I'm a new convert to ubuntu but I'm sticking with 7.10 for now. I've heard of problems with 8.x but I do not personally have experience with it. Ubuntu forums are a wealth of information.

But I do love the ubuntu! It is a Happy Thing not to have to run antivirus software or a firewall. Plus it makes for an awesome lamp development environment.

I'm a big fan of Ubuntu. I created a medical charting application for my employer using Ubuntu as the server OS. We then deployed 60+ laptops all loaded with Ubuntu for the field staff to chart, and it's worked like a charm.
The 8.04 release had some issues with the wireless driver in our laptops, but all of these issues have been fixed with the new wireless manager in 8.10. I've also got Ubuntu Studio on my home desktop and I love it. So far I have not run into any issues with my 8.10 installs, though YMMV.

Always use a firewall. Even on Mac, Linux, or any other system. They are always a necessity. :)

Matt Farina
Geeks and God Co-Host
www.innovatingtomorrow.net
www.mattfarina.com

By default Ubuntu is closed up and won't listen to anything so a firewall isn't needed (unless you're ultra paranoid and want to close what's already closed). If I decide to start opening various ports for various apps, then I'll get firestarter but straight out of the box, ubuntu is secure. =)

I'm a long time Red Hat and Fedora guy who recently accepted that Fedora's rapid release cycle really does mean you shouldn't use it for production servers. Though I have upgraded a couple of servers to CentOS, I decided to go looking for an alternative. Note that at work, we're also SuSE Enterprise licensed, but I never quite got the hang of Yast.

I started using Ubuntu, and I really like it as a desktop platform. However, after building a few Ubuntu servers, I decided to give Debian a try. I've found that I like Debian better for servers. I can't really give you any compelling reasons for the difference; it just seems to be a better fit for me.

My primary desktop OS is still Windows XP, but I usually have four or five PuTTY windows open to somewhere. Most of the time while I'm at the command line, it doesn't matter which Linux distribution I'm running. I'll have a better feel for how much I like Ubuntu and Debian after I have to upgrade a couple of systems. I have not tried 8.10 yet.

Micah

I have been a fan of both Debian and Ubuntu for a long time. I initially started with Red Hat but immediately switched when I heard of and played with Debian. We use Ubuntu server on our production web servers and I also have Ubuntu desktop on one of my workstations. I like the new packages included in the latest release. We have CentOS on our development server, but I am in the process of setting up a Xen Virtual Environment with Ubuntu as the host OS, with a combination of Ubuntu and Debian guest hosts, and it's working great.

This is a little off topic but if any of you can, and not already, start using Virtual Machines for development and testing. It makes a world of difference. Plus it allows you to re-purpose old hardware and run different machines on a single box. If you don't have it in your budget to get something like VMWare or Parallels, check out VirtualBox. It's from Sun and it's free. Multi-platform and supports both 32 and 64bit processors. Or if you are really adventurous and have good knowledge of Linux you can check out Xen.

Ben Haan
Web Developer/Webmaster
Resurrection Life Church
www.benhaan.com

Been using and enjoying Ubuntu for several years. Before that, I was a big fan of Gentoo (and still have a place of reverence for it).

I have a dev box running ubuntu. It's my flavor of choice at the moment.

Though, I do use a windows box and main main computer is still a mac (for the moment).

My XP box dual-boots Ubuntu and I run it on occasion, but that box has essentially become a media server as my wife and I are both running MBPs. One of these days I'll make it a real media server (or get a Drobo) and play around with Linux builds more.

I use Ubuntu 8.10 and think it is absolutely fantastic. In fact, you can do anything with it that you would do with a Windows machine, at least from a home or personal business computing perspective. If you use your computer for work related to the broader corporate world, I would recommend installing Ubuntu as a second operating system, because Windows is (unfortunately) integral to most applications used in the corporate world.

I use Ubuntu as my primary operating system on my personal laptop. I remember Windows XP only when I have to update my resume in MS Word.

Ubuntu 8.10 is faster than its predecessors. At least on most of the computers I've installed it.

Not tried Mandrake/Mandrive or RedHat/Fedora/CentOS in a long time. Debian rocks, but the versions get updated very late. I used to use Gentoo earlier, gave up on the compile time for every install/update. And, I've brought some 1998 computers to life with VectorLinux.

