Feckoff.net

Long ass post, brace yourself.

Its been a while since I’ve used Linux, but it deserved another look since I’ve been enjoying Windows Vista so much in recent weeks. This also comes in handy in replacing the beta release of Vista that’s on my laptop, as it will expire sometime soon.

So off I went and downloaded the Ubuntu 6.10 x86 ISO from the uber-fast HEANet mirror, which easily maxed out my connection. I burned it using a nice piece of freeware on Vista called ImgBurn, from the same smart guy that brought us DVDDecryptor. I chose Ubuntu 6.10 as it is widely recognised as the best desktop Linux distribution.

Anyway, installation was pretty simple and quick, as I didn’t have to worry about partitioning or dual booting or anything since I was going to give Ubuntu my laptop’s entire hard disk to play with. Once installed I was able to reboot straight into the operating system. Then I encountered my first problem: Connecting to my WPA-secured wireless network.

Ubuntu’s GUI tools do not by default support configuring your wireless card to use WPA at all. I had to go googling on my other computer (running Vista) to find some arcane instructions on how to enable this by editing config files and farting about in the terminal. If I ever want to connect to a different WPA-protected network I will have to go through this again. Not pleasant.

Second problem: Screen resolution. Ubuntu does not support my laptop’s 1280×800 widescreen resolution out of the box. The highest available resolution available via the Gnome GUI is 1024×768. Time for some more painful xorg.conf editing and terminal torture.

The solution to the above problem involved changing from the default “nv” driver to nVidia’s proprietary driver that includes proper 3D acceleration. This was easy to install using Ubuntu’s package manager but required further xorg.conf editing to actually enable it and turn on 3D acceleration.

Next problem: Synaptics touchpad. I’ve experienced this one previously. The touchpad works from the off, but it behaves in an awkward fashion. You can’t change its sensitivity or scrolling behaviour. Cue some more xorg.conf editing and package installation!

After all of that my system was pretty much up and running in a state I could live with, so I decided to try out the current eye candy favourite touted by Linux fans, Beryl. Installation of this involved further xorg.conf hacking and adding of a repository to Synaptic.

Once Beryl was up and running it was very impressive indeed, particularly the fancy rotating cube gizmo you can use to select which desktop you want to use. It was great while it lasted.

Next time I booted the machine and logged in to gnome, the system just sat there unresponsive. This happened several times. In the end, I had to log into gnome in failsafe mode and disable beryl from running at startup. I guess it needs to mature some more. It does look very promising though.

In conclusion, Linux still isn’t ready for the desktop. End-users should not ever have to manually edit a configuration file, especially when the same thing is accomplished on other operating systems with the ol’ next-next-next-finish shuffle.

Sure, if a system can come completely configured and tailored to its hardware out of the box, it’ll be fairly usable for most users, but the above problems are hard to ignore. Of course, Linux (in most guises) is free, and Windows Vista will run you typically a couple of hundred euros, but I am a jammy git who got a free copy of Vista from Microsoft and am enjoying it lots.

I will keep Ubuntu on my laptop for the time being, and see if a few weeks of use now that it is all set up will change my opinion.