ganymede.gathani.org running Ubuntu
I reinstalled 1420.gathani.org with Ubuntu 7.04 yesterday, and rechristened it to ganymede.gathani.org. It was difficult to decide which operating system and distribution I should have installed. The choices were:
- FreeBSD - useful for package hacking work I’ve been involved in recently. However, I already have access to several FreeBSD machines at this point in time, one which is even dedicated solely for package building.
- Gentoo - I wanted to evaluate the distribution from a usability and release engineering perspective.
- Ubuntu - Given the hype, I wanted to see how different it was from Fedora at this point in time.
In the end, I went with Ubuntu. I’ll admit it: curiosity got the better of me. Of course, it helps that Ubuntu is certainly more Free now then it has been before. I had last used Ubuntu two years back and came to a conclusion that it was not very different compared to Fedora. I ditched it when I couldn’t roll back the system.
This time around, I only had a Live CD on hand. Well, one Live CD and a girlfriend sitting on the couch beside me. I thought it may be interesting to see how a normal computer user would find the installation of a Linux distribution. So I passed her the Live CD and asked her to run the Installation.
Here is a point for distro installer developers: Live CD’s are slow. Very slow. For those coming from a Microsoft Windows background, crashes are common. Non responsiveness through slow CD’s indicates a crashed system for these people. And not to mention that an animated progress bar doesn’t exactly help if it doesn’t show actual progress per se. The recommendation here is to clearly inform the user about the progress of the boot process in an understandable and visually appealing manner.
After some time, the system finally booted into GNOME. Very spiffy. A nifty Install icon on the Desktop was clicked and the installation was easy and dandy as it could be. Everything ran correctly without any problems. Ubuntu gets a Borat style “Nice!” 
Fedora isn’t substantially different from Ubuntu from this perspective as Fedora tends to be as easy to install. The main difference is in the small touchup’s that Ubuntu has; attention to detail matters, a lot! If Fedora is aiming at the desktop crowd, it may do well to follow Ubuntu in this regard.
apt-get was heavenly to get into, after yum. But then, even I have long admitted that Debian’s package distribution system is certainly a shining jewel of FOSS distributions
I installed the Apache + PHP + PostgreSQL (LAPP) stack. There seems to be a simple way to install LAMP:
1 | $ sudo tasksel install lamp |
How does one go about just as easily installing LAPP? Clearly, an edit of /usr/share/tasksel/ubuntu-tasks.desc is required. One hopes that Ubuntu rolls LAPP by default, just as they did for LAMP.
ganymede.gathani.org is now part of a Umgubular-Slashkilter cluster, crawling the web for fun, profit and pretty graphs. Needless to say, the home Streamyx line is saturated. I so need to get a colocated machine