Unless you’ve been living under a rock for the last year or so, you’ve probably been hearing about Ubuntu, the new, hot South African import that’s been making waves and earning raves all over the Linux end-user community for it’s ease of installation, user friendliness, huge software library, and the fact that 10 Million clams has been pledged to the newly formed Ubuntu Foundation by Mark Shuttleworth and his company, Canonical. Shuttleworth is a South African billionaire and, uh, astronaut. Yep, if you recall, Shuttleworth was the guy who hitched a ride on the Russian Soyuz to the International Space Station in 2002 (for an estimated $20 million). Now, for his latest challenge, he’s going to conquer the Penguin food chain.
I had initially dismissed Ubuntu for my own personal use because I already had been maintaining two Linux distros, Fedora Core 4 and Debian Sarge, on my personal workstations, and well, Ubuntu for the most part is just a different Debian. But since Ubuntu is a community supported, free distribution, I had to try it. Boy, am I glad I did.
Ubuntu What?
Ubuntu can be considered sort of a parallel-universe version of Debian: it tastes like Debian, looks like Debian, and acts like Debian, but there are some differences. Unlike Debian, the Ubuntu project maintains their own package repositories, although the source of many of their packages come “upstream” from Debian and are tweaked and polished by Ubuntu volunteer maintainers and thrown into…
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