Ubuntu

[purplebean]

The good news is that it installed... it didn't do well detecting my monitor, and I seem to be unable to change it to a normal resolution, so everything is larger than I'm used to.  I was surprised it didn't ask me much of anything during installation: one of the things I like about Fedora is being able to choose the programs I want (or don't want

Comments

[msde]

Yeah, ubuntu starts you off with a user account and sudo access. I'm not even sure if I can log in as root on my box.

[zaph]

I can't forget I'm logged into a terminal as root and try to ssh to another account!

more to the point, it's much harder to accidentally wipe out an entire partition by typing rm -rf * in the wrong directory or something.

(not that I have ever done such a thing. nope, not at all. :)

[purplebean]

Yes, 'rm -rf' deserves much respect; if I need to use it, I type out the entire name of the directory :) Usually, my rm is aliased to 'rm -i' so I haven't had too many disasters. One of my biggest disasters involved scp -- I was writing on both my home and office computer, and I overwrote the newer version of my thesis by typing the files in the wrong order.... it was very sad, although fixable, since I did most edits on paper first.

[zaph]

I don't alias rm, but I follow the principle of 'ls before rm'. If the files listed are what you want to delete, you're good to go. :)

I was writing on both my home and office computer, and I overwrote the newer version of my thesis by typing the files in the wrong order.... it was very sad, although fixable, since I did most edits on paper first.

Oof, but still probably not fun to retype.

We had something similar happen at my old job with an entire hard drive. We were experiencing drive failures with a certain brand so we replaced all of them and used dd to copy the contents directly to new drives so everything would work seamlessly. Our IT guy did one in the wrong order, and you can imagine how that went. :)

eu root

[zaph]

I wonder if I can type this from my iPod... Seems to be working..

Okay! This is Melanie's Jim: the first thing I usually do on
Ubuntu is

sudo passwd

which first prompts for your user password through the sudo
part, then runs "passwd" as root, allowing you to give yourself
a root password. That said, I hardly ever use it--- sudo is a
nice way to do things most of the time. It's just good for peace
of mind.

By the way, I really like Ubuntu, it handles all the device-driver
sorts of things I never want to deal with, though I spend a lot
of time with a new system saying things like

sudo apt-get install emacs

Sheesh.

-- Jim