Ubuntu for Fedora/Red Hat users

I installed Ubuntu on a Linode virtual machine. I’ve got a list of things I do to a new RH/FC box. Here are some notes from trying to execute that list of things on Ubuntu:

• dir_index wasn’t set on my ext3 filesystem. I don’t know if that’s a Linode thing or an Ubuntu thing, but I actually needed to set it and then e2fsck -fD the device to build the indexes. Since the fsck requires the filesystem not be mounted rw, I set SULOGIN=yes in /etc/default/rcS, entered the root password when prompted, and fsck’ed from there.
• I set the host name in /etc/hostname; I hope that’s the right place.
• I didn’t seem to have an MTA installed at all (and this may be Linode’s “fault”). If I have one, I don’t know what it’s called. Sendmail and exim both seem missing.
• You should enable the universe repositories in /etc/apt/sources.list to get… well, it seems like to get all the good stuff.
• vim-enhanced probably isn’t necessary; I had vim by default. samba-client is smbclient in Ubuntu (mostly, at least).
• To turn services on/off, install the sysv-rc-conf package (in the universe repository!) and do sysv-rc-conf <service> on|off. Note that the on action just turns a service on for runlevels 2-5; it does not look at the init script to discover what runlevels that particular script thinks it should be turned on for (at least, as far as I know it doesn’t; correct me if I’m wrong). If you want to edit priorities, use sysv-rc-conf -p apparently.
• Use adduser instead of useradd.
• You may want to set EDITOR=vim in ~root/.bashrc, otherwise you’ll get nano.

• Look at /etc/cron.daily/apt for automatic update stuff. I installed the unattended-upgrades package, then put the following in /etc/apt/apt.conf.d/90local:

  APT::Periodic::Update-Package-Lists 1;
  APT::Periodic::Unattended-Upgrade 1;
  

  I… hope this works.

• rpm -qa becomes dpkg -l, rpm -qf becomes dpkg -S, and rpm -\ql becomes dpkg -L.
• I installed ntp-simple to get an /etc/ntp.conf, then put in my favorite servers.
• chmod 755 /etc/cron.daily/find to update the locate database every night.
• There is no standard way to insert iptables rules at startup, from what I’m reading. So I suppose I’ll… try and make the RH script I’m used to using run in Ubuntu. (Here it is: RH iptables init script ported to Ubuntu. Or maybe “ported to LSB”?)

Other miscellaneous notes, relevant to this particular machine:

• When you install the stunnel4 package I swear you get stunnel 3 as /usr/bin/stunnel and stunnel 4 as /usr/bin/stunnel4. I wanted stunnel4.
• The named package on FC is bind9 on Ubuntu. Zones are apparently kept in /etc/bind. caching-nameserver is unnecessary; that configuration seems to be included in the bind9 package and set up as the default. Set the stuff that goes inside options {...} in named.conf.options and the rest of your modifications go in named.conf.local. I guess.
• I guess Apache’s default CGI directory is /usr/lib/cgi-bin.

When you run “Ubuntu server”… is that any different than just running Debian? It doesn’t feel like it, but maybe it’s been too long since I ran Debian. One of the biggest reasons I’d probably run Ubuntu over Debian is because Ubuntu has a newer binary kernel package (I think?). Of course, on Linode I get their own kernel, presumably with UML magic (2.4.29-linode39-1um).

So far I am not seeing anything that makes me think Ubuntu is better than RH/FC. It used to be that Debian (and thus Ubuntu) had a lot more packages than Fedora, but Fedora Extras and third party repositories have really changed that. Managing init scripts with Ubuntu is significantly more painful for me than in RH/FC (chkconfig being a big part of that, obviously) and a lack of an obvious way to insert iptables rules at boot kind of blows (though this is supposed to be fixed in the next release, or… at least documented). I suspect a large part of Ubuntu’s claimed advantage is on the GUI side of things, which I won’t be seeing on this installation.