A Small Break from Ubuntu: Joost

Yes, I have had a lot of Ubuntu posts since it is part of my summer job to document my foray into Ubuntu. There will continue to be many more. However, I wanted to do a quick write up on something I found interesting, a service called Joost. I discovered it a while back browsing Techcrunch, and received an invite from the Techcrunch forums. It is an interesting concept; you can watch television shows from many networks that have signed up, and displays in a great picture quality. I have been using this service to watch one of my favorite shows, Fifth Gear which is actually British. I can watch any Fifth Gear episode starting from Season 6 till Season 9. Joost was created by the founders of Skype (and Kazaa) and is supported by sponsors who place two or three commercials per episode. The service still is in the beta phase and it’s obvious. Occasionally I will select an episode, it will be loading and then say the program is not available. A little while later, I can watch it. Nevertheless, I still think Joost is a great service and a great idea to capitalize on America’s love for television. As computers are moving into the living room, (maybe computer tables too), services such as these will become more popular.

The Final Selection: Ubuntu

After testing the various flavours of Ubuntu, we feel that Ubuntu is the best for our applications. The final competitor it faced was Kubuntu. One of the reasons we recommend Ubuntu is because of the interface. The interface is simpler in Ubuntu versus the clutter of Kubuntu. However, it is still fairly intuitive. In addition, there is a better method of managing the privileges of users. For instance, in Kubuntu, to add a user, you can go to the Users and Groups section. It is visible but grayed out, and you need to click a button saying administrator mode, enter the password, and then you can make changes. In Ubuntu, a person with restricted privileges would not even see the option of User Accounts in the menu. Although not a major issue, we appreciated the fact that Ubuntu came with almost everything we needed. Only a few more repositories and packages needed to be added. Therefore, with great confidence, we can recommend Ubuntu as the Linux distribution to consider in a school environment such as ours.

In addition to choosing the Ubuntu version both Brian and I liked best, I have been brushing up and learning more shell commands to fully understand Linux.

Desktop Managers

Since it is possible to add the desktop manager from Ubuntu to Xubuntu or Kubuntu or vice versa, I decided to see what would happen if I did. I decided to add the Ubuntu desktop to Xubuntu via Synaptics. Once it completed, I restarted and selected Gnome instead of Xfce for the window manager. Upon comparing the processes and everything to a standard Ubuntu install, we discovered it was the same. So we discovered that they all have the base components and we can add the different desktop managers as we like.

Ubuntus Day 3

We have all the flavours of Ubuntu on the computers: Ubuntu, Kubuntu, Edubuntu, and Xubuntu. As Edubuntu is Ubuntu with some useless packages for third graders, we cannot make a recommendation for it. As much as we like Ubuntu, Edubuntu is geared towards children; we are better off just using Ubuntu. Kubuntu is the most like Windows with the taskbar at the bottom and a “start” button. However, I feel everything about the operating system is cluttered. It feels there is too much in the taskbar even after removing almost everything, especially when you have too many programs minimized. The computer tends to freeze as well, even with only Konqueror open. Nevertheless, we will keep testing it to see if we can alleviate the clutter and make it more user-friendly. Xubuntu is very minimal and is supposed to be for older machines. We don’t have that problem. Too much is being sacrificed for performance as well; the desktop has nothing and nothing can be added. The only way to do anything such as make a new OpenOffice document is either go to the only menu on the taskbar or right click and get a whole bunch of menus. Ubuntu and Kubuntu are the only ones practical for our uses so we will continue to test them and narrow it down to one or the other.