The road to Ubuntu

I started using linux back in 94, when I inherited a PC with some version of Linux allready installed. The guy i got it from used a bunch of floppy disk to get it running, and he was my hero. I was instantly hooked. I was a student (and single) at the time at had plenty of time and spent nights diving into the system.

It is fair to say that my graduation got postponed quite some time beacuse of this... Anyway..

The first distro i got hooked on was RedHat. I can't remember the version. To this day i still like redhat/fedora/RHEN quite a lot.
I used RedHat for many years, and had a little business running on the side implementing redhat+openvpn to build secure connections between small business offices.

It was during that time that I found redhat less than optimal to use as server, mostly because i had to reinstall the system every year or so. I started to get into Debian, and loved the APT package system right away. Also at the time RedHat made the descision to stop support for redhat, and shift its commercial attention to the enterprise servers, while developing the community supported Fedora. It some ways RHES was what I was looking for since i wanted a system that was guaranteed to be supported for a number of years.

But, the commercial side of things made me look closer at Debian. I played with debain stable on my workstation, but i was allready too hooked on reading about new features in linux and gnome that I could be satisfied with Debian stable on my workstatsion. I upgraded to Debian Testing and also Debian Unstable to try out the new stuff. This resulted in a quite buggy system, and sometimes some failure to do basic stuff like read my mail... But, I got what i asked for.

I ended up with a feeling that debian stable was the ultimate box for a server, like the ones i set up to run OpenVPN, stable and with very little downtime. I would choose it, for my business server purposes, over RH, any day.

But for my workstation, I found Debian testing a bit too unstable and not very attractibe to use. Fedora on the other hand looks great and is very easy to use on a daily basis. I do love the way the Debian system works though....
So, last year i saw that yet another Linux distro was annouced : UBUNTU. Based on Debian/Gnome, with the latest sowftware, and good looking. I didn't expect much since it was the first release, but i have been more than satisfied.

All my hardware worked out fo the box. External USB drives, PCI Wireless DLINK Network card. Also, The way gnome was setup suited my likes perfectly. Clean beautiful desktop, without tons and tons of applications in hard to find menus. Clean, simple and fast....

I upgraded to the development version of ubuntu some months ago, and have had no problems, except a but of trouble enabling suspend/hibernate on my IBM R51 laptop.

All in all UBUNTU is what suits me bests in the linux world of desktop distros : based on Debain, whith a system setup that I like and a great package system, beautiful desktop, the latest of the essential applications (OpenOffice, Ximian, Firefox) and acces to alle the great software in the debian archives..

The latest version of UBUTU (the Hoary release) is due out any day now.

Try it. They even ship pressed CD to you at no cost
http://shipit.ubuntulinux.org/

http://www.ubuntulinux.org/