Revisiting Linux Part 1: A Look at Ubuntu 8.04
by Ryan Smith on August 26, 2009 12:00 AM EST- Posted in
- Linux
Installation
In terms of difficulty, right up there with making a good GUI is making a good installer. History is riddled with bad OS installers, with pre-Vista Windows being the most well-known example. Text mode installers running on severely castrated operating systems reigned for far too long. Microsoft of course improved this with Windows Vista in 2006, but even as late as the end of 2007 they were still releasing new operating systems such as Windows Home Server that used a partial text mode installer.
The reason I bring this up is that good OS installers are still a relatively recent development in the PC space, which is all the more reason I am very impressed with Ubuntu’s installer. It’s the opposite of the above, and more.
Right now Ubuntu is the underdog in a Windows dominated world, and their installation & distribution strategies have thusly been based on this. It’s undoubtedly a smart choice, because if Ubuntu wiped out Windows like Windows does Ubuntu, it would be neigh impossible to get anyone to try it out since “try out” and “make it so you can’t boot Windows” are mutually incompatible. Ubuntu plays their position very well in a few different ways.
First and foremost, the Ubuntu installation CD is not just an installer, but a live CD. It’s a fully bootable and usable copy of Ubuntu that runs off of the CD and does not require any kind of installation. The limitations of this are obvious since you can’t install additional software and CD disc access times are more than an order of magnitude above that of a hard drive, but nevertheless it enables you to give Ubuntu a cursory glance to see how it works, without needing to install anything. Live CDs aren’t anything new for Linux as a whole, but it bears mentioning, it’s an excellent strategy for letting people try out the OS.
This also gives Ubuntu a backdoor in to Windows users’ computers because as a complete CD-bootable OS, it can be used to recover trashed Windows installations when the Windows recovery agent can’t get the job done. It can read NTFS drives out of the box, allowing users to back up anything they read to another drive, such as USB flash drive. It also has a pretty good graphical partition editor, GParted, for when worse comes to worse and it comes time to start formatting. Ubuntu Live CD is not a complete recovery kit in and of itself (e.g. it can’t clean malware infections, so it’s more of a tool of last resort) but it’s a tool that has a purpose and serves it well.
Better yet, once you decide that you want to try an installable version of Ubuntu, but don’t want to take the plunge of messing with partitions, Ubuntu has a solution for that too. Wubi, the Windows-based Ubuntu Installer, allows you to install Ubuntu as a flat-file on an existing NTFS partition. Ubuntu can then boot off of the flat file, having never touched a partition or the master boot record (instead inserting an Ubuntu entry in to Windows BCD). This brings all the advantages of moving up from a Live CD to an installable version of Ubuntu, but without the system changes and absolute commitment a full install entails. Wubi installations are also easily removable, which further drives home this point.
Now the catch with a Wubi installation is that it’s meant to be a halfway house between a Live CD and a full installation, and it’s not necessarily meant for full-time use. As a flat file inside of a NTFS partition, there are performance issues related to the lower performance of the NTFS-3G driver over raw hard drive access, along with both external fragmentation of the flat file and internal fragmentation inside of the flat file. An unclean shutdown also runs the slight risk of introducing corruption in to the flat file or the NTFS file system, something the Wubi documentation makes sure to point out. As such Wubi is a great way to try out Ubuntu, but a poor way to continue using it.
Finally, once you’ve decided to go the full distance, there’s the complete Ubuntu installation procedure. As we’ve previously mentioned Ubuntu is a live CD, so installing Ubuntu first entails booting up the live CD – this is in our experience a bit slower than booting up a pared down installation-only OS environment such as Vista’s Windows PE. It should be noted that although you can use GParted at this point to make space to install Ubuntu, this is something that’s better left in the hands of Windows and its own partition shrinking ability due to some gotchas in that Windows can move files around to make space when GParted can’t.
Once the installation procedure starts, it’s just 6 steps to install the OS: Language, Time Zone, Keyboard Layout, Installation Location, and the credentials for the initial account. Notably the installation procedure calls for 7 steps, but I’ve only ever encountered 6, step 6 is always skipped. This puts it somewhere behind Mac OS X (which is composed of picking a partition and installing, credentials are handled later) and well ahead of Windows since you don’t need a damn key.
