Trying to get Hardy? Here's a good mirror for the U.S. ... plus OpenBSD is easy enough -- even for a 4-year-old, and a FreeBSD interlude
We go through this every six months: Ubuntu brings out a new release, and by the time release day comes around, it's murder to get enough bandwidth to grab the damn thing and make a new disc out of it.
And no, I don't have any recent Ubuntu installs that I can upgrade, so I need the full ISO.
Hence, I'm downloading a Ubuntu 8.04 beta right now.
I'm excited about this Ubuntu release for a number of reasons:
1) Even though I had problems with 7.10 on my Gateway laptop, that version of Ubuntu allowed me control of my Alps touchpad that is hard to come by in other Linux distributions. OK, so PCLinuxOS 2007 was able to do it, but otherwise I've either got tap-to-click or not ... and I'd like to have a choice in the matter.
2) I'm not a huge fan of upgrading every install on a six-month schedule. Some things I'm happy to upgrade twice a year. Some not. My problems with Ubuntus 7.04 and 7.10 put me off of the very popular distro for awhile. I went back to 6.06 LTS on one install and enjoyed it immensely. But why even think about staying with an install for up to three years? I'll tell you:
3) From the Firefox 3 beta to a bleeding-edge GNOME implementation ... OK, I can't find much else, but the point is that Ubuntu is front-loading this release with the latest of everything. Normally, I'm the kind of person who gravitates to stable, not experimental, but in this case -- with a long-term support release -- there should be plenty of time to shake out the bugs, so to speak. I imagine it'll be like running a less-broken Debian Sid (and hopefully not a more-broken one) that will cycle its way through Lenny-ness, on to a stable Etch-like state. Or at least that's what I'm hoping for.
It's a funny thing -- Ubuntu. I think this 8.04 release -- given its LTS status, and the general maturation of the Linux desktop over the past couple of years -- is more make-or-break and less just-another-in-the-cycle for the Ubuntu community. I'm hopeful that vendors like Dell will latch onto 8.04 and boost its profile by preinstalling it wherever and whenever they can.
Like I said, while I did abandon Ubuntu 7.10 pretty quickly, I saw a great deal of progress in terms of desktop usability. While I thought I needed Ubuntu to easily run the apps my 4-year-old has grown extremely attached too -- namely Gcompris, TuxPaint and Childsplay -- I've since installed them in Debian Lenny, and then even OpenBSD, and they worked just as well. Yeah, my 4-year-old is using OpenBSD (in 64 MB of RAM and 233 MHz of CPU, no less -- and no more).
So Ubuntu is great and all -- I do recommend it, but with the right administrative help and a little training, the "average" user can find his or her way in just about any Linux distribution -- and even in OpenBSD or FreeBSD.
Oh, and here's the fast mirror I found.
And here's the ubiquitous "this many days until Ubuntu Hardy" graphic:
But first ... FreeBSD 7 will fight for supremacy on my Gateway Solo 1450 laptop. I'm starting the install now, and things look very, very good at this point: ACPI fan management is working, and I'm barely past the boot prompt. that's very encouraging. Along with this install, I will be using and reviewing Dru Lavigne's book, "The Best of FreeBSD Basics," which so far has proven to be a very useful book to have around. A full review of the book is forthcoming.
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You could easily grab the final ISO via bittorrent. Even during non-release times, grabbing the torrent is faster. With many hundreds of people doing so, the download should be very fast.
Also, if you are wanting to upgrade from 7.10, and don't want to take 12 hours to do so, download the alternate installer. Burn it to disk, pop it in to your booted machine, and add it as a CD repository. This will allow you to upgrade your installation off of the CD instead of an online mirror.
Ack, OpenBSD!? That is the most hated of all BSD's.
I always just download a torrent of the new release. TONS of seeders make for a really quick download. I remember downloading Gusty at about 1mb/s, not too shabby for my crappy Qwest DSL line.
Re: Don
"Ack, OpenBSD!? That is the most hated of all BSD's."
What are you going on about? OpenBSD is a stable, secure minimalistic Unix-like operating system suitable for everything but massive multi-core servers or intensive 3D work.
Perhaps you are refering to a small but vocal segment of the Linux community that have issues with Theo deRaadt, the OpenBSD founder being hard to get along with.
If this is the case, well fine, I've not found him to be overly nasty, but to claim that the OS is in anyway hated because of it is just plain silly.
For example, I can't stand Linus Torvalds, yet I have no major issues with Linux, and run it on a couple of my machines. I run OpenBSD as well, and find it very nice too.
Whatever the controversies are over the way the OpenBSD community carries or conducts itself, I think that OpenBSD has much to offer both the desktop and server user. The emphasis on security is a big factor for me, as is the overall stability and quality of the system.
With the default install, you get the Fvwm window manager -- which I've grown quite fond of -- and more than a few applications. Besides the expected vi, OpenBSD, in its default configuration, offers version of Apache and the text browser Lynx, both of which have been tweaked quite a bit by the OpenBSD team.
And when it comes to adding applications for either desktop or server use, there are over 4,000 precompiled packages for i386, plus more ports than that for all the architectures on which OpenBSD runs. I'd love to get a SPARC box and try it out with OpenBSD (and Debian and NetBSD, too, for that matter).
Back to the packages: OpenBSD's version of the lightweight Dillo Web browsers looks better and is easier to use than on any other system. I'm not sure why it looks so different, but I'm glad it works so well. I packed one of my desktop systems with all the apps I use. The worst thing I can say about it is I have yet to get spellcheck working in AbiWord. Otherwise, everything looks and works great. As I say in the article, I even loaded all the educational software my daughter uses. It's not all by geeks and for geeks -- you can get just about anything you want to run in OpenBSD.
The overall experience of running any BSD is quite a bit different from Linux, to be sure. And OpenBSD's developers and users aren't, for the most part, trying to steal Linux's newbie lunch. If you have been installing and running Linux for awhile and aren't afraid to read the documentation (OpenBSD, like every other BSD project, has a great FAQ), you might have a lot of fun -- and learn a few things, too -- by working with OpenBSD, NetBSD or FreeBSD.