21. Submitted by Anonymous, Sunday 30th October 2005

Good read, my experience with ubuntu is the same. no complaints

22. Submitted by Anonymous, Monday 31st October 2005

answer for comment 11:

This is a common problem in Linux accessing NTFS or FAT volumes. The POSIX filesystem access controls don't map well to NTFS access controls (and FAT has no controls at all), so the filesystem driver applies a default value. This value usually corresponds to a umask of 077 (root has full access, and nobody else has any access). To change this you need to modify the fstab entry where the NTFS partition is mounted, you need to add something like the following to the fourth column (the options column):

ro,umask=000,dmask=000,fmask=111,utf8

This will allow you read-only access (writing to NTFS volumes from linux is still somewhat unstable) and prevent the "all-files-are-executable" issue that commonly confuses users of NTFS/FAT filesystems on Linux.

P.S.

You can add "gid=1000,uid=1000" to make the owner of the NTFS files the initial user. Substitute the uid/gid of any other user to make them the owner if you prefer.

23. Submitted by Anonymous, Tuesday 1st November 2005

After years of using Red Hat, Suse, Fedora, Knoppix, yada yada, I installed Kubuntu and found that it was truely the easiest to install on workstations or laptops. I was really pleased that it found my wireless card and was able to configure itself to use my wireless lan without my intervention (read:hairpulling). I am, however, baffled by how one accesses the NTFS partion on a dual boot box when the error messages continuously state that the "first user" does not have permission - even after using sudo at the command line.....

24. Submitted by MidnightOwner, Tuesday 29th November 2005

I have used Ubuntu 5.04 and wonder if the same problems I experienced still exist in 5.10:

I had to manually configure /etc/fstab to get Ubuntu to recognize my USB flashdrive. No other Linux distro has had that problem.

I NEVER could get the printing to work, either networked (windows 2000 network) or locally. The printing, I belive "broke" somewhere during an upgrade or installation of other apps. Not sure. But it seems to have been a common problem associated with this distro.

I have to say that this was the ONLY Linux distro where I was able to access windows shares (and documents within those shares) off of a Windows server or other client. Sigh. I could do that but couldn't get it to print for anything.

I do wish reviews of Linux on the desktop would include its interoperability with Windows networks in terms of printing / file sharing. If a distro would make this EASY and would make it actually WORK, Linux would make great strides in getting "in house".

25. Submitted by Mike, free-bees.co.uk, Tuesday 29th November 2005

In response to #24:

To repeat what I've said in reply to your other comment (because I'd otherwise just be rewriting what I've already written!):

For networking, I have tried a few distributions. Fedora Core 4, Ubuntu 5.10 and Debian 3.1 all, through the command line, could connect to Windows machines. If memory serves, Nautilus didn't like browsing the network using Samba (I think that was in Gnome 2.8), but it worked fine when I used Gnome 2.10 or higher i.e. Debian Etch, Ubuntu 5.10 and Fedora Core 4. In Debian, I used Linneighborhood anyway, which picks up the Windows machines easily as well.

As for KDE - the only distribution I've tried recently is Linspire, and Konqueror found the network without a problem as well.

In short: Debian (Etch), Ubuntu 5.10, Fedora Core 4, Linspire... networking with Windows always worked fine, either through Nautilus or Konqueror. The only problem I had was with networked printers. It seems you have to have the driver for that printer on the Linux machine, which obviously creates a whole load of problems. If you have the right driver, then you're fine... otherwise, you're pretty stuck!

As for printing locally, my somewhat old Canon BJC-210, connected locally, worked without a problem using the utility in the Gnome menu.