The only thing about the Ubuntu installation procedure that ruffles my feathers is that it doesn’t do a very good job of simplifying the installation when you want to install on a new partition but it’s not the only empty partition. This is an artifact of how Linux handles its swapfile – while Windows and Mac OS X create a file on the same partition as the OS, Linux keeps its swapfile on a separate partition. There are some good reasons for doing this such as preventing fragmentation of the swapfile and always being able to place it after the OS (which puts it further out on the disk, for higher transfer rates) but the cost is ease of installation. Ubuntu’s easy installation modes are for when you want to install to a drive (and wipe away its contents in the process) or when you want to install in the largest empty chunk of unpartitioned space. Otherwise, you must play with GParted as part of the installation procedure.
This means the most efficient way to install Ubuntu if you aren’t installing on an entire disk or immediately have a single free chunk of space (and it’s the largest ) is to play with partitions ahead of time so that the area you wish to install to is the largest free area. It’s a roundabout way to install Ubuntu and can be particularly inconvenient if you’re setting up a fresh computer and intend to do more than just dual boot.
Once all of the steps are completed, Ubuntu begins installing and is over in a few minutes. Upon completion Ubuntu installs its bootloader of choice, GRUB, and quickly searches for other OS installations (primarily Windows) and adds those entries to the GRUB bootloader menu. When this is done, the customary reboot occurs and when the system comes back up you’re faced with the GRUB boot menu – you’re ready to use Ubuntu. Ubuntu doesn’t treat its first booting as anything special, and there are no welcome or registration screens to deal with(I’m looking at you, Apple). It boots up, and you can begin using it immediately. It’s refreshing, to say the least.
The actual amount of time required to install Ubuntu is only on the order of a few minutes, thanks in large part due to its dainty size. Ubuntu comes on a completely filled CD, weighing in at 700MB, while Windows Vista is on a DVD-5 at over 3GB, and Mac OS X is on a whopping DVD-9 at nearly 8GB. It’s the fast to download (not that you can download Windows/Mac OS X) and fast to install.
We’ll get to the applications in-depth in a bit, but I’d like to quickly touch on the default installation of Ubuntu. Inside that 700MB is not only the core components of the OS and a web browser, but the complete Open Office suite and Evolution email client too. You can literally install Ubuntu and do most common tasks without ever needing to install anything else beyond security and application updates. Consider the amount of time it takes to install Microsoft Office on a Windows machine or a Mac, and it’s that much more time saved. Canonical is getting the most out of the 700MB a CD can hold.
Facebook
Twitter
RSS
195 Comments
View All Comments
viciki123 - Monday, February 22, 2010 - link
I have a new website!wedding dresses uk:http://www.weddingdressonlineshop.co.uk">http://www.weddingdressonlineshop.co.ukJillian - Thursday, December 29, 2011 - link
YOu are spamer .For this, you could pick up some popular open source and proprietary (or their free equivalents) application that can run both Linux and W7. and compare the price, time and power consumption for retrieving, saving, processing, compiling, encrypting,decrypting compacting, extracting, encoding, decoding, backup, restore, nº of frames,etc, with machines in a range of different CPU and memory capacities. http://www.idresses.co.ukzerobug - Monday, February 1, 2010 - link
Regarding benchmarks and Linux-focused hardware roundups, one thing worth of consideration is that while Microsoft places strong resources on O/S development to create features that will require the end users the need to get the latest and greatest powerful hardware, Linux places their efforts in order that the end user will still be able to use their old hardware and get the best user experience while running the latest and greatest software.So,the benchmarks could compare the user experience when running popular software on Microsoft and Linux O/S's, with different powerful machines.
For this, you could pick up some popular open source and proprietary (or their free equivalents) application that can run both Linux and W7. and compare the price, time and power consumption for retrieving, saving, processing, compiling, encrypting,decrypting compacting, extracting, encoding, decoding, backup, restore, nº of frames,etc, with machines in a range of different CPU and memory capacities.
