I decided to try to install Ubuntu 6.06 LTS Linux again this weekend. It looked like it might have been ready.
I’m sad to report it isn’t. Not even remotely.
What worked well:
Ubuntu has a partition resize feature that allowed me to resize my Windows partition and create a ext3 and swap partition.
What didn’t work:
For some reason, this tool kept refusing to recognize the swap partition. This sent me in a loop around the paritioning tool. It eventually let me out, but I still have no idea what I did differently the last time.
Upon rebooting to Windows XP later, the NTFS partition was corrupted. It seems to have recovered. Maybe that’s expected.
Almost everything else about this experience could go into the “things that didn’t work” category. I installed the ATI drivers, and they worked and worked well. But for no reason that I’m able to discern (there certainly aren’t any error reports) I’m back at the OSS ones.
Compiz looked interesting in screenshots and movies I found online, but none of the instructions I found worked. Apparently this is a new breakage. I suspect this is what killed my ATI drivers.
I don’t know how anyone can suffer under the delusion that this is ready for Joe Consumer - I’ve never struggled for two days to keep using the right video driver under Mac OS X or Windows.
Anyway. I guess I’ll try again next year.
September 25th, 2006 at 11:44 am
I’m not sure any system is ready for the desktop. Just look at how many times you’ve reinstalled Mac and Windows this year ;-). All of the systems are frail, depending what you need them to do. Your experience with scanning on Mac is another good example.
Once you’re used to an OS, though, you can learn to live with its quirks. Like XP: run it without a virus scanner or firewall for a few days. Talk about an unstable system! But we all know better, and we live with running with 3 layers of protection. Run a Linux distro on a bleeding edge motherboard? You’ll pay in pain. Run it on a supported system, with an NVidia card, and you’ll find it easy.
Compiz, as one example, is not a joe-user application. There are similar tools for Windows (themers, widget replacements, etc.)and all can easily hose a system. I used to run Windows with a replacement desktop manager. It was a nice escape, but if it crashed I had to restart the shell by hand. It was my choice, though, to hack around with it.
ATI is poorly supported on any Linux variant. They won’t release their drivers usefully, not much anyone can do about that. Compiz too is not mainstream, it’s a hacker’s toy (it will likely be mainstream in Ubuntu 6.10).
You’re test of Ubuntu is about as good as buying a first-generation Mac after any significant change. It’s a terrible way to measure it … like the MacBook in the office, it had a hardware failure in the first month, and there’s a bunch of software that doesn’t run on it yet. But everyone knows you don’t buy a first-gen Mac.
September 25th, 2006 at 11:07 pm
You’re comparing software and hardware, though. Windows XP is terrible, granted, and Ubuntu seems at least as ready as that. But I’ve never had a software-related crash on a Mac, and configuration data doesn’t just disappear either.
Are the drivers that much better for nVidia cards?
September 25th, 2006 at 11:37 pm
With a Mac the hardware and software are one. The software is far from flawless too: most Mac users I know reinstall their OS at least once a year (what’s up with that?).
The NVidia drivers are better, and can be updated using the system updater (so that they update with the kernel) using automatix. The ATI drivers are far less stable, and require more by-hand fiddling. It seems ATI doesn’t spend as much time on the OSS releases of their drivers.
September 25th, 2006 at 11:53 pm
I think it’s going to be once every two years going forward.
September 26th, 2006 at 2:08 am
FWIW, I reinstall Linux every year or so. I usually don’t have to do this to repair a failing system, but to move to whatever distribution is most supported. The worst thing with a Linux install is an irrelavent one: my last FC1 system is now completely useless, unless I want to build everything by hand. Ubuntu, otoh, has every package imaginable available by apt.
September 26th, 2006 at 2:15 am
That was what I meant by every eighteen months instead of every year. Apple’s releasing fewer major updates now…
I think I’ll probably try to get Ubuntu working again. I can do without the eye candy, but the OSS drivers for ATI are *absolutely horrible.*
September 26th, 2006 at 2:29 am
I agree about the ATI drivers: my laptop has a reasonable ATI chipset. I’ve been meaning to get the binary drivers working, but it doesn’t seem worth the time. The OSS ones suck as ATI does not release hardware specs for anything non-trivial, leaving out most of the useful features. The NVidia driver, though, is better than the Windows one in my experience (including a far more useful GUI configuration tool than the windows one).