I've been using Ubuntu for some specific purpose machines (i.e. recording PC for some real basic sermon recording, or an mp3 playback PC at church for between services, etc) as well as my primary desktop.

My laptop (personal and work) both dual-boot ubuntu, and recently I've really fallen in love with MythTV.

Once you get through the pain of getting it set up the first time, it can be really awesome to stream recorded TV (or live if the tuner isn't busy with other tasks) to any computer in the house.

I had some people from church over for thanksgiving and gave away two ubuntu disks for people to try out. So far, no complaints with 8.10 from either of them.

Ubuntu FTW. I was running 8.04 on my desktop as my primary operating system from mid-August until a week ago, and the only reason I stopped was because my new laptop finally arrived. (In those three months, I didn't boot Windows once.)

Actually, the first thing I did when my laptop showed up was to nuke Vista entirely and install 8.10. It actually worked really well: Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, and all the other stuff that you might not expect to work properly did work properly. Unfortunately, battery life sucked (around four hours on a 9-cell battery) and the digital microphone didn't work properly, so I spent about six hours installing XP and tracking down drivers, and I'm now getting almost five hours' battery life and everything works fine.

If I ever did go back to using a desktop as my primary computer, though, I would install Ubuntu without thinking about it. It feels a whole lot more natural than Windows to me now. That and, there's no such thing as Amarok under Windows (it'll be interesting to see how Amarok 2 under Windows turns out, though) and Winamp, while excellent, is just not quite right in a few ways (although it's the closest I've found).

--- Mr. DOS

Hey Hey,

I use ubuntu 8.10 for my mythtv box. Mythbuntu just makes things soooo easy and nice :).

For my desktop and laptop I currently run Opensuse 11.0 w/ KDE4. I've always had problems with ubuntu, it just seems to fight w/ my hardware (even though linuxmint does not... weird hu). Ubuntu has a great community so if you have any problems you will probably find an answer in the forums. I usually start looking there for solutions to other distro's even :).

At work workstation - Fedora 8
At work Servers - RHEL 3,4,5
Work Laptop - Kubuntu 8.10
Home Laptop - Ubuntu Studio 8.10
Home Firewall/Router - Ubuntu Server LTS 8.0.4

I specifically ordered my laptop with Ubuntu in mind.
http://djsimplyseth.blogspot.c...

I have used SuSE Linux since 7.1. Used if for 7 or 8 servers and a couple of desktops, alas awhile back I changed jobs and dont have the server access any longer. Really miss linux Server environment.

What do I use SuSE? YAST probably the best program in Linux, Some people dont like it but it rocks....

So, I guess the DOS in Mr. DOS stands for Denial of Service instead of Disk Operating System? Being a Ubuntu fan, it just wouldn't be right...

Also, Banshee is better. Toss Amarok out :-) Banshee also now runs on windows and mac, kinda... :-)

and finally ... http://last.fim/user/flickerfly

I have Ubuntu on my dual boot home PC alongside XP. I think I could just about convert to Ubuntu if I could figure out a solution for Quicken which I rely heavily on for my personal finances. I've tried to find a good open source solution but haven't been happy with anything I've seen. Any recommendations?

In the Ubuntu repos....

• gnucash
• grisbi
• homebank

or

Quicken on Wine ?

@Josiah: You're kidding, right?! That, my friend, is a tribute to one of the greatest operating systems ever, not a stupid script kiddie trick ;) Also, Banshee failed my tests, but I can't remember why... Something weird with the way it handled its media library, IIRC.

--- Mr. DOS

:-) Let the tech opinion wars begin! I think fondly on the Distro debates we used to have on the Christian Source Free Software Linux Users Group (CS-FSLUG) mailing list.

I'm surprised I haven't added my 2 cents yet. I run Windows XP Professional as my primary operating system, mostly because in Ubuntu distros-past, my internal Broadcom wireless card on this old Dell Inspiron of mine wouldn't work. I'm planning on doing a complete reformat and restructuring of my partition table next weekend (alas, I lost my USB drive - or it was stolen, and I don't have an external! I'll figure out something!)

