Ubuntu, my old friend

My first Linux based operating system was, as for most people, Ubuntu Linux. I loved it and quickly preferred it over my Windows XP at that time. Times started changing and ultimately I got tired of all the "ubuntu is for newcomers and people who don't know anything about GNU/Linux" and decided to try some other distributions that seem to have been developed for tech savvy people.

Fedora was my first and immediately I started encountering problems setting up my environment. A big and known problem with Fedora is their ignorance to provide you with proprietary GPU drivers and this was quite an issue to me. Quickly moved onto Arch Linux and stayed with that for quite some time. After a long period of time something got me to thinking about what I am actually doing. I realized I was creating my own desktop from scratch. Arch Linux usually provides you absolutely nothing of initial configuration and makes you write everything yourself. Their wiki contains pretty much everything you need but I decided it was counter productive and went back to Ubuntu.

I liked it again and used it for a few months. Then Debian caught my attention. It got me to thinking as Ubuntu is pretty much Debian providing a out of the box desktop experience. I convinced myself to give it a try, regardless of my statement about being counter productive on Arch Linux. That statement doesn't apply to Debian, at least not at same extent. I have never really looked back since I installed Debian. The package manager is superb, the community is very helpful and they all know what they're doing. Debian can provide you a very neat looking desktop with minimal effort and as of today it provided pretty much all my needs.

Last Sunday I needed a virtual machine as I wiped every single one of them formatting my drive. I was rather tired, couldn't be bothered to click more than 10 times during the installation so I came to downloading Ubuntu 12.04 beta. I was really surprised, the installer has improved greatly and the desktop is to say the least very productive and a joy to the eye. I was genuinely surprised and ended up using the virtual machine for the last 2 days.

While the desktop is resource heavier and bad news for my hard drive in terms of install size I am giving into the fact that I like this easy to use and very neat out of the box experience. I am deciding to use my expertise in Linux that I developed over the last years to remove all the things I don't require from Ubuntu as I think this will give a lot more comfort than creating the same desktop experience on my Debian box.

For the interested ones, below are some screenshots of the new Ubuntu LTS release.

Now I did find a very little annoyance when taking these pictures. Taking them itself it rather easy, print screen launches the application and you just have to save it to whatever location you like. The screenshot application has a rather annoying habit saving the pictures in a fashion that would make most Arch Linux users pull their hairs out. I've always hated spaces in filenames and while it doesn't really matter most of the time, it did cause a problem. I took most of the screenshots from the virtual machine itself so I have to get them back to my desktop where I am writing this article. The samba interface did complain about files not existing. The next little script solved this issue.


for a in *.png; do mv "$a" $(sha1sum "$a" | cut -d ' ' -f1)."${a##*.}"; done


Now this doesn't change my mind as this one liner is far less than what I've written to make everything work correctly on other distributions. The following picture is just a tiny part of this.