Choices – Part I. Ubuntu Linux.

Those days the development of Kyusl is done entirely on Ubuntu Linux 5.10. It’s not the first Linux-based OS that is running on my PC, and as the choice is big today, I wanted to share some ideas on selecting the right system.

The first one (after Windows and FreeBSD at home, and many many others at work) was the RedHat Linux 9.0, which I decided to install in the days of late 2004 when the JPEG Windows library flaw was being exploited by bad guys. In comparison with other systems that I have tried later, the main point about the RedHat it gives you a feeling of a highly refined product. Really, you get exactly the same system that RedHat sold and supported commercially. The only problem with RedHat 9 is that it’s not supported anymore, so that you don’t get the important security upgrades and installing the latest software can be a pain.

Now, let’s look at what is available today. To get the system that is easily maintained, unless you are a big fan of playing with terminal trying to compile software packages from source, the best is to check the offers of the biggest Linux players. The absolute leaders are RedHat and Novell. But RedHat desktop version is too expensive. Novel’s SuSe is probably a good choice but, similaryl to RedHat, they don’t provide the “real” OS for free. What you get for free from two biggest vendors is “corresponding” community versions. I tried Fedora as a logical upgrade from RedHat 9 and was disappointed. It screwed up my RedHat install (dual boot didn’t want to work properly after) and the very first thing that I would normally do – check for online upgrades – didn’t work. In addition, each version is supported with updates only for several months – then you have to move to the next, downloading several CDs again. OpenSuse’s release notes that I checked at that time started with explanations on how to repair the broken update manager (same problem as with Fedora?). Now I wonder how both things managed to go to “production”.

Among smaller vendors there is Mandriva. I checked it recently, but found KDE to be kind of cluttered. So, I decided to continue with Ubuntu, whose CD I got for free directly from Canonical.

Though some things look nicer and more polished even on now four year old RedHat 9, there are many reasons to look at Ubuntu. Main ones for me are:

1. The OS you get for free is the same that is commercially supported by its vendor. That means, they have some incentive to polish it.
2. If you don’t want to wait for CDs (they ship them for free), all you have to download is one CD, which will have everything most users need. Among general software, I had to download another firewall because I didn’t want to play with iptable. (RedHat provides easy GUI applet to configure the firewall, but Ubuntu doesn’t). I could never understand who may need all those gigabytes that you have to download from the very beginning from Fedora or OpenSuse folks.
3. Each version is supported for at least 18 months. In 2006 they have released a duo of “long term support” versions. Desktop gets three years and server gets five years of security updates. Yes, it still doesn’t beat Windows life cycle, but is already long enough.

Having said all that, the choice becomes easy. Even not-so-nice default font rendering and other less important points don’t affect Ubuntu as a winner for me.

Fixing layout problems.

The first test of Kyusl pages layout with MS Internet Explorer came out funny, though it had to be expected. Pre-IE7 versions interpret CSS options differently from Firefox, which is my primary browser for development. The missing support of min-height property in IE6 broke the layout if the page content was too long. Some simple tricks taken from MSDN did the job. The pages look the same in Firefox, Opera and IE now. Unfortunately, Safari will probably show slightly broken pages, but at the moment I have no chance of targetting it.