wm.azmi

Ubuntu is one of the most rapid growing Linux distro. Ubuntu is a derivation of Debian distro. Ubuntu is an African word mean “humanity toward others” and that’s why the Ubuntu developer called it as Linux for human beings.

The rapid growing of Ubuntu produces another subproject which is Kubuntu and Xubuntu. Both are focusing on KDE and Xfce desktop environment respectively. Other subproject of Ubuntu are Edubuntu and Gobuntu.

I’m using Ubuntu 7.10, Gutsy Gibbon to install on Esprimo V5535. I got this DVD by purchasing Linux Magazine issue 87, February 2008. The current version is Ubuntu 8.04.

Loading the DVD

When i run the DVD, it takes few times around 1 minute to prompt start up page. After that it initialize all important requirements to run as live DVD.

After finished loading, the front page of Ubuntu desktop is as below. User can browse the information of the system or proceed to install it on hard drive. User have to click on the icon at desktop which named ‘install’ to begin installation.

Running on DVD before choosing to install

Before the installation begins, user has to define the partition to place the OS. The DVD can perform partition management such as creating, deleting and resizing partition. But only two partitions can be created, which are root and swap. This is a little bit confusing me because normally I prefer creating separate user partition such as /home.

Creating partition

The installation is running smoothly. I don’t give any extra installation option command like the previous installation using Mandriva.

Installation in progress

Boot menu selection

After the installation is finished, then I restart the system. The boot menu selection is appearing at the beginning of boot up such picture above. The default desktop theme is a picture below.

Front page of Ubuntu Linux

One main different in terms of security issue using Ubuntu is superuser access. For other distros, user has to provide superuser or root password to access management or any critical part of the system. Ubuntu does not set superuser password but it use ‘sudo’ command replacing that method. But this method is not strictly secure because user only provides their (user) password when using ‘sudo’ command. I don’t like this feature.

When I connect the laptop with LAN network, it automatically detects the network. This feature is almost support by latest version of many Linux distros. For wireless network, normally it depends to the chipset driver. But this Esprimo V5535, Ubuntu 7.10 does not detect it.

The screen resolution is very basic and low, 800×600. When I opened the web page, it cannot view whole page because of the low screen resolution. I tried editing the “/etx/X11/xorg.conf” file by adding other resolution range, but it still use the default resolution.

Basic screen resolution, 800×600

On my previous project, i used to put PHP script at “/var/www/html/” using Red Hat and Mandriva. This directory is a default page redirect on Linux for HTTP. But i didn’t found that directory within this distro. Hayya… New ‘shirt’, have to search where the ‘pockets’ are!