinkpad but what distro does?

I really can't fault it especially on how new this distro is, given time to mature it can see it being very successful.

Mpemba Effect · 2 Oct 2004 at 21:58

Originally posted by wesley
edit: ok before i give up, how to check the iso with md5sum? cheers

At the bottom of this thread. How did you setup you virtual machine? As a "Other Linux 2.6.x kernel"?.

Mpemba Effect · 3 Oct 2004 at 10:56

I kinda liked the minimal window decoration look.

Mpemba Effect · 3 Oct 2004 at 12:37

Yeah post up a screenshot of the network configurationay screeny tool thing whichshows your network details. Sorry I Can't be any more specifc (I'm booted in my 'real' linux os atm rather than in the ubuntu virtual machine which is on windows)

Mpemba Effect · 3 Oct 2004 at 12:43

There no point re-installing if it's a configuration problem ... but I suppose that some you'll eventually learn at your own pace.

Mpemba Effect · 3 Oct 2004 at 13:45

During install you were given a choice on resolutions and you should have set it up then, I think also gave you a command to type to reset up stuff ... I'm sure I wrote it down but can't find it atm

There might be another way using those GUI tools on the menu. Otherwise I can talk you though the commandline method. But I'll need:

a) The horizonal and vertical refresh rates for your monitor (it's in you manual or perhaps on the manufactuers website)

b) What default resolution you want to run at

c) What refesh rate you want to run at

Oh ball! Forget all that! I've just remembered you're using vmware so did you install the vmware tools?

edit: Oh hang about, your now not using vmware so answer the questions a, b and c

Mpemba Effect · 3 Oct 2004 at 14:49

1. Make a backup of the file XF86Config. Open up a root terminal and type

Code:

cd /etc/X11/
cp XF86Config-4 XF86Config.backup

If you want to do this part with a GUI you can open up the root terminal and type "nautilus".

2. Open up text editor and look for the lines that begin with

Code:

HorizSync

and

Code:

VertRefres

It will be under section "monitor".

3. Change the "HorizSync" line to

Code:

HorizSync   30-121

and the "VertRefresh" line to

Code:

VertRefresh 48-160

4. Scroll down to near the bottom of the file you will see a section called "Screen" it should look something like this

Code:

Section "Screen"
    Identifier  "Screen 1"
    Device      "Radeon 9600xt"
    Monitor     "My Monitor"
    DefaultDepth 24

    Subsection "Display"
        Depth       8
        ViewPort    0 0
    EndSubsection
    Subsection "Display"
        Depth       16
        ViewPort    0 0
    EndSubsection
    Subsection "Display"
        Depth       24
        Modes       "1400x1050" "800x600" "640x480"
        ViewPort    0 0
    EndSubsection
EndSection

It won't look exactly like that since this is for my system and I suspect that you will have values in the 8 and 16 bit depth sections (unlike me where I only have filled in the 24 bit section). What you want to do is add "1280x1024" as the first resolution in each of the modes. Example:

Code:

Section "Screen"
    Identifier  "Screen 1"
    Device      "Radeon 9600xt"
    Monitor     "My Monitor"
    DefaultDepth 24

    Subsection "Display"
        Depth       8
        Modes       [color=deeppink]"1280x1024"[/color] "1024x768" "800x600" "640x480"
        ViewPort    0 0
    EndSubsection
    Subsection "Display"
        Depth       16
        Modes       [color=deeppink]"1280x1024"[/color] "1024x768" "800x600" "640x480"
        ViewPort    0 0
    EndSubsection
    Subsection "Display"
        Depth       24
        Modes       [color=deeppink]"1280x1024[/color]" "1024x768" "800x600" "640x480"
        ViewPort    0 0
    EndSubsection
EndSection

5. Save and edit. When you reboot you should boot into the new resolution.

Mpemba Effect · 3 Oct 2004 at 15:09

Thats an odd error try opening up a regular console and type

Code:

su

follower by the root password when prompted

Mpemba Effect · 3 Oct 2004 at 15:31

Eh the same one as you backed up

/etc/XF86Config

click the little "root" button on the very bottom left and see if you can move to / then move to etc and then X11.