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The Community Comes Through

Dec 03, 2008  By David Lane

As I wrote back on November 27, there is nothing more frustrating than trying to make software beyond its end-of-life work, and it is even more frustrating when it is really the best tool for the job. One helpful comment mentioned Ubuntu 8.04 as one possible source and the distro does include the code. A little more looking and some email traffic and it looks like the project has indeed been moved to the Ubuntu platform and is in some form of maintenance, enough that I will probably be able to accomplish my goals that way.

It means that I will have to learn a new distribution. As I might have mentioned, I came up the RedHat branch of the Linux family tree and having been forced to learn DEC VAX, NetWare, CiscoIOS, Windows, HP-UX and Solaris (from 2 through 10) throughout my career, I have tried to avoid learning yet another operating system, but it looks like I will have to hunker down and do just that. With luck I will be able to create not one but two articles from this little exercise, along with a functioning station/gateway for a variety of packet systems here in the Washington DC metro area.

So my thanks to a great number of people for all their help and comments!

______________________

David Lane, KG4GIY is a member of Linux Journal's Editorial Advisory Panel and the Control Op for Linux Journal's Virtual Ham Shack

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typical

Anonymous's picture
Submitted by Anonymous (not verified) on Sun, 12/07/2008 - 19:04.

Debian does the work, Ubuntu gets the love.

Hmmm...

El Perro Loco's picture
Submitted by El Perro Loco (not verified) on Mon, 12/08/2008 - 11:19.

I see a lot of negative comments towards Ubuntu. Most of them are in the same line: "Ubuntu does not deserve / has not earned its position".

I don't agree. Ubuntu has given Linux a lot of exposure. Ubuntu has made Linux widely known. Ubuntu has made Linux easy for people. Ubuntu has pushed the adoption of Linux more than any other distribution I can think of.

Isn't that what we, Linux folks, want?

Sure, there are other excellent distributions out there, both for the desktop and for the server/business side. But there are reasons why they are not as "famous" as Ubuntu.

So, let's give credit where credit is due. Ubuntu has done a fantastic job.

And, specifically to the remark "Debian does the work, Ubuntu gets the love", I agree, but I don't think the situation is necessarily wrong. Without Ubuntu, Debian would be a very obscure distribution. I'd prefer to call their relationship a "symbiosis".

For the record

David Lane's picture
Submitted by David Lane on Wed, 12/17/2008 - 08:58.

Debian apparently has a copy of the code I am looking to use, but it is a little "older" than the Ubuntu version. I am learning Debian now (it being the "root") and I can certainly say that the Debian community and the Amateur community have very strong links.

I have to agree that, yes, Debian does seem to be slighted (the internal fights that have boiled over and resulting in some bad press not withstanding) for their efforts in general, but the key here is that we all need to work closer together.

I will be writing more about that in a couple of days when I tackle a topic that is sitting on my desk - enterprise management

David Lane, KG4GIY is a member of Linux Journal's Editorial Advisory Panel and the Control Op for Linux Journal's Virtual Ham Shack

Distros

Edward Dunagin's picture
Submitted by Edward Dunagin (not verified) on Fri, 12/05/2008 - 12:06.

Hello David,

Your comment about learning to use Ubuntu is noted. I have used almost all of the distro, except maybe some of the new ones.
(starting with Slackware) I have recently installed and am using Ubuntu8.10, and like all, it has it's quircks. But it seems to me, that the difficulty might be in switching to KDE or Gnome. Again I have used both, but am now settling on Gnome. Good luck with your learning curve. Mine is sloping down due to age.

Learning curve

David Lane's picture
Submitted by David Lane on Wed, 12/17/2008 - 08:53.

I find my learning curve is less with the GUI - it really doesn't matter which one I use - and more with the package manager, file locations (although that has improved greatly in recent years) and startup/shutdown scripts.

There seems to be just enough differences in the way each distribution does things that it can sometimes create more of a bottleneck than the application itself. Apache is Apache is Apache, but where RedHat, Debian and others store the configuration, html and other key files seems to sometimes be a moving target. Again, things are improving, but I still find myself losing hours to spelunking through the file system or the man pages to figure out just where something is or why a command that produces result A on Distro A produces result B on Distro B (or worse, does not work at all).

My favorite example is ls -ll. I don't think I have had it work the same on two different distributions.

So it is the little things that makes it tough.

David Lane, KG4GIY is a member of Linux Journal's Editorial Advisory Panel and the Control Op for Linux Journal's Virtual Ham Shack

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