When I do, I plan on trying Ubuntu 8.10 as a dual boot with XP pro on this small, slow laptop with a 40GB HD. I'll probably set aside about 10 GB for Ubuntu when it's all said and done.

In the past, I HAVE run a dual boot of Ubuntu (and way back when, I tried Slackware). When I did, I actually did try it longer than it seems, and I've tried multiple releases of Ubuntu. I just haven't had time to mess around with it as much, now that I've been in college for 3 & 1/2 years. 1 more semester, and a job later, and I plan on getting myself a new computer that WORKS!

In the mean time, as some of you know, I do work study with my college's Technology Services department. We've got 2 or 3 machines in our Tech Services office with Ubuntu on them. I was recently given the task of creating a guinea pig machine with Ubuntu, and connect it to our Active Directory environment. I've already been successful, and it's been great to get my hands wet again in Ubuntu. I've enjoyed it, and am getting close to finishing all of the configurations we need. We're going to install Wine, and then consider migrating some of our workstations (if not all in the coming years) over to Ubuntu/Unix machines, and save some money from those darn Microsoft Licenses.

It will also help us to not have to replace the machines as fast as we need to.

Anyway, I'm a fan of Linux in general, and I feel that I've got a good, basic understanding of Ubuntu and Gnome, and I think it's one of the easiest distros to make the switch with - especially now with Wine and it's capabilities of virtualizing Windows programs.

Heck, I've even heard of Photoshop running flawlessly.

I'm on Linux Mint 6, which is based off of Ubuntu.

I use Ubuntu 8.04 Server Edition for two websites. They are on a dynamic IP, and I use ddclient/zoneedit.com so that the sites are always available to the WAN. I've even installed Postfix/Dovecot/ClamAV on it (but it doesn't work so swell because of the dynamic IP). I've tried just about every popular distro of linux, and Ubuntu is the best for me. It's just easy. With very limited knowledge, anyone can have a webserver up and running within an hour or two.

I am currently running Ubuntu 8.04 server on a laptop plugged into the LAN at my office. It's only used for development work for Drupal 6. I'm sure that if my supervisors knew about this they would want to move our production site to the laptop. I have only ran into few problems with it, all are because it is installed on a laptop and not a real server. 1) had to install the generic kernel 2) the display back light refused to turn off 3) some weird problem with the wireless card, which I don't use anyways so I just disabled it. I have no complaints, and really like it.

I haven't upgraded to 8.10 because I don't have a need to, and I have found that if it's not broken don't make needless changes. That is a good way to break something, especially if it is not a process that you do on a regular basis. I always do security updates.

I have also used FreeBSD 3.4 thru ummm I think 6 ish. For me it was a lot more difficult to setup, but once it is up I rarely had any problems.

I just upgraded from 7.10 to 8.10 and it is an improvement in just little things. It definitely seems more stable. Plus my whites are their whitest and I don't get dishwater spots on my glassware.

http://grover.seenet.ca/ is, as the page says, a dual-processor (two 2.8GHz Xeons) Precision 670 sharing my dial-up connection (I just got it on Saturday). It's got the 64-bit version of Ubuntu Server 8.10 on it. At the moment, it's not doing a whole lot - Samba shares for my music and videos, run-of-the-mill LAMP stack which I intend to use for something-or-other in the future (currently, my development work is all done on my laptop), and a local MOHAA server. Hmm, I should probably put a Subversion server on it too - that'd actually be useful.

I've heard good things about FreeBSD, but I haven't yet worked up the courage to try it. Maybe I'll do it tomorrow if I get bored; I think I have an install CD for it around here somewhere. No wait, that's for OpenBSD. Ah well.

--- Mr. DOS

I started with Linux using an early release of Mandrake (now Mandriva), switched to Fedora, worked with various other distros (Debian, Slackware, Knoppix) before building a Linux From Scratch distro. Recently I loaded Ubuntu and really like it for an "I just want to get stuff done" distro. If you are not a control freek insisting on tweeking each and every part of your distro then Ubuntu is a great, right out of the box, choice.

