“Ubuntu” is an ancient African word, meaning “humanity to others”. Obviously it also means “root privileges for everybody”:

Ubuntu uses sudo to allow a normal user administrative privileges. Thus the traditional UNIX ‘root’ account is disabled.

Yesterday I decided it was time for a new linux system on my desktop computer, and someone proposed to try ubuntu which should be easy to install and maintain (based on debian). Fine. I booted from the install CD and only had to answer some simple questions about my location, language, and time zone and whether I would like to erase my harddisk (the default) or rather edit the partition table manually. I managed to persuade the installer to use the existing partitions. The installation process continued without any further questioning and 20 minutes later it finished by installing GRUB (hey, I’m a lilo user!) and rebooting.

At least it tried. Then it said “Kernel Panic” and that was it. Fortunately a Knoppix bootable CD was available that allowed me to edit and apply my existing lilo configuration file and thus I could boot the new Ubuntu system. (that’s not what I’d call user-friendly installation, by the way). I mounted my old /home directory. Bad luck that the .xsession there contained instructions to start WindowMaker, which was not installed on Ubuntu yet. Since user-id and group-id on that directory (from the old system) didn’t match those of the new system, I couldn’t make changes to the .xsession file. And I couldn’t change the uid and gid of my user since I was not allowed to log in as root! (Only then did I notice that the installer hadn’t asked me for a root password). I didn’t know the thing about sudo yet, I had to boot from knoppix again and look at the ubuntu website. But it’s a very cool feature that when the X server can’t start because it’s miscofigured you get a nice little graphical message that says “Your session didn’t last longer than 10 seconds, I guess that’s because there’s a problem.”

I guess there’s a problem all right - but it will not be MY problem since I’ll kill Ubuntu as soon as possible.

But to be fair: If I had erased the harddisk, things would have been quite different.