[wellylug] UBUNTU 5.10 Dapper. First experiences!

[Gerald Roehrbein]

Hello,

I've never seen such a huge fan community of Debian or UBUNTU like here.
The SuSE system of my 15 year old daughter was just an old one. 8.2 or
something like that running a lot of years without any problems. 

After a lot of discussions about "never change a running system" she
agreed to install UBUNTU. I started yesterday in the evening with this
task. The only acceptable reason for me was that I could not install and
configure WINE for running  the math software Derive at this system. 

First of all I made a backup of the whole system. Just plug in a USB
drive. Booted form cd. Mounted the boot drive and the USB drive and than
dd if=/dev/hda of=/dev/sda bs=1024 and since I'm a little bit paranoid I
tar'ed the /home and copied it to the file server. She would kill me if
she will miss any file.

Today I begun at 10:00am with the installation and configuration. The
installation was just simple. Only a few questions but only a few
options to configure. After roundabout 50 minutes the system was up and
running. Just fine.

I tried to configure Evolution as usual. No problem with that.
To restore the data from the tar I needed an SSHD daemon. Installation
was just simple (sudo apt-get install openssh-server openssh-client).

But: I hate that there is no root account active and I always have to
sudo. I'm not sure about changing this. It looks like a well thought
security feature. Because anybody knows there is a "root" user at a UNIX
system but do you know the name of the superuser of an UBUNTU system?
Okay this look like security by obscurity. But probably it helps!

After this I've started an update of UBUNTU Dapper. This worked fine. 

The next step was testing FireFox. Everything fine with that except the
JRE.

I got it from the plugin installation screen FireFox pointed to. First I
installed  jre1.5.0_09. I linked the libjavaplugin_oji.so as usual to
the correct directories. The result was interesting: No more warnings
that there is a plugin required but no working JAVA applets. After this
I've downloaded FireFox 2.0 and installed it just
under /home/<user>/tmp/firefox and linked the plugin to the valid
directory.

I got an error with a missed shared library. I installed it with apt-get
( sudo apt-get  install  libstdc++5)  and FireFox 2.0 started but with
same result as 1.5.0.6.

Than I downloaded from the SUN website the j2re1.4.2_13 and tried this
one. If I started FireFox it crashed. Remark: If you want to see the
reason just start FireFox from the command line. Than I took the JRE
from my Notebook. It's jre1.5.0_06. After linking the
libjavaplugin_oji.so everything worked fine. This jre works with FireFox
1.5.0.8 and FireFox 2.0 very well!

It took hours to fix this problem. After this I replaced all the links
and directories with the correct one and everything worked fine.

My daughter love her "new" ICQ client "Gaim internet messanger". She
said this ICQ client look very well.

Without this list I've never had given UBUNTU a chance. Up to now it
works.  The animation at my homepage is now executed in slow motion.
Probably the driver of the graphics adapter is bad.

UBUNTU seems to be very professional. FireFox should offer a better JRE
installation method! ;-)

kind regards
Gerald