[tlug] Ubuntu / EPIA / Media Player

["Stephen J. Turnbull" <stephen@example.com>]

Curt Sampson writes:

 > So, I spent some time this afternoon installing Ubuntu 7.04

Big mistake.  Ubuntu is for people who can spare more money than
brains.  You don't pay for Ubuntu, but you do pay for hardware that
could run MS Windows Vista without strain.  You can probably do a
little better with Kubuntu.  (KDE is a little better optimized than
GNOME, which is just an absolute pig.)

 > 3. What do I want to be using to play movies, music, etc?

Rhythmbox seems popular among the people I hang out with, but they're
not exactly the usual crowd.

 > 2. The dmesg sucks: it's hideously verbose, gives you a lot of crap
 > that's extremely low-level debugging information ("sanitize start",
 > "Dentry cache hash table entries: 65536 (order: 6, 262144 bytes)") and

I thought that was what dmesg was for, logging all the low-level
bitflicking in case inquiring minds want to know.  (That's a question,
really.  I'm not a kernel hacker.)

I suppose in theory it could be better organized, but it would be
organizationally hard since Linux kernel architecture and development
organization is so decentralized compared to BSD.  So all of the
different messages are being output according to the tastes of the
developer doing that particular modules.  ("Have you ever tried to
herd cats?" :-)

 > doesn't even bother to give you things such as the CPU ID string.

cat /proc/cpuinfo give you what you're looking for?

If so, sure you could do that in dmesg too, I guess it would be a good
enough idea, but I don't miss it.  I use dmesg when I don't know what
I'm looking for (and so I want as much information as possible).

 > 3. No ssh server installed by default. Is it just me, or is that getting
 > fairly silly?

This is Ubuntu's way of telling you that it is aimed at the kind of
user who thinks that installing the Norton viruschecker for Linux is a
way to achieve perfect security.