Ubuntu, Gentoo..

MrSiggler · Post by **MrSiggler** » Wed Apr 06, 2005 3:04 pm

I've seen a lot of talk regarding Ubuntu these days..

In your opinions.. what are the advantages, and/or disadvantages of using Ubuntu rather then Gentoo?

butters · Post by **butters** » Wed Apr 06, 2005 4:13 pm

Gentoo - Pros: No dependency hell due to good package manager, extremely customizable, able to achieve an extremely optimised environment
Cons: Extremely high install time, bugs that force you to reinstall the entire system, very little to no ability to use a GUI to do system tasks

Ubuntu - Pros: Installs in minutes, extremely stable environment, can do most system tasks through the GUI, can use Debian's packages without problems
Cons: The usual Linux distro dependency hell situation where you need updated versions of several packages to install a package and those particular versions do not exist in the package manager. Also having to pull some strings to get things like mp3s and Windows codecs working (but I found a script for that

MrSiggler · Post by **MrSiggler** » Wed Apr 06, 2005 5:08 pm

Say I was to install Ubuntu..
How much trouble would I have getting KDE 3.4 on there? From what I recall, Ubuntu uses Gnome.

And.. in summary, how does the apt system work?

Covar · Post by **Covar** » Wed Apr 06, 2005 6:17 pm

apts not to bad so far. basically there's programs for it with gui's to update with. but it sure as hell is no portage. i truthfully haven't messed around with it to much. butters had a good post on the pros and cons of each, see BlackAuras post on kubuntu to hear about kde on ubuntu.

theres a livecd of ubuntu. check that out to compare it with gentoo.

OneThirty8 · Post by **OneThirty8** » Wed Apr 06, 2005 6:29 pm

To add KDE, you can also just grab Ubuntu's KDE packages and install them.

butters · Post by **butters** » Wed Apr 06, 2005 6:42 pm

You have to realize that ubuntu only maintains their base system, gnome, and a few apps now (basically just the stuff on a default install) which allows them to do updates every half-year instead of much longer like Debian. Anything else is in their universe or multiverse categories, and those are user maintained packages that you'd probably not want to have on a critical system and some things just don't work out of there (such as mplayer). As far as kde goes there is the kubuntu project, but it's still very young and doesn't have a lot of resources yet

ETR · Post by **ETR** » Wed Apr 06, 2005 7:06 pm

Ubuntu is the only Linux distro I have found "Friendly" enough for me, as a non-linux kid.

curt_grymala · Post by **curt_grymala** » Wed Apr 06, 2005 7:29 pm

ETR wrote:Ubuntu is the only Linux distro I have found "Friendly" enough for me, as a non-linux kid.

I'm guessing you haven't tried SuSE.

MrSiggler · Post by **MrSiggler** » Wed Apr 06, 2005 8:05 pm

Well, KDE isn't deadthly essential for me. If Gnome on Ubunto is tolerable (the gnome ebuilds on gentoo seem really sloppy to me), then i'll be fine.

Basically.. i'm finding that too much can be a bad thing. I'm endlessly tweaking with Gentoo, and I waste a lot of time doing so. it simply can't be helped.. i'm a tweaker by nature

Just something that can be installed without pain(unlike gentoo). And is small, clean, and fast. (like gentoo). Without all the hassle of configuring everything by hand and such(unlike gentoo). With relitively easy package installation(like gentoo). Ubuntu does sound like such a dist.. Any more thoughts/opinions ?

BlackAura · Post by **BlackAura** » Wed Apr 06, 2005 9:08 pm

MrSiggler wrote:Say I was to install Ubuntu..
How much trouble would I have getting KDE 3.4 on there? From what I recall, Ubuntu uses Gnome.

And.. in summary, how does the apt system work?

I'm running KDE on this system (Ubuntu), and I don't even have GNOME installed. I installed from the Kubuntu CD - it's Ubuntu, but with the KDE 3.4 packages on the CD instead of GNOME.

You can also install the GNOME version, and install the Kubuntu packages like this:

Code: Select all

sudo apt-get install kubuntu-desktop kubuntu-default-settings

The only problem is that the KDE 3.4 packages are still a little buggy. Konqueror (running as a file manager) is a bit unstable, crashes occasionally, there's a few bugs here and there, and it's not quite as well polished as the GNOME installation. I've actually considered installing GNOME and using that until the KDE packages become a little more stable. On my system, it's only an extra 80MB or so, because I already installed a few of the GNOME bits (they got pulled in by some other apps).

Apt is basically equivalent to portage. Except that it normally downloads and installs precompiled packages rather than building from source code. It can rebuild packages from source, if you want it to. It's a little more involved than Gentoo (you need to install the build dependencies first, then build the packages, and then install the package using dpkg), but not (much) more difficult than it is on Gentoo. Either way is easier than on RPM-based distros.

