A little news, a couple of tips.
First, this news:
Ubuntu is extremely popular on the desktop, but it's made comparatively little progress on servers. That's about to change. Dell is expected to announce in the first quarter of 2008 that it has certified Ubuntu Linux for its server lines.
In an interview with Rick Becker, Dell Product Group's vice president of solutions, Becker said that Dell is currently in the process of certifying Ubuntu for all its server lines. "But we are still several months away from announcing a certification. I'd say it'll be announced in Q1 next year."
[source]
Now, a link to a pretty useful tip: Ten useful uses of command find
Another tip. If you ever find yourself in a Linux terminal and you need to know what distro and release you are using, type this:
cat /etc/*-release
Now, do that about thirty times by hand (no using the history up arrow) so it will be committed to memory, just in case. This is the kind of stuff that really impresses the babes. Trust me.
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Ha! Awesome, I just discovered cat last night ...
My media box in the living room and my file server both run ubuntu full-time =)
The problem with Ubuntu is lack of support for centralized administration. Ubuntu is targeted to home users, who are their own admins. But most servers reside in corporate intranets, and are managed from a central workstation, because that's the only economic way to run a cluster of servers. That's why Red Hat and SUSE have separate enterprise editions.
Personally I don't like the way the administrator ("root") has been obscured. The idea seems to be to make Ubuntu look like Windows, but in spite of all the hiding, the root is still there. The name appears in access rights, and there are privileges that are hardwired to the first created user.
I run my machine with three users, one for admin (the first user, but I can't call it root), one for business, and one for entertainment. It's me in all three cases, but I want to keep the roles separate.
Unless you're using Mandriva, or then it's "which in your case, you have not got".
Lassi:
I do not understand this at all, frankly. I know there is a "server edition" of ubuntu, and one clear difference is that it boots up to a character prompt with no windows manager loaded (though there may be an x-server running, I'm not sure). I also think I know that the command su does not run on Unbuntu (though I have not tried "sudo su" !! :) )
Its almost like the actual admin does not really exist but the main user (the one that gives the first user name and p.w.) has privileges to become superuser with sudo.
I am just myself on my main desktop and my laptop, but for my daughter's powerPC laptop, I'm the admin who can do su and she is a mere user.
About sudo vs. su - here's a fine thread that eventually becomes a hair splitting contest:
http://www.tuxmagazine.com/node/1000148
The server scene is more complicated than just having shell access to the box. In a large corporate network you don't have time to poke into each box individually. You need an admin application that runs in the admin workstation and can command several boxes at one go. And all routine operations are scripted to avoid disasters by typos. Microsoft is pretty strong there with the centralized Exchange/IIS/whatever stuff. It's very different from the single desktop world. I'm just wondering what market niche Dell is aiming at...
The Ubuntu server edition includes LTSP-5, and installs the distribution as a LAMP server as well, so yes, it is way more than not having Gnome (or KDE) as the default startup. I've never installed the server edition so I don't know how the SU/SUDO distinction plays out there. No, wait, I did once. I installed a minimal server edition to get a computer running, then manually updated it to "Ubuntu Desktop". But, being fairly lost the whole time, I'm not sure I learned much from that experience (but the computer does work).
Thanks for that link, it's interesting.