[ILUG] To ubuntu or not to ubuntu

[Timothy Murphy]

I recently bought a ThinkPad T43 which is running beautifully
(thank you, rf, if you are listening).

The previous owner was running Ubuntu + Gnome,
so despite the fact that my religion is Fedora + KDE,
I thought I'd see what Ubuntu was like.

I should say that I have always thought of Ubuntu
as a rather nerd-ish distribution.
I'm not prejudiced, but ... in my experience
most people running Ubuntu drink too much,
need a haircut and have bizarre political views.

However, I was quite impressed with Ubuntu at first sight.

Incidentally, I was amazed how easy it is 
to change the superuser password under Linux
by re-booting in single mode.
(The previous owner had just set up a user account for me.)
Isn't this rather a big security hole in Linux?
[Can one do anything similar under Windows?]

But to return to Ubuntu.
I ran (as root) "apt-get upgrade"
and then "apt-get install kubuntu-desktop"
(I was missing the familiar smell of KDE),
and in both cases the download ended with the apparent error:
======================
Setting up f-prot-installer (0.5.21) ...
installing f-prot
Downloading file fp-linux-ws.tar.gz.md5 from ftp://ftp.f-prot.com/pub/linux/
No such directory `pub/linux/'.

    Download failed. Please make sure that
    your computer is connected to the Internet.
    If you see this error although you are
    connected, either the server is down or the
    download location has changed. In the latter
    case you can still download the files manually.
    Please file a bug report against
    f-prot-installer!
dpkg: error processing f-prot-installer (--configure):
 subprocess post-installation script returned error exit status 1
Errors were encountered while processing:
 f-prot-installer
E: Sub-process /usr/bin/dpkg returned an error code (1)
======================

Is this just added as a hurdle for Ubuntu newbies,
to see if they have attained a high enough level of geekdom?

I await the voice of the Oracle.





-- 
Timothy Murphy  
e-mail (<80k only): tim /at/ birdsnest.maths.tcd.ie
tel: +353-86-2336090, +353-1-2842366
s-mail: School of Mathematics, Trinity College, Dublin 2, Ireland