Using it is basically the same as using the emerge command, but the names are a bit different. To update the local copy of the repositories, you do:

Code: Select all

apt-get update

To upgrade existing packages:

Code: Select all

apt-get upgrade

To install something:

Code: Select all

apt-get install packagename

To uninstall something:

Code: Select all

apt-get remove packagename

To search the package list:

Code: Select all

apt-cache search searchterms

You can also add additional package repositories by modifying /etc/apt/sources.list. You might want to enable the universe repository (unsupported official packages, usually work OK), and add the multiverse repository (imported more or less verbatim from Debian, might not work properly). That should take care of most of the software you'd ever want.

Ubuntu also comes with a couple of other interfaces to apt. Aptitude is an ncurses-based one, which works quite well. Synaptic is a GTK-based one similar to Aptitude, but somewhat easier to use. Kynaptic is a Qt/KDE version of Synaptic, although it's not as capable yet (you can't add repositories, for example). There's also dselect, but you don't want to use that (it's horrible).

The only thing you really have to get used to is that you don't have a root password - you use sudo (with your password) to get root access.

butters · Post by **butters** » Wed Apr 06, 2005 10:13 pm

BlackAura wrote:The only thing you really have to get used to is that you don't have a root password - you use sudo (with your password) to get root access.

Heh the first thing I did on my system was set a root passwd. I like being able to su to root.

Post by **|darc|** » Wed Apr 06, 2005 11:09 pm

I'm posting this from Ubuntu. I had to see what all the hype was about. So far, I think it's pretty nice.

butters · Post by **butters** » Thu Apr 07, 2005 1:35 am

Hehe way to go with the flow |darc|

Anyways, I've really gotten to like this distro. Seems like every day I get at least 40 updates, and I love how quickly and seamlessly they get installed. While it's not as "spunky" as Gentoo it runs better than any other binary distro I've ever tried, and I've yet to have any seg faults (though I did manage to install a bad kernel that would make the kernel panic on Gnome startup).

Sidenote: I've installed a lot of fonts from Windows that I got through a script on Ubuntu's forums and webpages look so much better.

bizzle · Post by **bizzle** » Thu Apr 07, 2005 1:57 pm

I am going to install it once Hoary goes final on the 8th.

MrSiggler · Post by **MrSiggler** » Thu Apr 07, 2005 2:19 pm

Xylene wrote:I am going to install it once Hoary goes final on the 8th.

That's my plan as well

Covar · Post by **Covar** » Thu Apr 07, 2005 3:39 pm

just get the preview build and update when its released. thats whats nice about it.

MrSiggler · Post by **MrSiggler** » Thu Apr 07, 2005 5:31 pm

I have the preview ISO.. I installed it in a trial version of vpc to check it out.
I had horrible trouble getting X to work, I had horrible display corruption..
But that's the be expected. Trying to run Linux in Microsoft Virtual PC .. hehe
From what I saw though, it looks great. Even under emulation, the gnome seemed less 'sloppy' as Gentoo's gnome ebuilds. So I'm going to give Gnome a try again. And as ye say, I can easily slap KDE in there if i need

So you say if I install the RC ISO I have, I can simply update when the final version is out, w/o problem?

That's another thing I was wondering about..
To update the installed OS..

With gentoo, it's a simple emerge sync, emerge world.
With this, is it as simple as going apt-get update, apt-get upgrade ?
Will that upgrade kernel and system stuff as well?

butters · Post by **butters** » Thu Apr 07, 2005 9:35 pm

There's an apt-get dist-upgrade command that is supposed to do smart dependency checking when doing major updates.

BlackAura · Post by **BlackAura** » Fri Apr 08, 2005 4:17 am

So you say if I install the RC ISO I have, I can simply update when the final version is out, w/o problem?

Yep.

With gentoo, it's a simple emerge sync, emerge world.
With this, is it as simple as going apt-get update, apt-get upgrade ?
Will that upgrade kernel and system stuff as well?

Pretty much. For major upgrades (like upgrading from one release of a distribution to another, of if you've not upgraded for months), you do dist-upgrade instead. Shouldn't need that upgrading from the Ubuntu pre-releases - the packages are the same, they're just later version numbers.

Polymira · Post by **Polymira** » Fri Apr 08, 2005 11:56 am

I just wanna say, as an ex gentoo user and current ubuntu user ..... yeah, debian doesn't have your normal "dependency hell" issues, that's more associated with rpm based distrobutions. Using apt-get is basically like gentoo's emerge, just without having to compile your package along with however many dependencies you need.

Reason i went to ubuntu from gentoo? Well, this is on my laptop, 1.3ghz pentium m, 512mb ram. I went to compile k3b so i could burn some cd's on the go ... well ... 40 dependencies and 7 hours of compile time later ... i was downloading the iso....