Brand new Desktop

I have always been a Debian fan. Package managers are a core parts of Linux distributions and they play a main role in determining if a distro gets selected by  particular users for their use. YUM was added to RPM based systems as an afterthought, for example. When I was comfortable with RPM based systems, I liked more the comfort provided by Mandrake’s urpmi command that would make the dreaded ‘dependency hell’ go away. People always like nice things, right?

I did move over to Debian later on. I think I first used the ‘potato’ release. I was snug in the comfort offered by APT, Debian’s packaging tool. It was very easy to manage packages and dependencies were solved automatically. And with a huge package repository, only a very few times did I have to install packages manually. I always was keen at wringing performance out of my system. But being a developer and a Python lover, Gentoo seemed to be the best system available for me. Gentoo’s package manager, Portage is writen in Python. I used it for about a couple of years. Portage was not new to me. Being Operating system crazy, FreeBSD was one of the operating systems I kept installed on my system. FreeBSD’s port’s collection, its own package manager was the inspiration for Gentoo’s Portage. Everything installs from source and you can even tweak the compiler flags!

But given my download speeds and CPU power, portage’s ‘install after download and compile’ became a bottleneck when I needed a package up and running quickly. The best thing I have done with Gentoo systems is that once I built a 5 node OpenMOSIX cluster. I felt like I was on http://top500.org. It was then that I discovered Ubuntu. There has since been no looking back. I think Synaptic is Ubuntu’s killer app. It got the newbies hooked on. Without knowing about APT, users were able to search for their favorite software and install it. And man, how many choices.

Rather than do an ‘apt-get dist-upgrade’ to update my distribution to the next release, I decided to install Ubuntu ‘Dapper Drake’ from the installation CDs I ordered for free from http://shipit.ubuntu.com. Usually there are 2 CDs in each Ubuntu CD case. One Live CD, to try Ubuntu out without installaling it on your PC and the other, an install CD. This time, there was but one CD in each case. It can be used as a Live CD, and it doubles up as an install CD. Just boot up the CD and it will give you a GNOME desktop with a app link on the desktop that will let you install Ubuntu on to your PC.

This reminded me of Knoppix, it has a similar installer. I started the installer and it looked pretty simple to me. And I also managed to crash it once, during the partitioning stage, which kind of gave me chills, since I never care to back my data up One thing I didn’t like was that the installer insisted on installing GRUB and never asked me if I wanted to skip that part. It did over write my previous GRUB that I had configured to boot the 3 operating systems installed. Since I had two hard disks, I easily forgot what is installed on which of the partitions. So I grabbed a shell and wanted to mount partitions, so that I could poke around and figure out what is where. I needed to be root and there was no option to get myself a root shell. And neither did I know the passwords for the user or the super user to help myself. Well, I guess I needed to do some RTFMing… but I had no time, you see. Too many messages confuse the user and too few irritate. I had no clue what the installer was upto, most of the time. I fired up a terminal and used ‘top’ to see if the guy was alive.
The installation was over in about an hour and I rebooted the system. I logged in and the updater said I had some updates available. Well, there were 160 packages to update and it very well, ran into the night. I indulged in my favorite activity. Progressbar watching. But after all that was done, there stood Ubuntu, draped in GNOME’s charming beauty.