A default install of Ubuntu

Wednesday, September 27th, 2006 at 08:23pm

As part of the larger plan (to be written about at some point in the nearish future) for rearranging the linux boxes I have at home I have been playing around with an install of Ubuntu on a small form factor 1.8Ghz Pentium 4 that I picked up at a swap meet a week and a half ago.

The default install of Ubuntu doesn’t give many options but what I ended up with was all of the hardware being detected (you wouldn’t think that detecting the components of the Intel 845 chipset would be hard until you try Windows XP SP2…) and enough basic applications installed (browsing, mail, office) to satisfy a ‘typical’ user (eg my mother).

However I am having to work around some ‘interesting’ things. For example to be able to ssh into the box I needed to manually install the openssh-server package. But all I needed to do in order to take over the X session via VNC was to go into the menu and check a box. One other thing was that there are various options (such as sharing files via samba) that when you first attempt to enable it you are prompted to install the appropriate packages.

Once I have gotten my head around it more (ultimately it will primarily be a server for my mail, local copies of my site and other stuff) this hardware will become the temporary home for my current Mandrake 9.1 install in order to maintain service while I perform a fresh install on the other hardware (which is actually the same except for a faster CPU and not a small form factor which means I have somewhere for my storage drives…).

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