Your articles provide, I think, the right mix of assumption and detail for folks like me who have no intention of becoming “gurus” ourselves, but would like to nevertheless tinker and tweak and generally take advantage of Linux’s freedom of choice.

My comment here may seem a bit on the late side, seeing as Ubuntu 8.10 is out, but today is the day I happened to follow a link from another one of your articles to this one, and I have a question because I’m thinking of doing this very thing for my daughter, replacing her old distro with Ubuntu 8.10 and moving her current /home directory to it’s own partition.

My question is if it’s a typo that, In your two partition lists, /dev/sda2 and /dev/sda3 have been transposed? What keeps me from simply saying “Hey, lookee, a typo,” is that, from all I can see, everyone that’s commented here seems to know WAY more about Linux than I do … so I harbor a suspicion that it’s not a typo on your part but naivite on mine.

I enjoy your writings. You’re one of only a few reviewers I read from distrowatch. Keep up the good work.

1. It takes quite a long time, over 1/2 hour, apparently because it first downloads a long list of languages and then removes them at the end of the install. Compared to around 10 minutes installations with Suse 11 and Linux Mint. Then once installed more time is demanded while one tries to find Macromedia flashplayer and the Kubunti restricted drivers. Then one has to down load the restricted video driver. I would suggest that Kubuntu follow the excellent installation style provided by Suse 11 and add to it options to cover the above mentioned restricted items. Also Skype could not be found in the repositories and the version on Skypes web page will not download to 64 bit Kubuntu. I was able to install it by using “getlibs skype-static -2.0.0.72/skype.”

Once the slowness of the installation was overcome I found Kubuntu to be a fine distrubution.

Thanks.

If kubuntu only had yum, I would be very tempted to move from Fedora …

I prefer KDE to GNOME but both are good desktops, as are IceWM, Fluxbox, etc. With Linux, you can choose what you prefer. If you like Opera, use it. If you like Firefox, use that. Use whichever application meets your desires the best. If you don’t like the way a distribution works, either change it yourself or feed back POLITELY to the developers what your preferences would be. But don’t just take free stuff and then gripe that it does not meet your needs – you have no property rights in the distribution unless you coded and built it. If I do not have the skills or time to change what I don’t like, then I will adjust myself to whatever is offered or look for other alternatives.

Finally, being nasty is childish. The greatest and most useful advice I have ever heard was the old saying “Do to others as you would have others do to you.” For the naysayers in the above posts, consider that the problem may be with your equipment, the downloading of the file (did you check the MD5SUM of the download and the burn?), or simply another problem, possibly PEBKAC? The Linux community knows well that some hardware, such as Broadcom wireless, frequently has driver problems. There are many potential points of failure that have nothing to do with the distribution.

As for the article, Well Done, DeviceGuru. I will be installing the 64-bit version of Kubuntu shortly and keeping my fingers crossed that it works as I wish. [Yes, I did check the MD5SUM before and after the download and the burn.]

Fonts are a big complaint I have against Linux. ubuntu 8.04 is the best so far. I guess I’m so use to Windows fonts. I need to research more to find out if TT fonts can or will work in Linux.

Also, I just like KDE better than gnome. The board games on gnome just look like some cheap toy or evern worse, like Windows 3.1. KDE has much better displays. I’m excited about installing kubuntu.

Thanks again for this positive article.

Obviously you regard your OPINION as the absolute truth. Anyone deviant to your OPINION are idiots.
1: You confuse nonfreak linuxusers with those (idiots) who don’t understand politics.
2: Intelligence belongs to those who understand there’s more to learn.
3: Apparently you have something to share with the rest of us – sheer stupidity masked as arrogance won’t bring your message across.
4: Reverting to the term “IDIOT” – Linux politics appears to be something you really do not undestand thus the term kind of bounces back into your very own backyard.
5: If you don’t like *buntu don’t use it – It’s not my problem.
6: If your preferred distro or LFS suffers from ‘buntu popularity – put your grunts and efforts into that – don’t bother anyone else with it. Your comment doesn’t prove knowledge – only infantility.

1) ‘Ubuntu’ distributions are just noise that should go away. Look at the latency of their own security updates compared to debian. They focus only on the high priority ones, which for them, means: “the packages most users use”. This alone, is enough for any sane person to dismiss Ubuntu as a primary distribution.

2) ‘Ubuntu’ distributions have a problem with trying to look like Windows. There is no point in all of this. Think about it. People who want an “easy” *nix, should just go Apple. People who want a *nix, should stick to the plain good old BSD family or pick up a real distribution. Anything else but ‘ubuntu’.

3) Drivers that work in ‘Ubuntu’, are not manufactured by ubuntu. They work everywhere and “ubuntu” has little to do with that. Go and check the kernel contributions by Canonical. Writing nonsensical comments about “my hardware works with Ubuntu” means that you are actually do not know what you are doing. Enjoy your immense ignorance on the subject.

And I will not reply to idiots, so do not bother.