THIS IS NOT MY STORY... I borowed it from here and am presenting here without any changes... The first person referred to is Mr.Alexander Wolfe. Anyway.. its true that Ubuntu is tough to install on laptops. Read on...

I started my Linux journey wanting to like Ubuntu. It's pitched as a great operating-system option that's ideal for newbies and experienced PC users alike. Ubuntu founder Mark Shuttleworth is, like Bill Gates, both an entrepreneur and a philanthropist. And there's something appealing about joining a community that's built up such a robust ecosystem in so short a time (Ubuntu was introduced less than three years ago.) What could go wrong?

Unfortunately, none of the Ubuntu stories--no Linux reviews, for that matter--talk about the inevitable problems many people run into during the installation process. Yet online forums are rife with traffic on stumbling blocks, which often cause people intent on converting to the open-source operating system to give up and go back to Windows.


When Ubuntu starts up from the Live CD, it commences by loading the Linux kernel.

Things go most smoothly when you pick the plainest of plain vanilla desktops for your Ubuntu install. Selecting anything else--like the reasonably standard HP laptop I chose--could be an invitation to a software nightmare. Sadder still, the average homebrew Linux newbie will falsely feel that it's his technical ignorance that's the problem.

By now, you can guess what my conclusion is: Ubuntu isn't all it's cracked up to be. Indeed, if you're an individual user--and even more so if you're supporting an enterprise--the only path around problems is to use a heavily tested, commercially supported distro. My preference is SUSE Linux Enterprise Desktop 10 (though Red Hat is probably fine, too). I don't doubt that many fanboys will take issue with this (leave your comments below), since you'll have to pay $50 for SLED 10, and that's counter to the "free" open-source ethos.

Now that I've told you where I'm going, let me show you how I got there. Come along on my Ubuntu safari.

My test bed was an average machine, picked at random from the computer detritus lying around the house. The salient detail for our tale is that it's a laptop, not a desktop. Notebooks are always harder to work with, whether you're talking Linux, Windows, or hooking up add-on hardware. That's just a fact of life, because of the unusual variety of specialized drivers and hardware permutations you'll often find in downsized systems.

Preparing For Liftoff

My laptop guinea pig was an HP Pavilion ze4200 laptop, running Windows XP, purchased new in January 2003. The 6.6-lb laptop has a 14.1-inch display and is powered by a 1.53-GHz Athlon XP-M 1800+ processor. It's also got 256MB of DDR SDRAM, a 20GB hard drive, a DVD/CD-RW drive, and two USB 1.1 ports. While this might seem like a light configuration today, it's more than capable of running Ubuntu. The 20-GB drive is well above Ubuntu's 4-GB disk-space requirement. The 256-MB of memory exceeds the 64-MB minimum posted on the main Ubuntu installation page, though it only just meets the minimum spec on the 7.04 release notes, so I'm primed to accept a slightly longer installation time.

True, my HP laptop has nowhere near the heft of the four systems Dell is offering with Ubuntu. Dell's machines include two notebooks--the 1.73-GHz Core 2 Duo-based Inspiron E1505 N and 1.5-GHz Core 2 Duo Inspiron 1420 N--and two dual-core-based desktops, with 1.6-GHz and 1.8-GHz Intel processors.

When I requested a review unit from Dell in June, they said they didn't have anything immediately available. (Dell's reps recently told me they should have a tester available in about a month. I'll review it then.) That's when I decided to install Ubuntu out on my own machine.


....technit again.... i'll get the review too on my blog. But thanks for an eyeopener. Story SOURCE

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Although Ubuntu is highly regarded by desktop Linux users, the popular Linux distribution has been the subject of perpetual criticism from a small but vocal minority of users who believe that it doesn't set a high enough standard for software freedom. New initiatives announced this week aim to tackle those criticisms at their source, by resolving the perceived problems. Ubuntu founder Mark Shuttleworth has announced the availability of daily CD images of a "freedom-focused flavour of Ubuntu" called Gobuntu.

Gobuntu, which will eschew virtually all proprietary software components, aims to pacify critics who think that Ubuntu's support for "non-free" software is detrimental to users. Last year, the Free Software Foundation announced the release of gNewSense, an Ubuntu derivative without proprietary graphics drivers, proprietary plug-in components like Adobe's Flash player, and patent-encumbered proprietary media codecs. According to Shuttleworth, the goal for the Gobuntu derivative is to "provide a cleaner and easier to maintain base for projects like gNewSense."

