[wellylug] UBUNTU 5.10 Dapper. First experiences!

Rob Collins robcollins55 at aim.com
Tue Nov 14 09:16:12 NZDT 2006


Gerald, I recently installed Kubuntu 6.10 on a friends 4 year old home 
PC and works really well.  I've been quite taken with the way the 
K(U)buntu system just "works" so i fully understand where your coming 
from.  I was like you and hated the idea of not having root login access 
to the xserver but have since got over that.  I'm a keen KDE fan so I 
can only talk about Kubuntu in any depth (I'm sure Gnome has similar 
apps available though) but what I did to get around the root access 
problem was installed Automatix2 ("easy ubuntu" in gnome?) which eases 
the installation of all the commonly needed apps - firefox, thunderbird, 
java etc.  Also installed "Krusader" which is a root access file 
directories browser.  You can launch a terminal from this app also so 
you have full root access at command line without the need for "sudo".  
You can re-jig the system to get root access login but I wouldn't 
reccommend it as it just "breaks" your setup as I discovered.

ps - sudo apt-get install kubuntu-desktop will give you the option of 
logging in with Kubuntu on your Ubuntu system.

Rob Collins

Gerald.Roehrbein at oraforecast.com wrote:
> 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
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>   
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