…Clueless

I finally installed Ubuntu 6.06 LTS. The distro now comes on a single CD (Live CD + Install), just like Linspire. Pop the disc into your CD-ROM and boot. The Live CD boots the Ubuntu system where you take the OS for a spin. If you wish to install it on your PC, just click on install on the desktop while inside the OS environment.

The installation was easy and the GUI rocked because it was the GNOME desktop only. The only thing that actually troubled me was the partitioner. I could not format the partition of my choice. The partition on which I was to install Ubuntu was originally NTFS. I had thought that I would use the partitioner in the installer to reformat it to ext3. But that was not quite possible (or I was dumb to figure it out). So, I had to boot to WinXP and format the required partition.

After that, the installation went fine with just some initial problems with setting my Time Zone and Time. It hardly took 20 minutes and Ubuntu was installed. Visibly, there is not much difference. The difference is in the speed because of the new version of GNOME. I still had to go through the boring process of downloading and installing w32codecs and some essential software. Opera runs a little choppy inside Ubuntu specially if some Flash content is displayed. amaroK now comes with the xine engine by default. You still have to do some extra digging to get the mp3’s to play. The sound was a little distorted but lowering of the PCM level in the sound mixer fixed the problem.

I still find SUSE better than Ubuntu. But SUSE has its own disadvantages. You have to download 5 ISO’s whereas in Ubuntu its just one. SUSE is a bit slow whereas the GNOME environment in Ubuntu is quite fast. You still have to use the command line in Ubuntu whereas in SUSE its use is minimal. The YaST Manager in SUSE is super advanced. There is absolutely no driver problem in SUSE. SUSE plays mp3 files and the CD’s are loaded with useful software. Best of all, it runs KDE. But then, if you want KDE, you can download Kubuntu.

So if its a light OS that you require, which can perform basic tasks with a few holes, then go in for Ubuntu. You’ll need a working net connection to make Ubuntu a little more useful and powerful.

On the other hand, SUSE, although is big, contained in 5 CD’s, performs all tasks that you could expect out of your Windows box. But its a little heavy on the system resources. Net connection is not required initially. All the software is there on the CD’s.