The Cheezy Blog

So I’ve finally taken some time out to play around with the Dapper Drake release of Ubuntu Linux. I have to say that for a “beginner” aimed distro, it’s actually quite good fun to use.

Installation is done via a Live CD, and is so painless that I thought something was wrong. It’s default install is very limited, no compilers etc are included and need to be added, even going so far as to not come with OpenSSH’s SSHD by default. Adding packages is acomplished either via Ubuntu’s rather nice Synaptic gui or via the command line using apt-get.

There has only been a few issues so far. Firstly Nvidia in their infinite wisdom have decided that they are not going to release a PPC version of their linux driver, which doesn’t make much sense to me as they have one done for the BSD Based OSX on PPC, some sort of port can’t be that difficult surely. Secondly DVD playback took some fiddling to get working, not great for a distro aimed at old Joe Average. In the end I tracked down the library I needed and added it, and now DVD playback seems to be quite happy.

The third issue probably won’t affect Joe so much. I use screen a lot, I’ve usually got at least one screen session running with an app in it. This has never posed a problem before, but suddenly I found that backspace wasn’t working within screen sessions, when it was working fine outside of it. stty -a showed that erase was still set to ^? but screen itself was only obeying ^h.

After much fiddling I discovered that you have to set $TERM to screen before running screen, this was easily automated by adding this line to my .bashrc

alias screen='TERM=screen screen'

And now everything’s happy. It’s a real shame about the lack of an Nvidia driver though, I really wanted to get XGL / Compiz running.