I have installed Ubuntu 8.04 well over a dozen times now and I can honestly say for the first time, I am really sad for having moved off 7.10. My first real beef is the complete lack of basic application support at installation. Yes yes yes, I know, you want to be able to customize your linus install the way you want to, and I agree. I have a few issues primarily though which should be no-brainers for any disto installation...
1. No JRE option at Install: So far I have not been given an opportunity to install any JRE (from any provider) at install. This is serious. The JRE is a fundamental software core which should be loaded at install. Give me options, give me a toggle, give me a checkbox, hell anything other than me firing up some of the best applications around only to get thread exceptions in the console. There is absolutely no reason what so ever that some form of the JRE is not installed by default.
2. Emacs not installed. I'm a little old fashioned. I use emacs. I'm not ashamed. Emacs has been around for at least 21 versions, more if you count GNU. In my humble opinion, emacs and vi should be default installations for those early conf edits you will always have to do after an install. It is so much easier to configure applications in a terminal when you don't have to do a sudo apt-get blah blah blah. There are certain applications which should just BE THERE, by default, without question. Emacs and vi should be in this list.
3. SSHd. Oooook. Who forgot this one? At what point did someone say "hey, I think leaving out the ssh server is probably the best way to go by default"? Imagine (if you will) my surprise when I could not configure the sshd conf file. Why? Simple - it wasn't there in the file system. I thought I had gone crazy. I realized after each subsequent install, that I was not crazy, sshd simply wasn't installed by default. No you have to run sudo apt-get install openssh-server. I'm almost positive this was a standard software dependency in linux. I know that it came standard on RH6-9, SuSE, and Knoppix. I can almost say for certain that I never had to install it on my Ubuntu 6 or 7 installations. Why now? What changed. I can understand having the service turned off by default for security reasons, but not installed?
4. Samba: (I need to breathe on this one)...SMB services were annoyingly simple in 7.04. You simply stated what dir to share and shared it (of course you had to set the user to have a smb password - man smbpasswd for more info). This was a 3 hour headache in 8.04. Heck half the reasons I use linux in the first place is that I usually do not have the financial resources to have a 100 user windows server or the unlimited version of OSX (which I like better anyway). What is this noise? I had to edit the smb.conf file. This is Ubuntu folks. You are not supposed to edit a conf file starting out. What happened? My shares worked fine in 7.10.
Needless to say I am disturbed at southward trend on a great linux distro. BTW, when in doubt, use apt-get install, the updater doesn't always work.
Apparently I'm not the only one thinking this way.
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