The Ordeal with Ubuntu

Well today I decided to try and take the plunge into installing Ubuntu on my desktop PC. I haven't attempted ubuntu since I tried it on the laptop. I was trying to go for a dualboot installation. I went and downloaded the 6.10 Edgy Eft ISO image for Ubuntu, burned it on a disk and booted it up. Saw the Ubuntu live CD grub and selected the normal installation. Then saw the logo with the bar at the bottom and then...

/bin/sh: can't access tty; job control turned off
(initramfs)

I am still searching Google, but I think all I need to do is download 6.06 LTS rather than 6.10. And I have. I am typing this on my fresh Ubuntu 6.06 installation. I have verified that my Windows XP still boots up. So I guess I didn't need that backup after all. Not that I did (since I don't really mind losing the main partition as long as my data on the other drives are set). The main flaw I see so far is my 1680x1050 monitor is running at 1280x1024 with no option to set it. Maybe it will be fixed with the first set of updates. On my fresh install I have 60 updates that I need to install. Speaking of packages, I wonder why both linux-image-2.6.15-26-386 and linux-image-2.6.15-27-386 are being downloaded rather than just the 27 one. Oh well one of the mysteries.

So why the heck am I using Ubuntu rather than FreeBSD? VMWare (eventually) plus I like the ease of setting up a dual boot configuration. Which really sucks since if it wasn't for VMWare, FreeBSD would've been the only choice I would need to deal with.

The next thing on queue would be the EasyUbuntu stuff. That wasn't as easy as it was when I did it on the ThinkPad. I keep on getting this error: Could not apply changes! Fix broken packages first. (I would've put in a scree shot, but Blogger didn't seem to accept image uploads for the moment). Anyway when I did get the NVidia working, it still didn't support my screen resolution. I had to manually add the resolution in the xorg.conf file. Kind of annoying. Oh well, I wasn't expecting simplicity when I did try to switch to Ubuntu (or any *nix for that matter). Now I tried www.java.com to test my java plugin in Firefox. Well it worked, but EasyUbuntu installed the 1.5.0_06 which is not the latest version. I guess that's fine for the most part. Too bad its not part of Software Updates. Next thing I tried was NeoPets to test Flash. EasyUbuntu, didn't install it correctly, to the point that it wasn't there. The nice part is Adobe made an installer for it that works within Firefox without any restart... nice. I then noticed that I can't access my NTFS drives. Not even read-only. Googling brought me to yet another blog. Which then brought me to a forum entry on installating NTFS-3G. Didn't really work out too well. So I did what any Unix geek would do and updated /etc/fstab myself. Next thing I tried out were viewing some pictures, seems to work well, though I miss Irfran view. I would need to try out Picassa as well, but that's for later. Now for videos its another story. The video player didn't have the codecs installed properly... well chalk that up to EasyUbuntu being not so easy anymore. So I tried to load that up and it install the codecs when I chose that alone. I now see thumbnail images on Nautilus. Double clicking on the video to watch it was another story. It popup the movie player application and immediate closes. This happens on any format I have tried AVI, MPG and MKV. I also tried using VLC same results. Oh well... I'll have to check it again later.

Actually I had similar issues with the Mac and Quicktime, I needed to use VLC to play most of the videos since there is no Codec Pack for Mac similar to K-Lite Mega Codec Pack for Windows.

GAIM was the next thing to set up. It was relatively painless so that's a good thing. The only problem was I couldn't my webcam working. Most likely because webcam support was removed from GAIM. So I may have to find another instant messaging client then if I want to see my family. Remote desktop is another common function I use, primarily to connect to my work laptop from my desktop machine. RDesktop comes with Ubuntu which is a good thing, since I don't have to look around for it. Also, it was nice that it took up the whole screen rather than partial (the Windows version puts black bands on the side). The only problem was when I switched full screen, the normal behaviour of moving to the top of the screen to show the minimize button was not there. I had to google around, but I found that it was Ctrl-Alt-Enter (ya way obvious... not!) which they should have indicated somewhere. After all this, I think I won't recommend anyone to use Ubuntu for their main desktop machine unless they know what they are doing or have a geek in the family to help them initially set things up. Or get a Mac (if they are okay with losing the double click on the title bar to maximize function). So my final verdict on this? Ubuntu does not give me a good out of the box experience as of yet. However, I think I can spare the 10G on my drive to keep this OS installed, but I will switch Grub to autoboot back to Windows and ignore this OS unless I feel a bit masochistic, or as a reminder that though Windows can suck badly, the alternatives are not much better... yet.