I have used ubuntu for over a year now and now that I am getting more skilled with it, i am wanting some eye candy and gnome is lacking in this department. But on Jan. 27, 2009 kde 4.2 releases and I have been following its development and it is looking sweet enough to get me to switch, they have been doing nothing but bug fixes for two months now because they want it to be as stable as humanly possible for the big release, they even are encouraging usrs to host their own release parties for the occasion, because truly kde 4.2 is the first in the 4.x seris that is intended for public use. I don't know if i'll switch as soon as it releases or stay with gnome untill kubuntu 9.04 releases.

to change from ubuntu to kubuntu or xubuntu,etc (if you are running 8.10) the command is:

sudo apt-get install kubuntu-desktop
or
sudo apt-get install xubuntu-desktop

If switching to kubuntu, select kdm when the installer prompts you to choose.

if uncertain you can always do:
sudo apt-cache search ubuntu | grep desktop

Of course you can run gnome and kde and xfce on the same machine, the only difference is that you can choose kde, gnome, xfce before login.

Enjoy.

I started using the free version of MS Money that came bundled with the PC I bought about 5-6 years ago. About a year ago, most online banking stopped working with that version and I was faced with either paying to upgrade MS Money or switching to an open source app. I prefer the second option since I've finally grown tired of things like being forced to pay for upgrades when my current version does everything I need or licenses that are tied to your hardware (an OEM version of Windows can not legally be transferred to another computer - even if you uninstall it from the original computer).

So I've taken a stab at exporting my financial data from MS Money and importing it to GnuCash and wasn't entirely happy with the results. Maybe exporting from Quicken would work better. GnuCash seems like a solid piece of software, but if you go that route I would recommend rebuilding everything from the ground up. Unless you're an accountant, there are some new concepts you'll probably have to come up to speed on if you go with GnuCash - it uses something called double entry accounting. It also looks like it supports online banking, but my first impression is that it might not be trivial to get set up initially.

Don't know much about grisbi or homebank or Quicken/Wine.

For the Ubuntu fans!!

http://www.ubuntupocketguide.c...

I've been down the road with a number of distros, but my favorite today has got to be Ubuntu. I've been running it on my Inspiron 1525 for a few months now and am very happy with it. I still have a vBox of Vista as I haven't had time to try and Wine a bunch of windows only apps.
Last month I deployed my first Ubuntu desktop at the church. We have a station upstairs for volunteers when they are working in the office. It was long over due for a windows Re&Re so I talked with the primary user and our XO and we agreed to roll out a trial system of Ubuntu as a case study. The windows box had already been running open office and the users were already using webmail, so there were no significant obstacles of Win-Apps.
The only speed bump we have run into is printing to our big Xerox printer/copier in the office, but I have the gurus at Xerox working on that.
I have discovered that as a church we are moving towards a lot of Web-Apps as opposed to Win-Apps which has giving me the ability to explore alternate OSs
There are plenty of reasons for Non-Profs to start looking at Ubuntu and other FOSS solution besides just the money. Many FOSS apps out perform their windows counterparts. Many require far less administration. And when things break "often" professional support can be less expensive then hiring MSCEs.

So to all those church tech people... try a little FOSS at your church, I think you'll be pleasantly surprised at how openly it is received.

Free linux book for anyone new to linux (like me!) http://slickdeals.net/permadea...

I got an eeePC for Christmas (my wife loves me) and I quickly ditched the included OS and played with a few others. I am now running eeebuntu on it with some success. I have found doing web development on Linux desktop a challenge. I know there are apps for everything but I haven't found them to be as mature as on Windows and Mac. I have used Linux (LAMP) on the server side (SuSE) for years and love it - still not sure about the desktop side for development...

My eeePC is not a development box - so I'll play with it there for a while and see...

Funny, I prefer a nice Linux desktop environment for web development! What are you having problems doing?

Hint: Geany makes all things better, from the editor standpoint at least.

--- Mr. DOS

@Mr. DOS - I am a one man web shop so I have to do it all from graphics to coding to SQL and deal with internal politics :)

I use Dreamweaver on Windows - not the typical way - more for project and asset management. I spend 99% of the time in code-mode and I love having a keyboard shortcut to save and upload in one quick step - no fiddling with an FTP app. The code mode works fine for what I do and I typically don't let it write any code for me. Also like the way it manages CSS from a code view - don't let it write that for me either. One more feature I love using is the code snippets - keeps all my code handy and saves redoing stuff over and over...

