Burning Ubuntu 5.04 LiveCD in Windows
I had to download this on a friend’s computer because mine was all tied up. Once I got the CD image and burned I was totally shocked to find that it had an autorun menu for Windows. It popped up, introduced itself to me, and asked me if I wanted to try any of the software it offered on Windows. OpenOffice.org, Firefox, and the Gimp were all offered in Windows versions for trying out. I think this is an awesome feature for a Linux distro that want’s to get people to ease their way out of Windows.

Booting from the CD

I put the bootable Ubuntu cd into my drive and reboot. I’m impressed with the colorful-but-not-too-orange appearance of the vga frameserver that the bootable CD has.
I hit enter for ‘default startup’ and only a couple seconds later it begins to ask me questions.

1. what language do you want to use?

I choose English

2. where are you in the world?

It guesses that I’m in an English-speaking country (clever), and I choose the US.

3. select a keyboard layout

Okay, how about American.

And then the configuration is complete. I just hit enter three times and it started doing it’s magic.

Ubuntu 5.04 Live CD hardware detection
I’d heard great things about Ubuntu recognizing hardware and this LiveCD seemed to fall right in line with those rumors. I initially started using Mandrake back in the day because of the excellent driver library and it looks like Ubuntu may be taking over in that arena. Ubuntu 5.04 successfully detected all of the following in under a minute and a half:

• LAN card
• ESS audiodrive sound card
• ATI All-in-wonder radeon
• 2 80GB hard drives
• Belkin wireless keyboard
• standard USB mouse

Unfortunately I don’t have any glamorous hardware to really give Ubuntu 5.04 a run for its money and it’s true that pretty much all modern distributions can run the above software list without any problems. Still, I wanted to give it credit.

The working desktop
Ubuntu uses Gnome exclusively as it’s desktop environment. This enables it to compile all of it’s packages to be perfectly suited for Gnome and not have unnecessary KDE or QT extensions. It’s counterpart, Kubuntu, is what you should check out if you’re a fan of KDE.

When it started up I knew I was sold on Ubuntu. While I’ll probably stick with Gentoo for my own professional and hobby use, Ubuntu will be with I put on my friends computers and the general-use computers in my house.

It showed me a high-resolution screen (1280×1024 @ 60Hz) and I knew that I wanted the higher refresh rate (1024×768 @ 85Hz). Not being familiar with Gnome I was amazed at how quickly I found out how to do this. There’s only a few buttons to click and one said “System”. Under that was “preferences” followed by “screen resolution”. I selected my resolution and refresh rate and hit “ok”. It updated even faster than Windows with the same hardware. I was left with a working screen, beautiful desktop wallpaper, and some well-placed buttons.

Productivity on Ubuntu 5.04 LiveCD

The real test of any distribution is whether you can get stuff done with it. The computer that I’m thinking of installing Ubuntu on permanently (also the test machine for this distro check) is one mostly used for email and watching DVDs. It’s right in the middle of our living room (along one wall, not actually in the middle). I’m not sure how much I should bother trying to configure anything because it’s a LiveCD and this is all being run off of read-only memory so I see how good it’ll do with default settings.

Mozilla Firefox
For email and browsing I always use Firefox. Ubuntu 5.04 LiveCD has a link to it as one of only three links in the Gnome equivalent of the quicklaunch bar or kicker. Perfect.

OpenOffice.org
Most people use Word a lot so I check out the OpenOffice.org Writer first. I find a link to it in the Applications menu and I click it… only to have nothing happen. That was an unexpected response so I decided to try out a different application in the OpenOffice suite. I go for the OpenOffice Drawing application and (with a fifteen second delay) it starts without a hitch. As it starts I see that Writer has started along with it.
So I know that OpenOffice works but it take a while for it to load the OpenOffice libraries from the CD (on my hardware, this will vary). Still, I’ll wait a few seconds for a startup as long as it works well when it gets there.

Playing a DVD on a LiveCD
There’s a problem with playing DVDs on LiveCDs when you only have one drive - you can’t. That’s a drawback of LiveCDs in general and in this case it stays true.

Playing an Xvid/Divx movie
I immediately realized that this would be a problem when I couldn’t find my hard drives. I know that Ubuntu was praised because it didn’t modify your computer at all (i.e. didn’t write to your hard drives) but I didn’t know what it was set up not to even mount them at boot. This is a major drawback to Ubuntu 5.04 LiveCD in my opinion. If I’m going to use a LiveCD I need access to my files - period. If I have to mount the drives myself this will be a lot less fun.

Problems with accessing files

mounting local harddisks
I try this first to mount my large NTFS partition:
# sudo mkdir /mnt/m
# sudo mount -t auto /dev/hda5 /mnt/m
And I see no error message (good news!). This means that my NTFS partition successfully mounted. Next I’ll try my fat32 partition with my music:
# sudo mkdir /mnt/x
# sudo mount -t auto /dev/hdb2 /mnt/x
That doesn’t work at all but it does when I remove the ‘vfat’ and change it to ‘auto’
# sudo mount -t auto /dev/hdb2 /mnt/x
Now since I’m still not smart enough to mount the partition where all users can access, (and I’m probably better at this than the average Ubuntu experimenter) I have to switch to root mode to navigate the files and run any program that will need access to them (for my NTFS partition only).
# sudo su
I type # totem in as root and I get the Totem movie player. It works, it can navigate my NTFS mount because it was called as root, and it can open files. Luckily this Ubuntu LiveCD doesn’t have the Xauthority problems that many distros have by default.
But it can’t play Xvid or DivX movies. This is a serious drawback.

On to MP3s:
# rhythmbox
Up it comes.
I navigate to my MP3s on my FAT32 partition and open an MP3 file. When I try to play it it tells me that there’s ‘No MP3 decoder’ found.

Hmmm, this is serious. This LiveCD has many things but it can play neither compressed DVDs nor MP3 files at it’s default configuration.

Summary
This is a great LiveCD with a couple of potentially fatal problems. It clearly has a great idea and a great delivery of that idea but it’s lacking in the ‘ability to actually get stuff done’ department.

Overview of Ubuntu 5.04 LiveCD

Installation	Totally cake, just put it in and hit ‘on’
Ability to find necessary programs	Excellent. There wasn’t any clutter and the applications that one needed were all well-marked.
Office	Beautiful. OpenOffice.org is a masterpiece of programming.
Multimedia	Tragic. There’s something wrong with this if my common hardware and my Linux know-how can’t make MP3s play.
Image Editing	The Gimp works great.
Filesystem	No auto mounting - very sad. If you want to save any of your work you’ll have to ftp or email it to your self (unless you want to manually mount partitions like I did.