Bones' Blog of Stuff About Things

I’ve been using Fedora Core Linux as a server OS for a fair while now, and I do occasionally use the desktop on that machine via VNC for initiating large downloads that I don’t want to tie up my laptop with. I haven’t used Linux as an everyday OS and, although I’ve been curious about it, I have been reluctant to wipe my laptop to try it out. Previous experiments with live CDs on the laptop have drawn a blank on the wireless front and that’s been the end of that as I hadn’t the time or patience to spend hours or days trying to get the machine back to a usable state.

My curiousity about using something other than XP has been heightened in the past half year or so by the amount of buzz around OS X, mostly in conjunction with the new Macbooks, and I was especially intrigued by the RoR Screencasts showing it in action. In the past few weeks the theory of acceptable alternatives has been bolstered by articles about decisions to hop off the OS X bandwagon and jump on Ubuntu‘s, which has been gathering momentum for a while. OS X isn’t something I can just try, and my Acer Aspire 1682WLMI is not ready to be retired (or rather, I’m not willing to cough up the cash for a Macbook), which left Ubuntu as the likely candidate for a trial. So, with some spare time on my hands this week, I saw an opportunity to clean up my laptop hard-disk and give Ubuntu a try, and so I did, and it works. Look:

But it wasn’t without some effort. After offloading all the media and various archivable bits and pieces onto network storage, I had enough space on the 60GB drive to dual-boot. I repartitioned the drive, giving 6GB to partition for shared data and 48GB to the Windows boot partition (a few gigs being lost to the Acer recovery partition and to disk manufacturer’s odd relationship with binary numbers). I chose to let the Ubuntu installer handle the creation of the Linux partitions and resizing of the Windows OS partition, which it did without a hitch. The end result being 32GB for Windows, 16GB for Ubuntu and 6GB for shared data. Seeing as the Windows partition is FAT32, it’s also read/write to Ubuntu, so the shared data area is just an organisational choice.

The install process beyond the partitioning effort was entirely painless and Ubuntu detected my wireless just fine. Unfortunately, the light part of the wireless active light/button on the front of the Acer doesn’t work under Ubuntu and so I spent a fair while trying to fix a non-existent problem with not being able to see any access points that was solved by simply pressing the button and turning the card on. All was not well, however, as I use WPA encryption on my router,and this isn’t supported by default, so I had to resort to an ethernet cable in order to search out some help.

Once I had sorted the connectivity, I let Ubuntu download a hundred or so updates — which it did with far less fuss and rebooting than a vanilla XP install — and there it was, a fully functional Ubuntu laptop. Well… not quite. For a start, it seemed that I couldn’t play any media. Now this is a basic function of computers these days and it’s the reason a lot of people have them at all. I understand the licensing issues, but if a distro is meant to be “easy to use” and a prospective Windows replacement then a clear path needs to be provided to getting this functionality up and running. There is an such a path, but you have to go looking for it yourself (I’ve put some links further down).

Possibly a worse crime is that Ubuntu doesn’t enable all its package repositories by default, and it doesn’t up-front tell you that it hasn’t, why it hasn’t or even that there are more available. This seems very odd when the Add/Remove and Synaptic install managers are clearly intended to provide easy access to the package management functions. If someone is new to Linux then they are going to have no clue why significant numbers of packages that they will read about aren’t even listed.

Anyway, it’s safe to say that I had to spend more time fiddling with the config and hunting for solutions than I expected, and way more than the threshold level that would make Ubuntu recommendable to Joe Average. No, Windows doesn’t “just work” either, but it does better than Ubuntu did by a long way and most people are at least somewhat familiar with Windows. I know my father doesn’t have many Linux users in his circle of friends, which would leave me as sole support-desk. No thanks. To save anyone else who is intending to give Ubuntu a whirl some time, here are a few useful links:

EasyUbuntu – Installs a number of media codecs, drivers, web plugins etc. that you will end up installing the hard way otherwise.

StartingTweaks – You’ll want to do at least a few of these, particularly the repository tips. I haven’t read the book, by the way, but if the tips are anything to go by, it could be worth a look.

Break It Down Blog XP-Ubuntu Review – an extensive post listing experiences in trying to get Ubuntu to do what XP did, including replacement software and the odd problem. Be sure to read to the end, because he learned some stuff after he wrote it.

So, do I like it? Yes, so far, but it’s hard to tell if that’s not just a honeymoon thing or a result of having a fresh slate as compared to my relatively untidy XP install. It’s hard to pick on anything that Ubuntu does that Windows doesn’t, or can’t with a bit of tweaking and vice versa. I haven’t yet replaced iTunes, but Amarok can do it from what I read and I’m sure I’ll need to keep the XP install for the few games I play on the laptop, although I haven’t looked into WINE compatibility. An unexpected win has been the ability to have a proper MythTV frontend on the laptop to connect through to my existing MythTV server. I had been using the DSmyth filters to identify the files for playback and the MythWeb interface for scheduling, but being able to browse the recordings by series rather than search through a huge directory mousing over likely files to see the details is almost worth the effort of moving OS in itself.

So far, I haven’t felt the need to switch back to XP apart from to check some settings. Ubuntu is attractive, performs well, is stable and so far has software that does everything I need as well as or better than the XP versions. However, it still suffers from Linux niggles even after several days of bedding down that just make it “not quite there” as far as mainstream usage goes. For example, I have number of samba network shares. On Windows, these work fine and took very little effort to setup. On Ubuntu I had to hack about with the fstab config to get it to mount the shares on boot, then had smbfs falling over under load, then switched to cifs, where I find that the machine gets stuck for nearly a minute on shutdown trying to unmount the shares because it doesn’t have the right permissions. Tiresome for me as a relative expert, a complete non-starter for a non-enthusiast.

Getting there though – “Good effort: B-“.