Shuttleworth says that the current focus is on hardware drivers, but more significant differences will emerge as the team grows. In his announcement, Shuttleworth asks for interested developers to participate by joining the Gobuntu development team. "This is a call for developers who are interested in pushing the limits of content and code freedom—including firmware, content, and authoring infrastructure—to join the team and help identify places where we must separate out pieces that don’t belong in Gobuntu from the standard Ubuntu builds," says Shuttleworth.

Canonical, the company behind Ubuntu, also announced plans to start releasing parts of the web-based Launchpad project management system under an open-source license. Launchpad's proprietary status has been source of controversy since the web site's inception. Earlier this year, Mark Shuttleworth responded to the criticism by saying that Canonical was "actively working on making Launchpad open source," but that it couldn't be done "until there is a clear revenue model to be able to pay the salaries of the developers working on the platform itself." Canonical took the first step towards opening the Launchpad source code this week by releasing Storm—Launchpad's Python-based object relational mapper—under the permissive LGPL license. Storm source code and documentation are now available from Canonical's web site.

This Story has been taken from HERE ( thank you arstechnica.com)

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Updating all the software on your system can be a pain, but with Linux it doesn't have to be that way. www.builderau.com.au shows you how to combine the apt package management system with a task scheduler to automatically update your system.

If you've been using Linux for even a short time you'll surely have experienced the wonders of having a package management system at your disposal. For Debian and Ubuntu users the package manager you get is the excellent apt-get system. apt-get makes installing a new program (e.g. xclock, a graphical clock) as simple as:
% apt-get install xclock
That's nice, but the real reason apt is so useful is that updating your entire system all at once is just as easy:
% apt-get update
...
% apt-get upgrade
...
This will refresh the apt system with the newest information about packages and then download and install any packages that have newer versions. Do it regularly and you can be sure that you've got the latest and most secure software on your machine, without needing to hunt down the newest edition of each program individually.
You can make things even easier, however, by combining the apt system with the Linux scheduling daemon cron. cron let's you schedule any command to run periodically at given intervals. Take the following command:
% (apt-get update && apt-get -y upgrade) > /dev/null
Which both updates the apt cache and upgrades the system. The -y flag tells apt-get to answer yes to every question, which prevents the process from hanging waiting for user input, say in the middle of the night so the bandwidth from the downloads won't bother anyone. It's also a good idea to redirect the output of the command to /dev/null, so that your terminal is not flooded with the results of automatic maintenance.
It's a bad idea to just install everything regardless of errors, sometimes incompatible software can creep into the repository, and that can bring down your whole system. A better idea if you want to be more careful with what your machine is doing is to add the -d flag, which tells apt to merely download the packages, but not install them. You can then run apt-get dist-upgrade later to install the packages without waiting for them to download, and letting you keep a watchful eye over what's being installed without having to wait for everything to download.
If you want to use this approach then you can add the following lines to your crontab using crontab -e, which will download new packages every Sunday morning at 12am:
# Automatic package upgrades
0 0 * * 0 root (apt-get update && apt-get -y -d upgrade) > /dev/null
There is still an easier way -- using the cron-apt package, which as the name might suggest, combines the cron and apt utilities, but provides a bit more flexibility and a simpler interface -- as well as supporting e-mail alerts on errors or new information. cron-apt automatically adds the -d flag, so you'll have to run apt-get dist-upgrade to install the changes. You can install cron-apt like any other common utility by using apt:
% apt-get install cron-apt
The configuration for cron-apt reside in /etc/cron-apt/config -- except how often the script runs, that's depended on cron so you can find it in /etc/cron.d/cron-apt. One popular configuration change is to add the line:
MAILON="always"
This will make sure an e-mail is always sent when the update runs, rather than only when an error occurs.
That's it. Setting up your machine to automatically update itself is as simple as a couple of lines in the console. If you need to have closer control over what is happening during the automatic update process then you'll want to write your own script, the Ubuntu help pages have a good run down of how to write a script around aptitude to achieve the same results.

[ This story has been taken from HERE ]

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