# Linux that works... Ubuntu. Good Bye Bill.



## stanb999 (Jan 30, 2005)

Finally. I have used many distributions over the years only to get frustrated by the difficulty in getting things to work, doing addons or plugin's and all the various inconsistencies in performance. What is so amazing is it all works out of the box... If it needs drivers or files it asks you if you want it to down load it... it does it and installs it. Then will check it for updates... with no more action on your part. 

Well what has all changed with ubuntu 10.9. It just works. 
here is a link.
http://www.ubuntu.com/


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## lharvey (Jul 1, 2003)

I got 9.04 (Jaunty) installed on most machines in my office,

I do have one machine with 9.10 installed on it but it really doesn't like the video driver or the sound card. Funny that this is identical machine with one of the Jaunty machines and it works perfectly.

Naturally I got to keep a machine here with Windows on it so I can test stuff so that is a dual boot XP and Windows 7

Yea that's right, I skipped right over VISTA just like I did Windows ME

L


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## stanb999 (Jan 30, 2005)

lharvey said:


> I got 9.04 (Jaunty) installed on most machines in my office,
> 
> I do have one machine with 9.10 installed on it but it really doesn't like the video driver or the sound card. Funny that this is identical machine with one of the Jaunty machines and it works perfectly.
> 
> ...


Did you install the proprietary drivers? Or are you in 64 bit... 64 bit I've read can be an issue. Not just with the drivers but with finding software.


Can't beat compiz... and the screenlets for the home user customization. The wife has sworn off her vista on her HP laptop, a cheap one from wally world. Yep, installed it and it worked. Well I did have to plug the laptop into the router directly to download the wireless card software. Once done. All else just installed. A few other things. The sound actually works better (it's louder and clearer) before external speakers were always needed. The other is the monitor had stopped going into power save even when you closed the lid. Now it suspends like it should. It also starts in less than a minute and shuts down in the same. It used to take at least 5 minutes to start and forget about shutting down.


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## fratermus (May 11, 2009)

To be fair, some folks upgrading from to 9.04 are making unhappy noises about 9.10. I'm waiting a bit longer.

All my machines (including the wife's workstation) are running linux; I do have one windows box that sits in the corner and gets fired up from time to time these days.


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## stanb999 (Jan 30, 2005)

fratermus said:


> To be fair, some folks upgrading from to 9.04 are making unhappy noises about 9.10. I'm waiting a bit longer.
> 
> All my machines (including the wife's workstation) are running linux; I do have one windows box that sits in the corner and gets fired up from time to time these days.


I think the key is to not upgrade... Just install it knew. They even say it in the docs.


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## HermitJohn (May 10, 2002)

I download copy of Ubuntu once in a while I have access to broadband there, but havent been to library with my laptop for some time so cant comment on recent releases. 

I have never been that thrilled with Ubuntu, just much prefer Puppy or PClinuxOS. The best thing about Ubuntu is its large user community so if you have problem, even a rather uncommon one, most likely others have already had it and dealt with it.


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## Mechanic Intern (Jun 10, 2007)

I did a clean install of Karmic (9.10) over my Jaunty install, and found that one of my favorite apps (gtkpod) no longer recognizes my iPod Nano 1st gen (2GB white), and it doesn't want to shut down (it acts like it's going to, but then it just freezes before halting the system) so I have to take it down hard (if I take it down at all). Don't get me wrong; Karmic is still a great release, but the shutdown bug is rather annoying.


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## stanb999 (Jan 30, 2005)

I was talking to a buddy that is the network admin. for a fairly large retailer. I was telling him of my success. He was like isn't it great when a program just works. 

But he did say that most of my hardware is technology older than 2 years and he also said the laptop and the desktop box are basically the same... Same chipset, same graphics, etc. 
So maybe thats why the install was so easy. 

So for those that know what hardware you have and are interested in a new OS.