MarcusAsleep - Thursday, December 17, 2009 - link
Quick Startup: OK, Windows is fast - at first, well let's say that is if you install it yourself without all the bloatware that come standard on Windows store-bought PS's (we bought a Toshiba laptop for work with Vista that took 12 minutes after boot-up for it to respond to a click on the start menu - even on the third time booting.)Windows startup is often burdened by auto-updates from Microsoft, anti-virus, Sun-Java, Acrobat Reader, etc. etc. that slow down the computer on boot-up to where your original idea of "hey I just want to start my computer and check my email for a minute before work" can take at least 5. I can do this reliably on Linux in 1. Yes, if you know a lot about Windows, you can stop all the auto-updates and maintain them yourself but 99% of Windows users don't have time/or know how to do this.
Trouble-free: E.G. I installed Linux on a computer for my wife's parents (Mepis Linux) 7 years ago for email, pictures, games, web, letter use and haven't had to touch it since then. This is typical.
For Windows, often I have done fresh installs on trojan/virus infected computers - installed working antivirus and all Windows Updates (not to mention this process takes about 2-4 hours of updates upon updates + downloads of the proper drives from the manufacturers websites vs about 1 hour for an Ubuntu install with all updates done including any extra work for codecs and graphic drivers) - only to have to come back a couple months later to a slow again computer from users installing adware, infected games, etc.
Free: Nearly every Windows reinstall I've had to do starts with a computer loaded with MS Office, games, etc. but upon reinstall nobody has the disks for these. There is a lot of "sharing" of computer programs in the Windows world that is not very honest
With Linux, you can have the operating system plus pretty much anything else you would need, without having to cheat.
Adaptable Performance: You can get a well-performing Linux installation (LXDE Desktop) on a PIII computer with 256MB of ram. The only thing that will seem slow to an average mom/pop user would be surfing on flash loaded web pages, but with adblock on Firefox, it's not too bad. With Vista loaded on this computer, it would be annoyingly slow. You can often continue to use/re-use computer hardware with Linux for years after it would be unsuitable for Windows.
I think these features are of high value to the average user -- maybe not the average Anandtech computer user -- but the average surf/email/do homework/look at photos/play solitaire/balance my checkbook user.
Cheers!
Mark.
SwedishPenguin - Wednesday, October 28, 2009 - link
Using SMB for network performance is extremely biased. It's a proprietary Microsoft protocol, of course Microsoft is going to win that one. Use NFS, HTTP, FTP, SSH or some other open protocol for network performance benchmarking. Alot of NASes do support these, as they are Linux-based.Furthermore, using a Windows server with SMB with the argument that most consumer NAS use SMB is pretty ridiculous, these NASes are most likely going to use Samba, not native SMB, the Samba which is implemented in GNU/Linux distributions and Mac OS X, not to mention that most of the NASes that I've seen offer at least one of these protocols as an alternative.
SwedishPenguin - Wednesday, October 28, 2009 - link
The ISO thing is pretty ridiculous, creating a simple GUI in both GTK and Qt and integrating them into Gnome and KDE should be pretty damn easy, though I suppose integration with the respective virtual file systems would be in order, in which case it might get slightly more complex for those (like me) not familiar with the code. There's even a FUSE (userspace filesystem) module now, so you wouldn't even need to be root to mount it.About the command-line support, IMO that's a good thing. It's a lot easier both for the person helping and the guy needing help to write/copy-paste a few commands than it is to tell the person to click that button, then that one then another one, etc. It's also alot easier for the guy needing help to simply paste the result if it didn't help, and it makes it much easier to diagnose the problem than if the user would attempt to describe the output. And you usually get much more useful information from the command-line utilities than you do from GUIs, the GUI simplifies the information so anyone can understand it, but at the price of making debugging a hell of a lot more difficult.
nillbug - Wednesday, September 30, 2009 - link
It must be said that Ubuntu and the major Linux distributors all have 64bit O/S versions since a long time. The reason behind is to allow users to benefit from memory (+4MB) and 64bit CPUs (almost all today) gaining a better computing experience.If this article was a private work of the author to provide him an answer on whether he may or may not move to Linux, people should advise him the above mentioned. As for an article intended to be read by thousands it must be pointed out that it's conclusion is a miss lead.