I just haven't found something that works like that on Linux - there may be something but everything I have tried has fallen short. I have been using Dreamweaver since 1998 so I am an old man stuck in my ways...

Also not a big fan of "The Gimp" - I actually still use Paint Shop Pro - been using it for 10+ years. Not the best for sure but it does great for most web stuff and I can whip through things so quickly on it. I do have Photoshop on my box as well and lean on it for more complex tasks.

I guess part of it is that I just need to produce produce produce... I don't really have lots of time to relearn how to do stuff or change processes just because...

I do love Linux on the server end though - nothing better :)

I use Linux at home for surfing the web and web development, but I still fire up my windows XP for my Adobe CS3... It runs like crap in WINE, almost unusable. And sorry open-source, I'm a fan, but Photoshop is a necessity for me, GIMP doesn't cut it, and inkscape isn't even on the same playing field. It's more usability than features, I'm sure.

However, since I'm almost always using drupal now, document management isn't a feature I need anymore, so I stopped using Dreamweaver.

Blessings,
Tony

Hey Andy,

I was looking at this post on Ubuntu and noticed you have an eeePC. I've seriously thought about getting one! I don't expect it to have the power and ease of a Macbook Pro, but I think it would be a fun thing to mess with! Of course, I'd have to either buy the linux version OR put Ubuntu on it!

If I get a new laptop that's not a mac, then I'll try out Ubuntu on it.

Let me know how things go with your eeePC.

Thanks,
Shane

Ok gang, I'm new but I'll throw in my recent experience. After two years of developing on my MacBook Pro, I decided I no longer wanted to carry two laptops while traveling (I'm required to carry a locked down corporate Windows XP laptop for work). I grabbed an $80 WD USB drive and threw Ubuntu 9 on it. It's extremely stable and very easy to use as far as Linux goes. It took a little while to figure out the differences in setting up virtual hosts in a Debian based system but everything is up and running. The great thing about it is the ability to boot it from nearly any machine, a PC at home, my corporate laptop, a friend's computer. I haven't been able to boot my Intel Macs from it however. I just keep copies of the xorg.conf for each machine I boot and I have a portable development platform anywhere I go. GIMP is not quite as robust as Photoshop but for 90% of what I need to do, I actually prefer the GIMP interface. One huge quality of work issue for me was setting up Bonjour on Ubuntu so it plays in my Mac home environment. So far, I have been very happy.

Brent
http://www.norcrosssystems.com

Brent, that's a great idea. How'd you go about doing that?

I followed the tutorial at http://www.pendrivelinux.com/u...

I can't emphasis enough to be careful to select the advanced options and choose the usb device for the boot record. I completely removed my internal drive first to prevent wiping the corporate XP drive (didn't want to go to the system administrators with my tail between my legs). Whenever I'm going to switch computers I simply sudo cp /etc/X11/xorg.conf.myfailsafe xorg.conf. When it boots to a new computer I configure the display and create a new xorg.conf.newcomputer. Let me know if you have any questions. Immediately create a backup xorg.conf from the first computer you install it with and keep a copy in another place in case you lose your X display.

i was a long time windows nerd who thought that MS could do no wrong (please don't shoot), this was of course until I saw the light. A friend of mine hooked me up with the url for Ubuntu and I haven't looked back.

Thus far I have Ubuntu 9 on two Laptops (Lenovo & Toshiba) and have had 0 problems with any drivers or non working hardware. Its installed on my workstation, desktop and my wifes gateway, (that was a fun trying to convinve her LOL). I also (as mentioned before by another user) run virtualbox by Sun. Great virtual machine ware. I only xp for the wireless transmitters that require ie6 and the device discovery tools made for the MS based platform. Other than that it all goes on Ubuntu.

All i can say is if you haven't ... you should at least try it out.

I do all of my graphics/web design on my Ubuntu box merely as a proof of concept to show ministries they don't need the Creative Suite for web graphics. (the GIMP is NOT photoshop, but I switch to Inkscape from Illustrator CS) My profile picture was done in Inkscape after generating a raster texture for the button in the GIMP.

