When I got my MacBook almost a year ago, I instantly fell in love in OS X - it’s Unix, it’s compatible and it’s pretty, but the love wasn’t truly returned. Sure, OS X has some cool stuff bundled, and sure, it’s easy to install and remove stuff in OS X, but well, I just didn’t feel free to do whatever I wanted, so I decided that it was time to replace OS X with something better.

Now I’ve tried installing Ubuntu on my Mac before, actually just around the time I purchased my MacBook, but many features were on an experimental level back then if they even existed, but I figured that with this new Ubuntu-release, MacBook-support should’ve matured.

Notice that this is not a thorough review of Ubuntu nor GNOME, but merely a review of installing and configuring Ubuntu on a MacBook and the issues and documentation involved.

About Ubuntu
Ubuntu is a rather new distribution. It was created in October 2004 as a fork of Debian, but meant to have releases in sync with the major GNOME releases, occurring every six month. Ubuntu has newer packages in their official stable tree, than Debian, and it comes with many new utilities. The distribution is fully open-source and thus, per default no non-free packages (as in, with no source-code available) come bundled with the distribution.

Initially, a South African named Mark Shuttleworth, posted $10 million into the project. Due to this, as well as a continuous donations and a strong company supporting the distribution, copies of Ubuntu on CD’s are given away and shipped freely to anywhere in the world.

Of course Ubuntu is also available for download via torrents or direct download, having plenty of mirrors all over the world.

If you’d like, you can read more about Ubuntu, it’s history and it’s philosophy, on Wikipedia and Ubuntu’s official site.

Getting started
Now, MacBooks are not just your regular PC-laptops, even though MacBooks are now using Intel-processors, so I figured I’d rather read up whatever I could, instead of jumping right in. Finding documentation using Google was pretty hard. Well, it’s not that there was no documentation, but most of it was outdated and much of which was before an issue, has now been fixed - I wanted documentation for Ubuntu 7.04! Anyway, I figured documentation was most likely to be available in the Ubuntu Community Docs, and I was right. There was a page dedicated to Ubuntu on MacBooks and it has been updated very recently - horray!

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MEPIS basically claims to beat all other distributions at the major aspects of desktop-computing, as it claims to feature “unique hardware detection and configuration superior to any others” as well as being “pre-configured for simplicity and ease-of-use, you’re productive in a matter of minutes” and it claims to “include the very best business and multimedia programs”. Such huge claims gives huge expectations and that’s exactly how I intend to review this distribution: I expect nothing less than the perfect distribution, in all desktop-aspects - especially, as always, in the field of user-friendliness!

MEPIS is an Ubuntu-based distribution, using KDE for the desktop. It includes a vast array of free software (not just free as in open-source, but also closed-source free such as Skype). The first public release of MEPIS came in May 2003 and development has seemingly been going strong ever since.

The primary force behind the site is Warren Woodford, who founded the MEPIS Linux in November 2002, due to frustration of the several distributions he had tried and inspired by his experience as a NeXT developer, he began working on a distribution that “just works”. More developers have joined in later on.

The distribution was originally based directly on the Debian-tree, but has lately moved to use Ubuntu as its base. The distribution is free of charge and can be downloaded directly from one of the mirrors as a combo live-CD/install-CD.

It is possible to pay for a subscription, which gives access to special versions tailored for various purposes and to early test-releases. The fees primarily benefits paying for Warren’s full-time commitment to the development of the distribution.

Expectations
The distribution claims a lot so the stakes are high, but knowing of the main-developer’s past and his level of commitment, this distribution wants to be taken seriously, and that’s how I’ll review it. I expect nothing less of a setup from start to end with not a single loose end in any desktop-related field, be it multimedia, communication, web-browsing or linguistics.

Hardware
The hardware for this review was my own personal workstation. That I had to do actual work on this machine while having the OS installed only made it more significant for me that the system was capable of all the things I use Linux for.

This is the setup used in the review:

• CPU: AMD Athlon 64 3200+
• Harddrive (root, swap and home): 40 GB Maxtor 7200 rpm
• Harddrive: 2x 250 GB SATA-drives, running hardware RAID-0
• Graphic: NVidia GeForce 6600 GTX Dual-head
• Monitor: 2x 19″ Medion-monitors, one using DVI, other VGA
• Keyboard: Logitech Ultra-X
• Mouse: Logitech MX1000
• Optical drive: NEC DVD-RW ND-2510A
• TV-Tuner: Brooktree BT878-based

Getting the distribution
Getting it was no big deal. There where enough mirror-servers to choose from, all high-speed, although I find it peculiar that downloading via torrent was not an option, which probably would lead to less load on the mirrors, especially when a new version is released.