In face of today's reality (and not the author reality) why did he never mentioned the 64bit Ubuntu systems? I guess he's final thoughts then would've been much more in favor of Linux.
nillbug - Wednesday, September 30, 2009 - link
It must be said that Ubuntu and the major Linux distributors all have 64bit O/S versions since a long time. The reason behind is to allow users to benefit from memory (+4MB) and 64bit CPUs (almost all today) gaining a better computing experience.If this article was a private work of the author to provide him an answer on whether he may or may not move to Linux, people should advise him the above mentioned. As for an article intended to be read by thousands it must be pointed out that it's conclusion is a miss lead.
In face of today's reality (and not the author reality) why did he never mentioned the 64bit Ubuntu systems? I guess he's final thoughts then would've been much more in favor of Linux.
seanlee - Tuesday, September 15, 2009 - link
I have read all 17 pages of comments…a lot of Linux lovers out there… and they all purposely ignore few important things that make Windows successful, which in term, makes most Linux distribution marking failures, I have used Linux on my net book and my ps3, and I absolutely hate it.1. User friendly. No, CLI is not user friendly no matter what you say; no matter what excuse you use; no matter how blind you are. NOT ONE COMPANY dare to provide their mainstream products to be CLI only, from things as simply as ATM, ipod, to things as complicate as cellphone, cars, airplane. That ought to tell you something--- CLI is not intuitive, not intuitive=sucks, so CLI = sucks. You command line fan boys are more than welcome to program punched cards, expect no one use punched cards and machine language anymore because they are counter-intuitive. Having to do CLI is a pain for average user, and having to do CLI every time to install a new program/driver is a nightmare. GUI is a big selling point, and a gapless computer-human user experience is what every software company looking to achieve.
2. There is NOTHING a Linux can do that windows cannot. On the contrary, there are a lot of things windows can do that Linux cannot. I’d like to challenge any Linux user to find engineering software alternatives on Linux, like matlab, simulink, xilinx, orcad, labview, CAD… you cannot. For people who actually user their computer for productive means (not saying typing documents are not productive, but you can type document using type writer with no CPU required whatsoever), there is nothing, again, I repeat, NOTHING that Linux can offer me.
3. Security issues. I disagree with the security issues that windows has. I can set up a vista machines, turn it on, luck it into a cage, and it will be as security as any Linux machine out there. Hell. If I bought a piece of rock, pretend it was a computer and stare it all day, it would be the most secure system known to the man-kind. Linux’s security is largely due to one of the two reasons: 1. Not popular, not enough software to support and to play with. 2. Not popular, un user-friendly. Either of them is not a good title to have. It is like you are free from the increase of the tax not because you have your business set up to write off all your expense, but because you don’t make any money thus you don’t have to pay tax.
4. There is nothing revolutionary about Linux for an average user, other than it is free. If free is your biggest selling point, you are in serious trouble. Most people, if not all, would pay for quality product than a free stuff, unless it is just as good. Obviously Ubuntu is never going to be as good as windows because they don’t have the money that MS has. So what does Ubuntu have that really makes me want to switch and take few weeks of class to understand those commands?
Be honest, people. If you only have ONE O/S to use, most of you guys will chose windows.
kensolar - Monday, October 26, 2009 - link
I hope you realize that your hated is showing so strongly that absolutely no one cares what you say.
That said, I don't know how to use a cli and have been successfully using Linux for 3 years. I found the article to be a fairly fair one even though the author is so unfamiliar with Linux/Ubuntu. As he does not use the default app's in windows, linux users don't use the defaults only in linux. K3B is far superior to Brassaro and so on. In addition, I don't think he let on very well as to the extent of the software available in the repositories (with addition repositories easy to add). Several hundred app's, 20,000 programs, even security app's and programs ranging from easy as pie to complicated. (for those of us how have a computer that is more than a rock) I personally do audio mixing, video transcoding, advanced printing....all with graphic interfaces.
BTW, I learned how to turn on a computer for the 1st time 3 1/2 years ago, I stopped using windows a little over 3 years ago and have no reason to go back. I find it too hard, limiting and frustrating to use. Plus, I can't live w/o multiple desktops, the author didn't get it yet, but once you get used to them you can't go back.
Well, I've said enough for now, can't wait for your next article.