Home built desktop
Mother board....................... ASUS m2n
Chipset .............................. Nvidia
processor........................... AMD K2+ 5800 Duel core
video acceleration............... Nvidia 9800 SLI
Sound................................ from chipset 
Lan.................................... from chipset

Laptop
Hp Pavillion DV6000


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## DoubleBee (Nov 13, 2006)

I tried a few versions of Ubuntu. Have recently tried 9.04 and 9.10. It just doesn't run as snappy as I'd like on my machines.
These are homebuilts, assembled in 2006, and I'm not looking to upgrade any time soon.
I ran across PCLinuxOS and it's been love ever since. Runs smooth and things just work. I was even able to dust off an older Lexmark printer and HPScanjet3300. Both work like a charm with the OS.
I'm running a HP Officejet all in one on my main tower.


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## stanb999 (Jan 30, 2005)

9acres said:


> I tried a few versions of Ubuntu. Have recently tried 9.04 and 9.10. It just doesn't run as snappy as I'd like on my machines.
> These are homebuilts, assembled in 2006, and I'm not looking to upgrade any time soon.
> I ran across PCLinuxOS and it's been love ever since. Runs smooth and things just work. I was even able to dust off an older Lexmark printer and HPScanjet3300. Both work like a charm with the OS.
> I'm running a HP Officejet all in one on my main tower.


:rotfl: You should try Vista if Ubuntu isn't fast enough.


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## fratermus (May 11, 2009)

9acres said:


> I tried a few versions of Ubuntu. Have recently tried 9.04 and 9.10. It just doesn't run as snappy as I'd like on my machines.


Ubuntu is easy/nice but not particularly fast. Several of the "pretty" distros are fairly bloated at this point, lugging around a lot of crap. Using Ubuntu with a lightweight desktop environment like Xfce is near effortless and has a smaller mem/cpu footprint. Or dump the integrated desktop and go for something leaner that requires a bit more learning curve/effort like fluxbox, IceWM, etc. You can install several window managers / desktop environments and flip back and forth between them at the login screen (there are other ways but that may be simplest for first-timers).

For raw speed we can run one of the "everything loads in RAM" variants like Puppy or Tiny Core. The latter is not for the faint of heart; the OS is 10MB (!) and obviously comes stripped very bare. You intentionally install any software you want to have on the system. I run TC on my Eee which has minimal hardware.


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## farmerbrian (Aug 29, 2009)

I used 6.x (Breezy beaver maybe?) and it was I nice OS, but I found myself still spending 80% of my time in a RDP session to a windows terminal server. So what was the point? The linux RDP client worked pretty well but not perfect. The kicker that really sent be back to XP was trying to get desktop shared across two monitors. I just gave up after screwing with x11 conf files for a few weeks. 

Linux systems have a great many purposes and excellent qualities. But 3 years ago at least, Desktop in a medium sized enterprise was not one of them. 

Who knows maybe I will try latest versions of Ubuntu out at home. I certainly wont be paying for an Windows upgrades since there is not a thing XP is lacking for me right now.


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## DoubleBee (Nov 13, 2006)

stanb999 said:


> :rotfl: You should try Vista if Ubuntu isn't fast enough.


Yeah. That's one reason I went back to trying Linux distros. I'm here on Vista now and thinking about rolling it back to XP. 

I have PCLOS on a couple towers and I think I have Mandriva RC1 on another. I did download the latest Mandriva final release, but haven't burned it yet.

I have 2 hard drives on 2 towers, with separate operating systems on each drive. I have a single drive on my "test" tower, and use that one first to try out any new OS.


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## DanHurt (Nov 11, 2009)

I have vista ultimate 64bit with 8GB of ram at home and it's decent. I'll install 7 Pro on the wife's computer when I build it, probably with 12 GB of ram.

The Air Force is upgrading to vista but they're not adding ram, at least not in my office, and the performance is what you would expect. I had to bring in 3 GB of spare from my house, and the system uses half of that it idle.:1pig:


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