Xubuntu Linux

[vakkotaur]

I've been trying out Xubuntu (a slightly lighter version of Ubuntu with the XFCE window manager) on percheron recently.

I wound up re-partitioning percheron such that I could install Xubuntu, Wolvix, and FreeBSD on it. Right now, only Xubuntu is installed. The install itself was as smooth as Ubuntu advocates claim. It was a bit strange not seeing much text go by and it is strange to me to not see boot text when things are starting up.

One thing that struck me as strange is that there is both an 'Add/Remove Programs' menu entry and a Synaptic menu entry. Add/Remove seems to be a simplified set of things that should take care of the so-called average user. Synaptic allows the same things, and more, in perhaps finer detail. Synaptic is as advertised: nearly painless program installation and decent dependency checking. As shipped (downloaded) Synaptic is a bit limited. Using the menu entry 'Software Sources' and enabling other sources makes a lot more easily available. I only had difficulty when Audacity wanted libmp3lame.so and I couldn't readily find it. It was there, just not by itself and not in what I expected it to be. It was in lame-dev rather than lame. Dealing with mp3 encoding was the only time I was cussing Ubuntu's Debian ancestry. That might not be fair, as Fedora is similarly goofy about mp3 encoding.

I also installed Opera by downloading it from the Opera web site and double-clicking on the package in Thunar (the XFCE file manager). That worked out well.

I copied over a few settings directories and files from belgian and had things pretty much to my liking. That took a bit as gftp seems prone to crashing. I've seen that on other distributions, so it may be time to consider another FTP program rather than blame Xubuntu for the problem.

That cannot be said of whatever Xubuntu did to make Nedit not work. I installed Nedit via Synaptic. I reinstalled via Synaptic. I went to the Nedit web site and got their binaries. They all crashed on startup. I know it's not Nedit being screwy. It's Xubuntu being weird about something. A Google search yielded a work-around for just starting Nedit alone. That didn't work as intended when I tried to use Nedit as Opera's source viewer. I wound up resorting to a short bash script that Opera can call to invoke Nedit with the work-around. It was a bit disappointing and annoying to have to do that when the distribution's claim to fame is ease of use with things just working. It was then that I was glad for my experience with other distributions, the Slackware derivatives in particular. I was also a bit surprised not to find an entry for Nedit in the menu after the install. That isn't a big deal as I start Nedit either by quicklaunch button or from Opera.

I did find I got used to not having root as such exist. There is no logging in as root and there is no using su to become root. There is only sudo, which is not at all the same. It's not bad, and I found I did get used to it fairly quickly. It still feels odd, but it doesn't annoy me.

Will I switch from Fedora to an Ubuntu-variant? Probably, but not immediately. I expect I'll give it a 'test drive' for some time, and then likely, though not certainly, switch not to Xubuntu or Kubuntu (and certainly not plain Ubuntu - I have no intention of putting up with Gnome as a Window Manager) but to an Ubuntu-based FreeSpire. That is coming, probably sometime later in the Spring, and will let me bypass a bunch of codec silliness.

Comments

[altivo.livejournal.com]

Not well documented, probably because they really don't want you to use it. But in all the Ubuntu distribution flavors, 'sudo' with no argument is in fact the same as 'su' in most other distributions. Just do 'sudo' and answer the password prompt and you'll be in root mode.

[jmaynard.livejournal.com]

Not only that, but "sudo bash" (or other shell of choice) gets you a root shell, no matter what the configuration.

[yakko.livejournal.com]

One can also use sudo -s to simulate su -

[altivo.livejournal.com]

I assume you're referring only to Ubuntu and its derivatives here. The sudo command in Slackware certainly doesn't behave that way. Ubuntu is the only place I've seen these tricks and I'm not sure what their point was in doing that and removing the traditional su.

[jmaynard.livejournal.com]

Actually, I didn't think of "sudo bash" until I saw someone use it on AIX.

[altivo.livejournal.com]

AIX does a lot of unexpected things too.

'sudo bash' or 'sudo ksh' would work on Slackware, but only if they were explicitly added to /etc/sudoers as permitted. In fact, 'sudo -s' doesn't work on Slackware unless the user issuing the command has been explicitly authorized for a root shell. I didn't look, but I suspect Ubuntu provides a default /etc/sudoers that is rather more permissive than most.

[jmaynard.livejournal.com]

Gentoo's /etc/sudoers also allows "sudo bash"...I just did that.

So, for that matter, does Wolvix, a Slackware derivative.

I suspect your Slackware distribution is very much the exception.

[altivo.livejournal.com]

My view on Gentoo is that it is pretty much a fringe area when it comes to Linux, as is RedHat/Fedora despite its wide distribution.

Wolvix is of course trying to behave as Ubuntu does, in a "user friendly" and Microsoft-like way. Nothing wrong with that of course, though it's not my cup of tea. If I wanted Windows, I'd just use Windows.

I'd be more interested to know what Debian and Suse do with "sudo -s" and "sudo bash" by default. While I very much approve of using sudo and having it available, I also prefer that defaults be very restrictive until deliberately set otherwise by the system admin.

[vakkotaur.livejournal.com]

Ubuntu puts the first user in an admin group so that the one user can do whatever administration tasks might be required. Other users can be added to that group, but if the account is made without changing a default setting, the new accounts are 'desktop user' level without admin access.

[altivo.livejournal.com]

That's a pretty logical way to approach it, I guess. I didn't dig deeply enough into Ubuntu to figure out just what they did with things. I disliked their philosophy too much to do more than look at it and erase it.

[jmaynard.livejournal.com]

Red Hat? FRINGE??! What have you been smoking, and where can I get some?

Red Hat, as far as the commercial Linux world goes, is Linux. There are more than a few software houses that only certify their stuff on RHEL. It's also been around a long, long time, longer than SuSE (which started out as a Red Hat clone) and Debian.

SuSE Linux Enterprise Server 10 allows both "sudo -s" and "sudo bash". I don't run Debian, and won't; I've got very strong disagreements with their kowtowing to the FSF.

[altivo.livejournal.com]

I agreed that RedHat is very widely used and distributed, my objection to RedHat is that they are so far from the mainstream with respect to drivers, file tree locations, and so forth that they are a little empire unto themselves. The fact that many software distributors ONLY test on RedHat irritates me no end, because stuff that works on RedHat is definitely NOT guaranteed to work on all or even most Linux distributions. Quite the opposite in fact.

I believe RedHat has deliberately leveraged this in order to build its own market share, much the same way that Microsoft has done and SCO tried to do. Vendors distribute hardware with drivers for "Linux" and claim they are "Linux compatible" when in fact they are only RedHat compatible.

[jmaynard.livejournal.com]

Oh...the point of using sudo and getting rid of su is to get people in the mindset of using sudo for everything that needs to be done as root. That way, you have to stop and think about each command you're doing, and so security is increased (or so the thinking goes).

OS X also uses sudo for everything. After doing it that way for a while, i've gone to doing that on all of my Unix boxes.

[altivo.livejournal.com]

That's reasonable. When possible, I prefer to move tasks likely to be needed by the non-root user into the user domain of action, as you do with 'mount' by adding 'user' in /etc/fstab where appropriate.