As stated yesterday, I wanted to install Ubuntu Linux on a machine somewhere. I took the opportunity during two lunch breaks to do so, and let me tell ya...I am pretty impressed.

The install was a breeze and something most anyone could do providing they read the setup screen\'s instructions. As usual, any custom partitioning should be left to the experts, but the default install would install everything into the root partition if you\'d let it.

I chose to make my own partitions and format them as ReiserFS, (mainly because I\'ve no experience with ReiserFS and wanted to see what i\'d end up with).

After initial setup it prompted me if I wanted to install packages from the CD or from the internet. Having a okay internet connection, I chose to install packages from the net. There was no selecting of packages to install, it just installed a base system with OpenOffice and Ximian Evolution all inside of the Gnome Desktop environment. (Usually something I hate due to getting way too many applications installed.) In this case, the application bloat was minimal and my GUI desktop started up with no tweaking needed. (It did start up at 1024x768 which I changed later, but I got GUI with no interference needed). I am used to plain old Debian which always took some playing to get X to go the first time. (I think there may be some GL issues, but that may be because it is using a generic video driver. As soon as I find out what type of card is in here, I\'ll if I can\'t find a better solution.)

The root account is disabled by default which is annoying to me, but is probably a good idea for the end user, especially the newbie. You can always re-enalbe the root account and set a password anyway.

Sound worked out of the box although it did not come with Xmms, my music player of choice. It was only an apt-get away, (or use synaptic, which is what I tried this time). With everything working as expected, I decided to check some security.

Nmap showed the following ports open by default:

• 25/tcp smtp
• 111/tcp rpcbind
• 631/tcp ipp
• 939/tcp unknown (I believe the has something to do with CUPS running

Nessus found a security hole in the ipp port and reported that is was able to request some CGI scripts that had extensions of .old, .bak, ~, and .copy and told me to delete those files. I have no clue how to do that just yet. It also warned me about the other ports being opened but none contained exploitable holes.

There is no firewall installed by default, which I think is a bad idea but the folks at Ubuntu argue that there isn\'t any real need for one with the base install because nothing is really listening. I think nessus and nmap tell a different story, but its nothing glaring. Still a simple firestarter application would be a good idea in my mind.

There are some FATAL modprobe errors when booting up relating to hotplug with the pciehp.ko and shpchp.ko modules. Not sure what that is all about.

RhythmBox froze up when I tried to stream audio from an internet radio station, but they may not have been Ubuntu\'s fault. I haven\'t had time to check that out.

Finally, a look at lsmod showed TONS of modules loaded. No big deal as its a modular, not monolithic, kernel. Something alot of distros are doing. Still, I\'ll be that there are tons of things compiled into the kernel, or even modules that aren\'t needed which is a bit of a bloat problem. However, some kernel tweaking may fix that.

Overall, I think with all the trouble I\'ve had with my laptop concerning ALSA and some SCSI emulation stuff, I may switch over to Ubuntu for my work laptop. I\'ll have to install it onto one of our \"extra\" laptops around here someday and see how it behaves. That way I\'ll know if its worth my time to switch, or just keep tweaking my plain Debian(unstable) install.

Ubuntu shows promise and for those of us linux geeks that refuse to use the SuSE\'s and Redhat\'s of the world, it\'s a damn good option.

NOTE: This test system was installed on a 550 Mhz Dell Dimension L600-R.