Update: A Month With Ubuntu To Commence
by Ryan Smith on February 15, 2008 12:00 AM EST- Posted in
- Ryan's Ramblings
As I discussed in my last blog post, some time in the near future we will be doing a month-long review on Ubuntu to see if it's ready & capable as serving as my main desktop OS. After soliciting your feedback on the matter (and we really are amazed at the feedback; 131 comments) we have decided to go ahead and immediately start the process with Ubuntu 7.10, rather than waiting a few months for the 8.04 release. We appreciate the feedback and a lot of good arguments were made on both sides, but we've decided we want to bring this review to you sooner than later. We'll take a look at 8.04 separately when it ships. Expect at least a couple of blog posts related to the review throughout the next month.
For those of you seeking more Linux-focused articles, we'll also be fulfilling your wishes in the near future. Along with our month-long look at Ubuntu, we'll be bringing out some other articles. We'll have more to talk about this once the first of these articles are ready.
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MooseMuffin - Tuesday, February 19, 2008 - link
Heh, this isn't a typical video card upgrade experience. The problem is the nVidia driver in the ubuntu repository doesn't support the 8800gt yet. If you were going from a 7600 to an 8800gts, you wouldn't have to change anything, just swap in the card.For those of us who do have a 8800gt and want to use it with ubuntu, you can get newer drivers from nvidia and install those and all works fine. I can't imagine what the hold up is with ubuntu updating the drivers in the repository however. I can understand the need to test things but people need to be able to use their hardware.
maveric7911 - Friday, February 15, 2008 - link
Doing a review of any other of the 1000's of distros....hasemike - Friday, February 15, 2008 - link
I look forward to read on your experience with ubuntu 7.10, my own experience has been less than great. Here some comments on that :I had installed 7.10 both on my laptop and desktop. With 7.10 the sleepmode on my laptop did not work and the x3100 graphics is still blacklisted by Gnome. This means no graphics effects on the desktop, and if you do enable it video does not work anymore..
On my desktop the 8800gt support is scetchy at best and i could not get the cpu fan to spin down (i use speedfan for that under windows as the bios does not spin it down enough)
Good points : painless install next to vista, everything FREE, good GUI interface. Has lots of promise but due to the quite severe drivers problems with the 8800gt and the X3100 i decided to uninstall 7.1 and wait for what 8.04 will bring. All in all it's getting there but it's not nearly as smooth sailing as Vista by a long shot.
Ubuntu is very promising and has a great community, but it's not smooth enough for mainstream yet.
sc3252 - Friday, February 15, 2008 - link
Its a GPU fan for starters. I have an 8800gt and it was very easy to lower the fan speed for the gpu, nvclock anyone?Connoisseur - Friday, February 15, 2008 - link
Damnit seriously? So I don't get the full effects in the gnome interface if I install it on my laptop? Hmm. Anybody figured out a fix yet?kac77 - Monday, February 18, 2008 - link
The problem with Linux now is that (especially with Ubuntu) there have been a TON of advances to make your life easier with installing devices.....video cards included.I have found myself with Linux usually taking the hard way of doing things without realizing that within the software manager there is usually a quick and easy solution. No need to edit conf files. I've edited conf files so many times when I didn't need to I've really lost count. I would say good rule of thumb with Ubuntu is that ALWAYS look for the easier solution first. There is always something that will do what you want without editing a conf file.
VIDEO DRIVERS
For video drivers, by and large while the default installed driver manager is pretty good.... Envy for the novice user is better. It will install ALL nvidia drivers perfectly aside from TNT's and maybe the first series of nvidia cards. Baseline support is offered out of the box but if you want 3D acceleration you'll need it. ATI driver installation is pretty good.... not as trouble free as Nvidia but pretty good nonetheless.
If you are changing your video card simply using Envy uninstall the driver.... reboot... update Envy and reinstall/install a new driver. It's pretty painless. Considering Nvidia isnt' making thier drivers open at any time soon it can't get much easier unless Nvidia makes it easier. This isn't the fault of Linux but Nvidia.
I run Linux for just about everything and have found that I can do most things from DVR's, Emulators, to changing the way the OS looks and behaves completely (mine looks like Mac OS X on steroids) to running servers and SQL. All of this without spending more money and it works on the same box without any degradation of performance.
DISTRIBUTIONS
GNOME
Distributions are important. If you like Gnome which I do personally use Ubuntu as it's most definately the most hassle free version of the Gnome desktop out there. I tried Fedora but I started seeing errors quite early of my time of use so I I chucked it.
KDE
And I can't stress this enough... Ubuntu Dev team spends most of their time with the Gnome Desktop. If you like KDE please don't use Kubuntu. You'll save yourself from seeing a lot of the inherent bugs in KDE. I would recommend OpenSuse or Mandriva. Either of these runs KDE much better.
Last Thoughts
Eventually I will move to KDE but until they fix their menu problems I just can't use it until it's reliable for me. An example would be getting to I guess what would be their Control Panel is accessible like 4 different ways. Most things are like that it's enough to drive you insane. Anyway I hope this helps those users trying Ubuntu for the first time. Remember there's always a easier method available
grgraphics - Friday, February 15, 2008 - link
I thought I would put a post up because I have seen some people incorrectly posting that the 8800GT does not work. When the 8800 GT first came out there were some bugs in the drivers that NVIDIA made for linux.Nvidia fixed the bug you are referring to here http://www.nvidia.com/object/linux_display_ia32_16...">http://www.nvidia.com/object/linux_display_ia32_16...
I have successfully installed Ubuntu 7.10 on 10 different machines without a problem. The desktop effects even work on a machine with a pentium 900, 256MB and a GeForce 2. I wonder how Vista would work on that machine.
Just as I have seen bugs on the Windows drivers too. I recently had repair a friends Windows machine that broke after a service pack update. Unfortunately Microsoft doesn't have the concept of "Live CDs" so we had to waste hours reinstalling Windows.
I would agree with you that sleepmode works poorly on many laptops. If you want good sleepmode support I would recommend getting a Dell.
Yes Linux has it flaws but so does Vista and Leopard.
crimson117 - Friday, February 15, 2008 - link
I'm not really interested in paying Cedega for the privilege, but if World of Warcraft ran on Linux natively, I'd switch in a heartbeat.Ohn0es - Friday, February 15, 2008 - link
I only play WoW under linux. I use 64 bit Ubuntu 7.10 as my primary os and play WoW with the free wine, not cedega. It works quite well.mofo3k - Friday, February 15, 2008 - link
+1 , I have had great success with WoW on Kubuntu using WINE. I think it actually works better with wine than cedega.