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.

Ubuntu sucks

Just had to vent it out. I tried to use Ubuntu on my T40 laptop after I accidentally irrecoverably corrupted my data partition because of Partition Magic merge partition operation. The blog title will most likely stir up some flames, very little though since I am not that popular.

Ubuntu Desktop was my first foray into Linux after a long period of time, just going on the hope that Linux would've improved on the desktop. I've been using FreeBSD as a server for a long period, but never really took the plunge to switching away from Windows as a Desktop. I didn't bother with FreeBSD because of VMWare's and other virtual machine implementation's lack of support for it as a host OS.

The out of the box experience was quite good (excellent even), and went relatively flawlessly, provided I hook up the laptop to the wired LAN, as wireless didn't seem to work out of the box for me. I liked the time zone selection where it zooms in on a map, makes it easier to select Toronto.

After everything was installed, came the problems that I had hoped would've cleared itself up by now.  Especially since it was time to install some of the apps I would like to use such as VMWare which the RPM I downloaded didn't install by just double-clicking on it, instead I had to google some long instructions on how to set the thing up.

As I was surfing, I found that the "scroll" feature of my TrackPoint was not working. Fortunately I googled some instructions on how to do this. So my scrolling is a bit happier now that I don't have to go all the way to the right.

After Windows was installed on my VMWare, I switched to a slightly higher resolution... 800x600. And something appeared that I didn't expect... "scrollbars" and this was with autosize. It seems that the default theme of Ubuntu takes up so much screen space with the dual panel bars and all. So for now I just lived with it.

The next thing I decided to lookup was some FAQ for an old game I was currently playing. The bloody thing didn't layout properly. It finally dawned on me that this wide font called "Sans" which is used everywhere in Ubuntu is quite wide. Please note, this is not just Ubuntu that I have seen this on, I have also seen it in other Linuxes and I hated that font on every system I have been on. Note to the UI guys, not everyone has a wide screen (even if I have one at home, my laptop is just 1024x768). The fonts themselves are quite fuzzy, unlike the default fonts from Windows up to XP that switch to bitmap so they look quite sharp. Even when the ClearType is turned on, the fonts do not take up that much more space as this Sans font. However, the Chinese fonts were one of the best I have seen. It looks like it was done using a Mo-pit (Chinese handwriting brush).

Network setup with the applet that Ubuntu provides by default is such a Fugly tool. I switched it with the NetworkManager applet which does a better job. Next thing I hit was a the speed test site I use, out of a lark. The site uses Java. So I tried to click on it and as expected it required a manual install. So I went to www.java.com to download the RPM and as expected, the thing didn't work.  Oh well, google found me something else though that helped me install it.

Skimming through more of it, I found out about EasyUbuntu which made life a whole lot easier I guess for the other plugins. I think that should've been a part of the original install as an option (because of licensing issues) rather than me trying to find out about it myself. And after setting up the components with EasyUbuntu, Firefox looked a lot saner now, when it came to fonts and such. I also wish SimpleKDE was used too. Oh well, I guess simplicity is not one of Linux's strong points anyway

I also noted some artifacts appearing in the buttons I had when I told Ubuntu to update the driver database -- which I expected to download new driver data rather than expect me to say what I found. Apparently, I am not the only one with the artifact problem. But by doing the fix, watching videos would be rendered choppy, so I reverted back. I tried using the fglrx driver, no luck, can't find my video device. I then tried to connect to my work using the AT&T network client. This took a bit to get installed because it was missing a library and the Add/Remove tool that comes with Ubuntu didn't show a list of libraries that I can download. Fortunately, google helped out with this page. So I was able to get the program installed.

Unfortunately its such an old version compared to Windows I can't use it. This was basically the clincher. I would've expected things to improve in terms of package management, at least I was hoping for something as good as the xBSD ports collection. But Linux seems to be polluted with .deb, .rpm and .tar.gz distributions with no standardized way of installing things (or at least with double-click simplicity and security risks like Windows).

The BSDs do have the same sort of problem as well, especially with the PBI that PCBSD made up, I am not sure about the differences with the PKGs and Ports, but ports work very well for me. So I decided maybe I'll just shrink this thing down and work with it later and use Windows instead. At least everything I need works. So I tried to installed qtparted and gparted. No luck, the programs just refuse to install. I just remembered that I it might just be available in the LiveCD and it was, so I am running the resize to see how it will go. Unfortunately, no luck. The partition does not want to resize itself. I guess it will have to be wiped out.

At least I kept track of what I have been doing sort of on this blog entry in case I want to run through the thing again, probably when Ubuntu 7 comes out and RPM + DEB merge into a common format that is acceptable to all linux distibutions. (update: I have tried going through this ordeal on my main PC just now).