Ubuntu 6.10 (Edgy) Patch x86_64

I recently had to reinstall the operating system, Linux of course. I used to have CentOS 4 on the computer, but although it is stable, it did not have automount, new versions of Firefox, Thunderbird and OpenOffice (if you did not use manual installation, which creates problems with shortcuts and updates). I had experience with Fedora. I have found that Fedora Core has a lot of bugs. I have old SuSE on a server and it is stable, but the community support is a bit smaller than Red Hat based distributions, and things differ from Red Hat. I tried a slightly new version of SuSE on my laptop, and maybe it was nice, but somehow I haven’t used it much. Slackware is good, but I don’t want to configure the monitor and graphics card manually and I want some kind of standard package manager and update process.

I wanted a Linux distribution that was stable, on which I could easily install Java, Netbeans, and Eclipse. I needed MySQL and I wanted new versions of Firefox, Thunderbird, and OpenOffice. Analysis of the distribution on distrowatch.com showed that Ubuntu is quite popular and has new versions of those packages. I decided to give it a try. Since I have a 64bit Sempron processor in my computer, I have decided to install Ubunty Edgy 64bit!

I must admit that Ubuntu Edgy is stable and works very well. Using Synaptic and Automatix I was able to install the necessary audio and video codecs, and the newer ones Xine and Amarok. There are new versions of Firefox, Thunderbird and OpenOffice.

And everything is almost fine. Version for 64-bit processors, x86_64 includes buggy Java. It is not easy to install a new version of 32 bit Java that really works and configure Eclipse and Netbeans to use this Java instead of the package. I uninstalled one included and somehow now I can run Eclipse and Netbeans and that’s what I need. They run a bit slower than before on CentOS. If you don’t need Java, the x86_64 version will suit your needs.

The only thing, except the one related to Java, that I wanted to install and have not yet succeeded is Adobe Acrobat Reader. I have set up the repository that should contain the deb package for Acrobat, but apt-get still can’t find them. It seems that you should find the Acrobat package manually and install it.

Conclusion: I have come to realize that Ubuntu is not without reason the first Linux distribution on distrowatch.com. It is an (almost) ideal distribution today for desktop computers. If you want Java, don’t install the 64-bit version :).