A silly review of Ubuntu, Kubuntu, XandrOS, Linspire (formerly Lindows), SuSe, RedHat, Slackware, FreeBSD etc

The last few days, I have been installing and unistalling different Linux distros, different Linux flavours.
I'm by no means an expert in Linux and I'm not going to bash Win XP, although it deserves bashing :)
I first encountered Linux in 96 in the form of RedHat. At the time, I didn't know what on earth I was doing, I was stuck with dialup (broadband was a distant dream for me at the time) and had a Win 95 installed on my computer. I also had Win NT and OS/2 Warp installed on the same computer. I had no notion of Grub or Lilo but I had VCOM's System Commander, can't remember what version it was at the time, now it is up to version 8. It was a great boot manager, and I'm sure it still is.
It was rather frustrating at the time to download RedHat images, create floppy boot disks and install from hard drive images, and yet, managed to do it.
I was intrigued by RedHat and I kept it for a while, and played around with it.
Fast forward several years...
Win 95
Win 98
Win 98SE
Win ME <-- Worst ever release. Win XP. And in the meantime, RedHat decided not to offer RedHat free anymore and created Fedora instead. For some strange reason, I could never install Fedora: I was always greeted with kernel panic and since I had little knowledge... I left it be. I did try, FreeBSD, Slackware and a few other distros names of which have long disappeared from my rather short memory.
One I remember is Mandrake, which now is called Mandriva. It was pretty good but the freely available version is rather handicapped.
Recently, I have been hearing a lot about Ubuntu. So, I downloaded 5.10 last year and I was somewhat impressed with it. It was very easy to install but it just didn't feel right to me, it wasn't polished enough. In June, Ubuntu 6.06 was released: now we are talking. Dapper Drake is definitely worth the look and it definitely is a good contender to replace Windows XP on my computer: kinda sorta... Everything works... except my Logitech QuickCam IM Webcam and my D-Link DWL-G122 rev. B1 USB Wireless adapter. Luckily I do have a regular connection so the network part is not that crucial. But, the Webcam is. The cam is recognized... but the moment the system boots, the cam is in use so the device can't be reopened and I have no idea how to stop it. I tried using aMSN 0.95 and it does find the cam but it tells me it is already in use and I know it is in use, 'cause the nice shiny green light on the cam is on. No idea how to fix it. I searched high and low and no luck. So... I tried Kubuntu... thinking it will have different drivers... what a mistake that was. Kubuntu 5.10 and Kubuntu 6.06 will NOT install on my computer. Actually, I tried it on 2 computers and still no luck: an AMD 1700+ and an Intel 3.06GHz. Next, I tried SuSe 10.0 ... and it looked real good except I had a @!$%# of a time trying to get mp3s and xvids working and I gave up. Then I went back to Ubuntu 6.06 Dapper Drake and this time I also installed the automated script Automatix. All I can say is WoW! All the missing codecs got installed plus some extra ones and I was on my way. Yet, I still was not happy... the webcam not working was really ticking me off. I was reading Jerry Pournelle's article about how easy Xandros was and how it recognized all the wireless adapters and the webcams. I had once looked at Xandros before but it was not available as a free download and I wasn't ready to shell out $90 for an OS which probably would not have worked for me at the time. I decided to take another look at Xandros and I was pleasantly surprised to see that it was now available as a free download: v3.02 OC Installation went through like a breeze and I was impressed with how neat it all looked once it booted up. It looked rather polished and very Windows-like. And it sucked. I tried to go through its Xandros Network tool to update the OS... and the installed applications... it did.. it upgraded Firefox from 1.04 to 1.07. Hmmm the only problem with that is the fact that as of this writing Firefox 1.5.0.4 is available and has been for a while now. So, after trying out many different Linux distros, I decided to settle with Ubuntu. I'm not particularly fond of the default brown theme (I'm sure I can change it) and I'm not very happy with the fact that the webcam support is really pretty much non-existing. One thing I have to say about all these distros: they sure did come a long way since 1995/96. It was a pain in the where-the-sun-don't-shine-normally-area to install different OS's. Now, everything pretty much goes through just fine. I did have a few mishaps where I kinda sorta messed up my MBR (Master Boot Record) a few times and almost formatted the wrong partition, but, to be fair, it was all my fault. I sometimes have a habit of not reading the dialog boxes that pop-up with big red warning signs: shame on me. In my defense... after years of working in IT... I have pretty much seen almost every error message that could be seen and sometimes the error messages / dialog boxes that pop up are utter nonesense: I kinda tune them out at times. I spent pretty much all day today, installing and uninstalling countless Linux distros. Ubuntu 6.06 Dapper Drake is definitely worth a look and it definitely is a good replacement for Windows XP. When I use Skype (Beta v2.5) on XP, my CPU usage goes through the roof even though I have a 3.06GHz computer with 1Gb of RAM. But, when I use Skype 1.2 on Dapper Drake... the CPU stays around 25% to 35% range. I have even managed to install Wine and have mIRC running with my favourite script eXtreme 9.0 by Kall. I was pleasantly surprised to see that even the sound events worked.

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