Ahhhhh!!!! My PCLinuxOS server crashed (peace out Maxtor hard drive), and so I went about attempting to recover the data. It took me almost 4 days of off and on troubleshooting but I am proud to announce that all of the data has been recovered. That was thanks to OpenSUSE 10.1 Beta 6 and it’s robust set of module and drivers. Unfortunately OpenSUSE is not as user friendly or package complete as PCLinuxOS .92 so I’m currently working on re-installing that. I say working on it because I’m getting a lame Kernel panic error that I’m trudging through at the moment.
During these events I tried the most current release of the popular Linux distro, Ubuntu 5.10. Color me not impressed. There are to many issues to list, but the first and most apparent problem I have is the use of the “sudo” account. The sudo account is the Ubunutu equivalent of “root” and in order to make changes to the system you have to enter a special “sudo -s” command or choose to “run app as root” in the GUI. This means if you want to change the monitor power settings you enter a password. If you want to edit a config file (or most any file) you have to launch a text editing program through “Run Application As…”. I spoke with on of Ubuntu’s developers and he said that sudo is here to stay. There are many other bugs and functionality issues to numerous to mention, but the devs say those will be resolved in Ubuntu 6 coming in April/May. Ubuntu is definately for novices only. If you plan to make changes or additions to your system, or ever have the need to modify something other than the screen saver look elsewhere.