Well, it’s actually going to be a combination of Ubuntu LTS 8.04 (Hardy Heron) and OpenSuse 11.0 (hopefully when that gets released sometime in June). The main needs are to use Bugzilla and Subversion and also to look more closely at Mono and see how far we can really go with cross platform development with it.
In the recent Linux Format Magazine review Ubuntu 8.04 got a 7/10 and I can see why now. It’s a good distro, easy to install and configure but it’s not trying to be anything spectacular or cutting edge. One of my previous pains with Linux has always been getting stuff installed and having to build stuff from source and resolve library dependencies. It’s not pretty and life is just too short to be messing with things like that. I know some see it as a test manhood but not me! The Synaptic Package Manager and the .deb files of Debian are about the best things around and the online respositories are extremely fast for downloading from.
Accessing email from Cougar is done from Outlook Web Access via Firefox 3 beta as Evolution doesn’t support connecting to Exchange 2007. I don’t know whether there is a resolution to this at the moment. Also, I cannot browse my network shares on Cougar but having looked at the latest Samba version (3.0.29), I think I might have to upgrade to that.
I had the usual having to install libdvdcss to watch DVDs as most Linux distros won’t provide this because of the legal implications. I’ve installed Skype and I’m using Kopete for Messenger and how could I forget Twitter, which is sorted out with the Firefox addin TwitterFox.
There’s also a great game called Open Arena which is a Quakesque like experience, so shooting up some badies is catered for. So, for now I think I’m equipped for general day to day usage.
It’s fast and responsive on my lowly laptop and with Vista on it, things are frustratingly slow.
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May 30th, 2008 at 11:02 pm
[...] you just love it when things just work together, well I do! I recently wrote about using Ubuntu 8.04 and saw a great post by Girish entitled Ubuntu 8.04 on SBS 2003 network, so I thought I’d try [...]
June 4th, 2008 at 1:55 am
Actually, I also made the transition to Ubuntu Linux 8.04 just today. I found it uber-easy to install, and its finally got a screen resolution that fit. I’m pleased with it! I hope you enjoy it too.
July 8th, 2008 at 2:32 pm
Why bother with Samba?
Services for NFS has been around for a long time (Interix, Services for UNIX 1/2/3/3.5) and is a lot simpler to configure than Samba.
Plus you get the benefit of your domain controller becoming an NIS Master and being able to re-use your AD accounts on your Linux/*BSD boxes. Not as elegant as pam_ldap though, but can be simpler to configure (for an odd definition of simpler).
Besides, the NFS client is simpler to configure than Samba.