I also record my podcast in Ardour since it supports plugins and automations, but I don't have the audio skills to actually make a decent recording yet. (I'm having a friend come over to teach me the basics as soon as I can lure him with some BBQ)

I've tried several distros, and even go to church with Daniel Robbins (founder of Gentoo Linux, maintainer of Funtoo), but Ubuntu is still my favorite because it is user-friendly. I'm all for command-line work, but I want to learn something I can teach to normal people, and something that can be used in the ministry.

With all that said, I maintain a Windows Domain and also have a MacBook with OS X Leopard. Windows 7 is probably my favorite OS at the moment, but I still boot into Ubuntu all my side-business work and graphics design work. I love learning tons of different tools, and I don't think one is ultimately superior. I've spent the most time troubleshooting OS X this year, and almost no time troubleshooting Windows Vista and Windows 7. Ubuntu has only caused me problems because I was trying to get some low-latency audio working without a realtime kernel... doh!

The only issue I have with Ubuntu (Linux in general) is the hardware support... which is not Ubuntu's fault, of course. But for recording, I'm gonna pick hardware FIRST, because the DAWs are all pretty much equal, then I'm gonna pick my machine based on what will run that hardware. So, even though I use ubuntu for all my web development, I have not been able to make the switch to audio recording yet on Ubuntu.

I've also stuck with XP for the same reason... so much of my hardware is legacy hardware, and Vista doesn't support it. Windows 7, however, will support XP drivers... which is TOTALLY awesome, so I might actually get to upgrade my machine this next year! Woohoo!

Tony

At my day job, I'm Windows because there are no medical apps for Ubuntu/Linux from the major medical companies. But elsewhere I often use Ubuntu/Linux and Mac. There is a "Christian Edition" that I use with places I want strong internet content filtering. On my laptop and HTPC, I use Ubuntu Studio (an audio and video editing version, though I mainly use it for the audio and website editing at this time). What I like about Ubuntu is that I can get any "special edition" I want and if I see something particular on another, I can add it and it will work.

I've used OpenSUSE and a variety of others flavors and the only other one I like as munch is DSL (why couldn't they have called it "Really Small Linux"?) for thin client PCs on old hardware.

I've also used the Live disks to rescue data off of contaminated windows systems so that I can just wipe the drives and start over. This alone has proven to be worth the effort to learn the basics of Ubuntu/Linux and keeping a disk handy.

I got an Eeepc back in the spring. I installed 2 gig of ram and procrastinated on installing Ubuntu. But I finally made the plunge a few months later, and set it up to dual boot Ubuntu / XP. I installed Netbook Remix 9.04 and loved it. The only thing was the wifi/bt hotkey didn't work. It was on all the time.

I recently upgraded to 9.1 without a problem... And the wifi/bt hotkey now works. I spend most of my time on Ubuntu now. Only get on XP because my PSP has software that's Windows only.

I sure miss OSX, but Ubuntu puts a big smile on my face.

I hit the button twice and found out that I can't delete.

Sorry

We have five computers at home. Two are on Vista (including my development machine), one is Windows XP only, another dual-boot Ubuntu and XP, and a dedicated Ubuntu server.

The server came about earlier this year because we had a client machine with a strange motherboard error, and we couldn't get Vista to install on it. The client told us to source a replacement machine for them, and left us with the broken one to dispose. Before stripping it down to the parts, I tried Ubuntu on it - and it worked! So I've left it there.

It's on 24/7, running Samba to store our archive data, and backing up to an external disk. One day I'll get round to running some test websites on it, but haven't the time to figure that out yet.

The main use for it, however, is as an SVN server for our development stuff. It's so good to be able to reverse any silly mistakes, and now the first thing I do on a new client is put all their website stuff in to SVN. The comfort of doing that is immense. When cashflow is better I'll put Navicat for Ubuntu on there as well, to automatically backup all client MySQL databases (I do that on my machine at the moment, but I'd prefer it to be on the server)

I still use Vista on my machine because Covenant Eyes only runs on PCs.

Regards,

Pete.