[LBo] A (shortish) introduction

[Brice Hunt]

Stefan Waidele wrote:
> Brice Hunt schrieb:
>> Isolde Ryan wrote:
>>> Ps I'd be interested in hearing how K/Ubuntu limits your
>>> command-line capabilities .. 
>
> Ubuntu made a bold step when they deactivated login for root, forcing
> users to use sudo as much as possible.
>
> This is a reasonable security measure.
>
> If I need to do something major as root, I simple do a "sudo su" and I
> have a root shell.
>
> The fact that Ubuntu has very good GUI-tools for configuration tempts
> people (like me ) to use the GUI-tools, setting things up in a hurry
> without actually understanding how they work.
> The same is true for other major distros like Suse, Fedora and others.
>
> I actually used Suse since 5.3 without learning how to manually set up
> a soundcard! I consider myself pretty good at networking, but I need
> to look up "man route" and "man ifconfig" each and every time I need
> to use them, simply because I usually use GUI for setting up NICs.
>
> I configure server-processes like Apache, Samba, Postfix by hand. I
> don't know when I had to read up the basics for those.
>
>> What I noticed is that for changes made to certain configuration files
>> to actually take effect, I had to run some obscure script that made the
>> basic changes for me.
>
> In Ubuntu? Can you give an example?
>
The two examples that I can think of occurred with Kubuntu 6.10 "Edgy
Eft." 

The first example happened when I tried to set up cups to accept raw
octet/streams from port 631 and from a very specific network address,
just changing the necessary config files and restarting cupsys seemed to
have no effect. My wife's Windows XP (she runs Autocad, thus needs
Windows) couldn't even find the printer with the firewall completely
turned off.  I searched on the Ubuntu forums and found some post
somewhere that told about a script that had to be run with sudo in some
non-path directory that actually enabled the print sharing and fixed the
printer problem.

The other example is that I installed the NVidia drivers and edited
xorg.conf by hand to use them at my preferred screen resolution and
refresh rate.  For some reason, Kubuntu is the only distribution I've
seen that would ignore the settings in xorg.conf on my system and run at
a lower resolution and refresh rate, even though I downloaded the
drivers from NVidia and did a compile for the kernel module.  Kubuntu
did load the proper drivers, but would not run any higher resolution
than 1024x768 with refresh rates at 55 Hz (contrasted with 45 Hz using
the generic "nv" driver in Kubuntu). If I reduced the resolution to
800x600, I could get a refresh rate of 60 Hz. The Ubuntu-provided
pre-compiled NVidia driver didn't work any better. Providing the actual
sync rates of my monitor in xorg.conf made the problem worse, except
that I could now access higher resolutions (yea try using a monitor at
1400x1050 at 34 Hz!)

By comparison, in Suse 10.1, I'm running at 1400x1050 resolution with an
83 Hz refresh rate and can go as high as 1600x1200 at 75Hz (my monitor's
maximum per the monitor manufacturer). Debian "Etch" works as well as
Suse 10.1. In Debian, X.org just worked at my preferred resolution and
refresh rate before I ever installed the NVidia drivers. Mepis ran at a
maximum of 1024x768 at 55Hz by default, but installing the NVidia drivers
and editing xorg.conf fixed up Mepis to run at my preferred settings.
Even a default install of X in OpenBSD with a vesa driver produced
better results than Ubuntu with NVidia drivers.  Some obscure setting
somewhere within the Ubuntu distribution messes up X on my particular
hardware and will not run at the refresh rates and resolutions that my
hardware is capable of providing (perhaps some kernel option or X.org
compile-time option is set differently in Kubuntu?). I spent my spare
time for about 3 days searching for and trying out different solutions
before I got tired of typing "sudo" and wiped Kubuntu off of my hard drive.

Anyway, that's the worst of my experience with Kubuntu and why I am
prejudiced against its form of command-line editing of files.

Brice Hunt