Ubuntu!

[Psion]

Maestro wrote:

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I'm loving it, but I broke it. Something didn't upload correctly after it asked to do an update following install. I completely lost my ability to connect to the Internet. It wasn't working without a cable to begin with, but then it wasn't even talking with the cable. THEN, in my ignorance, I removed the software that allows it to talk to the Internet, thinking that it was new stuff that was causing the problem.

So, I'm back to running it off a USB stick.

Anyone know how to get my network connections gnome back in the actual OS?

Log back in and get yourself into a "shell" command-line window ... ctrl-alt-t should do the trick. Or go to the dash and start typing "terminal" until you see the terminal icon appear.

From there, type "ifconfig" -- this displays the current status of your ethernet configuration. You should see entries for each installed networking card (usually just one) and the local loopback (called 'lo').

If you don't see 'eth0' or 'eth1', try typing "sudo ifconfig eth0 up" -- 'sudo' makes the commands that follow run in "superuser" mode, and the rest sets up your hardware to send and receive information. With a little luck, this is all you need to get your network connection running again.

[Geckothan]

Of the big distros, I generally prefer Fedora over Ubuntu. SELinux is better than AppArmor, and systemd, while still rubbish (yeah it can do some neat things out of the box that SysVinit can't without some really good scripting, but it's so huge and unnecessary), is still better than Upstart. They're both fairly bloated, but it's easier to trim the bloat out of Fedora, imo.

Also, RPM used to suck a lot when dealing with dependencies compared with dpkg, as it lacked many features and didn't have anything like APT, but the format was still better than deb, and these days, the whole thing is better (though APT is still a better frontend than YUM). The average GUI-only user migrating from Windows won't notice any difference between either package manager, anyway (unless they hit a bug or start messing around with RPMs/debs from outside the distro).

Gentoo is the way to go, though! Whenever I use binary distros, I'm simply astonished at how much bloat gets pulled in whenever you try to install something as simple as a web browser (Firefox and Chrome/Chromium pull in things like gconf, which in turn pull in most of GNOME, etc), while with Portage, I can simply turn off a few USE flags to disable most unwanted dependencies, and if a certain package is still trying to pull some bloat in, I can just make my own local copy of the ebuild that turns off the offending feature (with EXTRA_ECONF) and removes the dependencies for it.

All the compiling isn't too painful either if you distribute it over all of your machines (with distcc), keep a compiler cache to speed up rebuilds (with ccache), and compile everything with optimisations that are generic enough to work on all of your machines so that you can use the same builds for all of them (with FEATURES=buildpkg on the machine that does the building and its DISTDIR/PKGDIR shared over NFS).

Gentoo's SELinux policy is a little bit unpolished (I just use the Fedora one and port over any necessary Gentoo-specific changes), but the support for PaX is very good (I guess SELinux and PaX on a desktop is a bit overkill though, and probably won't help much, considering that most desktop vulnerabilities are in things like browsers and don't even require code execution, or in binary blobs that have to be ignored by PaX to run in the first place).

The 'ifconfig' tool (which from net-tools) is obsolete btw, use 'ip addr' and 'ip link' instead (which is from iproute2). The only reason it hasn't been removed is because net-tools contains a few things that aren't in iproute2 and that don't have any other alternatives yet. Seeing as net-tools will be phased out entirely eventually, it's better to learn the 'ip' tool instead.

[Robert Maxwell]

I use CentOS for servers because, well, I'm a cheapskate. Plus, I'm very familiar with it by now.

[Geckothan]

CentOS isn't a bad choice for servers.

Seeing as RHEL is basically just an old version of Fedora (RHEL 6 is F12 with backported features from F13/F14, AFAIK) with Red Hat branding and technical support, and CentOS is just RHEL minus the Red Hat branding, technical support and fast updates (not sure if that applies to security fixes though, as lagging behind with those could be catastrophic), that effectively (albeit indirectly and unofficially) makes CentOS a sort of server-centric 'Fedora LTS'.

I guess a lot of people would consider RHEL (and by extension, CentOS) to be bloated for a server distro (at least by default), but the target market should be competent enough to trim it down to fit their needs.

[Count Zero]

Robert Maxwell wrote:

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I haven't used Ubuntu in a while, though. J, what tasks require the command line, that a "normal user" would need?

None, really. I only had to use it once when the package system got damaged. Ubuntu told me two way to repair it, the first one involving the GUI didn't work.
I've been using it for a year now, and it's worked really well, I've updated the kernel many times and I upgraded once, all without incident.
The main problem Linux still has is compatibility issues. If you didn't buy your hardware accordingly you can have some bad luck with some components. Overall, the situation has greatly approved in recent years but there still can be problems, and if you're new to Linux and have maybe more than one of those components in your computer, it won't be such a great experience, I guess. Wireless is still somewhat of a problem although it can be made to work in nearly all cases nowadays. It's one of the reasons I'm reluctant to recommend it to just anyone. Then again, our Windows Vista computer at the office wouldn't boot recently if the newly bought USB mouse was connected. It's a standard one, I use the same one and I've never seen such behaviour before.

Anyway, welcome to the exciting world of Ubuntu/Linux, Maestro! It's actually not that exciting. I hope you'll have a good user experience with your laptop.

[Geckothan]

Most wireless chips work right out of the box, and the few that don't usually just need the right firmware blob to be installed (a lot of firmware can't be provided by distros due to licensing conflicts, so you have to download the Windows/OS X drivers from the manufacturer and use a tool to extract the blob from them). I guess that can be a problem for new users, but anyone who is intelligent enough to use Google should be able to figure it out.

The only real compatibility issues are with new graphics cards, and that's usually only if you're using the open sourced drivers instead of the proprietary ones from the manufacturer (for e.g., the open source Radeon stack still struggles with Northern Islands/HD6xxx cards, let alone Southern Islands/HD7xxx ones).