Official instructions on how to burn the ISO in various operating-systems were available, although the instructions were written in a very compact English, possibly not very helpful for the people who actually need these instructions the most. I found out much later that much better documentation were available on the site by looking in the official documentation-wiki, but how would any new visitor know that the same site contains ‘competing’ documentation spread around the site and under such confusing names as “MEPIS Community”? Read the rest of this entry »

Some interesting stories and some good points were pointed out in the debate following my review of openSUSE and some extra notes was added to the review because of the comments. I’ve decided to highlight some of these good points and stories in this follow-up:

The installation does potentially dangerous things without warning the user

…Something you didn’t mentionned enough : by default, SuSe is setup to shrink windows partitions, without asking or even warning enough the basic user ! Very dangerous I think, considering Windows file systems don’t like these kind of operations if they haven’t been defragmented first !…
Pointed out by Nikoo

Unofficial, but highly thought of repositories for media-support

… Concerning your fears about 3rd party repositories: Packman’s and Guru’s repositories have a long standing and high reputation. They became almost an integral part of Suse. Otherwise it is true that some 3rd party repositories have to be treated with care, not so much for possible spyware but because they might have some very buggy packages lying around. And generally I find 3rd party repositories still much more secure than just downloading programs somewhere on the internet. If there should appear a repository with viruses or spyware it would be banned very quickly by the community…
Pointed out by Patrick

Storry from a happy openSUSE-user

…I am a Computer Programmer/Analsyst, of approximately 7 years in the programming field. I mainly program in C++/C#/Visual Basic. I have very minimal Linux experience I have tried many distributions over the past 10 years… …Open Suse is great combination of power and simplicity. the way I look at it is this. you can either choose a distro that is super power user, and get overwhelmed by all the technical options you know nothing about, or you could choose a super simple distro that has next to nothing with it. or you can pick a distro like Open suse 10.2 and get the perfect medium…
By Peter

Thank you all for a good debate!

Teaser: If you’re interested in playing your Windows-games in Linux through Cedega, then you should check in tomorrow the 28th, at around 9 pm CET/3 pm ET.

openSUSE is a widely known distribution for its huge array of unique tools for managing virtually every part of the system, without having to even think about using the console. It’s also known for the stability of the official packages and releases, and it’s known for a very stable package-system.

SUSE was acquired in 2004 by Novell, which meant a significant change in the future development of the distribution. From now on it would be an open-source project for everybody to help developing, while Novell kept maintaining a commercial pay-only edition, focused mainly for corporations.

As it’s a free project it’s available for download, both via torrents and using one of the many mirrors available. openSUSE comes in both CD-editions and a DVD-edition. It is not a necessity to download and burn all 5 CD’s if you don’t have a DVD-burner, as there’s also a network-boot-CD available, which is only capable of starting the installation, while all the packages will have to be downloaded from the Internet (or the LAN if you have a server available with the installation-sources).

Expectations
Knowing that this distribution has a long history and has siblings sold for commercial usage, I expect a lot of this distribution. I expect it to be very user friendly - I expect to not ever have to touch the console, even for rather extraordinary tasks not usually supported by a GUI front end.

I hope it to include all necessary packages for all the tasks needed for general usage, or at least easily, safely and officially available.

Test-system
The test-computer used in the article is my parents workstation, so the specifications are not very impressive (they use the computer for word-processing and mail-checking only). The final set-up which was created during the research for this article, is actually what they’re going to use when they come home from the vacation they’re currently having. Because they’re going to actually use it, the need for the distribution to get up and running perfectly, as they’re used to a stable and responsive Windows XP, is critical. The hardware is as follows:

CPU: AMD Athlon XP 2200+
RAM: 256 MB Kingston DDR (PC2700)
Harddrive: 40 GB Maxtor (7200 RPM)
Mouse: Logitech MX 700-mouse
CD-writer: Teac CD-W512EB (12x CD-R)
DVD-ROM: NEC DV-5700A (using a flashed firmware for region-unlocking)
Ethernet: RTL8139B-based on-board
Audio: VT8233A-based on-board
Graphics: S3 Trio3D/2x AGP-graphics card
Printer/scanner: Hewlett-Packard Photosmart 3210 All-in-one Network-printer/scanner
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