techTuesday, December 27, 2005
I played with Underground Desktop for a while - it's a good little distro, but I decided that it's not for me. I'd recommend it to anyone with fairly standard hardware (desktop pc and wired internet connection) and little or no previous linux experience.
Underground has a nice graphical installer that walks you through all the steps required to install. It's a little more complicated than installing Windows (well, if you ignore all the stupid stuff you have to go through to install windows - like activation and the stupid first time tour junk). The extra complication is necessitated by the greater flexibility of the operating system - GNU/Linux is not just for home/desktop computers - it can be used in embedded devices like cell phones, PDAs, network routers, or pretty much anything with a processor that requires software and an operating system (these things do all have operating systems, it's just that we don't usually think about it - and we shouldn't have to. I bet you'll be thinking about it if your PDA is running Windows CE and crashing all the time). So most linux distributions don't assume too much - if you're installing a distro like Underground Desktop, it's assumed that you're going to be using it as a desktop operating system, so they make a few assumptions - that you'll want a Graphical User Interface, for example. But lots of things are left up to the user to determine - like disk partitioning, perhaps package (software) selection.
However, I've been using gentoo linux on my desktop(current and previous) for quite a while now and decided that it has a few features that I'd like to have on my laptop as well. The reason I didn't install it in the first place is the need for an internet connection to install (you can get a basic setup without it, but it's not much) and the need for wireless networking on my laptop. Of course you gan get wireless working in gentoo, but I thought that maybe the more standardized distros would have the wireless networking setup a no-brainer. KNOPPIX has wireless networking setup so that it just works, but Underground is not quite to that point - too bad KNOPPIX isn't quite suitable for everyday use.
Gentoo is just about the most flexible of all the distros that I've tried - most of the packaged ones like Fedora, SUSE, Slackware, Underground, etc have a set collection of pre-installed software (Desktop Environment, Web Browser, etc)(and, of course, a mechanism to install anything else after the OS is installed). Gentoo has a very basic base setup - it doesn't even install a GUI (you gotta choose one and install it yourself). Gentoo doesn't even choose simple things like system logger or cron daemon for you - these are things that you don't ever think about (or know about) if you're just using a packaged distro in GUI mode - a real Unix hacker will know about them (and they're about the only ones who'd really care). Gentoo makes software installation/updating pretty easy (if you're comfortable with a command line), and everything is compiled from source - so it take a while, but it's more customizable.
Oh yeah, that's another reason I was going with Underground instead of Gentoo - Gentoo takes forever to install - I'm still installing it in fact. I don't even have a GUI installed. I'm writing this post from a console based web browser (links). It looks kinda funny. It's all text and no graphics. Page navigations is a bit funny. But Gentoo does give you a really nice system once it's all installed (if you know what you're doing).
On my last desktop, I didn't want to install one of the standard Desktop Environments like KDE or Gnome because the hardware was a bit out-dated and those things are kind-of resource intensive, so I installed a fast little Environment known as xfce4. It was sweet at the time, lightweight and fast, but it also looked pretty good and had some nice features. I don't use it anymore because my hardware these days can easily run KDE (though I turn off all the fancy animated menus and junk).
Well, that's about enough for this post - my pre-gui install updates are still compiling (I'm updating the base install to the most current before installing the gui).
Web browsing with Links is fun, you should try it - I think there's a windows version.
Oh, I am in console mode, but I'm not running at 80x25. I've compiled the kernel with svga support and it's running at somethingx50. I don't know the exact resolution but I got 50 lines. It's probably more than 160 characters wide because I got a widescreen lcd on my laptop. whatever it's running at, it's a 1 to 1 pixel ratio from the console font to my laptop's native resolution (1280x800) - which is nice because running a console at 80x25 looks funny because it doesn't map evenly onto the native resolution so there are a few pixel rows that are wider and it gives a strange fuzzy look to the letters. They're nice and crisp now though.
Underground has a nice graphical installer that walks you through all the steps required to install. It's a little more complicated than installing Windows (well, if you ignore all the stupid stuff you have to go through to install windows - like activation and the stupid first time tour junk). The extra complication is necessitated by the greater flexibility of the operating system - GNU/Linux is not just for home/desktop computers - it can be used in embedded devices like cell phones, PDAs, network routers, or pretty much anything with a processor that requires software and an operating system (these things do all have operating systems, it's just that we don't usually think about it - and we shouldn't have to. I bet you'll be thinking about it if your PDA is running Windows CE and crashing all the time). So most linux distributions don't assume too much - if you're installing a distro like Underground Desktop, it's assumed that you're going to be using it as a desktop operating system, so they make a few assumptions - that you'll want a Graphical User Interface, for example. But lots of things are left up to the user to determine - like disk partitioning, perhaps package (software) selection.
However, I've been using gentoo linux on my desktop(current and previous) for quite a while now and decided that it has a few features that I'd like to have on my laptop as well. The reason I didn't install it in the first place is the need for an internet connection to install (you can get a basic setup without it, but it's not much) and the need for wireless networking on my laptop. Of course you gan get wireless working in gentoo, but I thought that maybe the more standardized distros would have the wireless networking setup a no-brainer. KNOPPIX has wireless networking setup so that it just works, but Underground is not quite to that point - too bad KNOPPIX isn't quite suitable for everyday use.
Gentoo is just about the most flexible of all the distros that I've tried - most of the packaged ones like Fedora, SUSE, Slackware, Underground, etc have a set collection of pre-installed software (Desktop Environment, Web Browser, etc)(and, of course, a mechanism to install anything else after the OS is installed). Gentoo has a very basic base setup - it doesn't even install a GUI (you gotta choose one and install it yourself). Gentoo doesn't even choose simple things like system logger or cron daemon for you - these are things that you don't ever think about (or know about) if you're just using a packaged distro in GUI mode - a real Unix hacker will know about them (and they're about the only ones who'd really care). Gentoo makes software installation/updating pretty easy (if you're comfortable with a command line), and everything is compiled from source - so it take a while, but it's more customizable.
Oh yeah, that's another reason I was going with Underground instead of Gentoo - Gentoo takes forever to install - I'm still installing it in fact. I don't even have a GUI installed. I'm writing this post from a console based web browser (links). It looks kinda funny. It's all text and no graphics. Page navigations is a bit funny. But Gentoo does give you a really nice system once it's all installed (if you know what you're doing).
On my last desktop, I didn't want to install one of the standard Desktop Environments like KDE or Gnome because the hardware was a bit out-dated and those things are kind-of resource intensive, so I installed a fast little Environment known as xfce4. It was sweet at the time, lightweight and fast, but it also looked pretty good and had some nice features. I don't use it anymore because my hardware these days can easily run KDE (though I turn off all the fancy animated menus and junk).
Well, that's about enough for this post - my pre-gui install updates are still compiling (I'm updating the base install to the most current before installing the gui).
Web browsing with Links is fun, you should try it - I think there's a windows version.
Oh, I am in console mode, but I'm not running at 80x25. I've compiled the kernel with svga support and it's running at somethingx50. I don't know the exact resolution but I got 50 lines. It's probably more than 160 characters wide because I got a widescreen lcd on my laptop. whatever it's running at, it's a 1 to 1 pixel ratio from the console font to my laptop's native resolution (1280x800) - which is nice because running a console at 80x25 looks funny because it doesn't map evenly onto the native resolution so there are a few pixel rows that are wider and it gives a strange fuzzy look to the letters. They're nice and crisp now though.
