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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crimson117 - Friday, February 15, 2008 - link
Also, I raid, so I need Ventrilo. Does that run under Wine, too?crimson117 - Friday, February 15, 2008 - link
Answer: sort of:http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=41737">http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=41737
crimson117 - Friday, February 15, 2008 - link
What, if anything, doesn't work?Do all your UI Mods work?
What video card do you use?
Bruneauinfo - Friday, February 15, 2008 - link
i'm excited that Anandtech is doing this kind of review. i really respect the opinions of the writers on this site a lot more than on a lot of other tech sites i visit. what Linux needs for its success is thoroughly honest reviews on what its strengths and weaknesses are. there are plenty of Linux reviews out there that avoid talking about the deficiencies in a distro. i hope this review can capture the mentality of a person who would chose to go with open source and Linux versus proprietary and what their hopes are for the future of the software industry.Connoisseur - Friday, February 15, 2008 - link
I don't know if this is in the scope of the article but i've been interested in switching to linux for either my desktop or laptop (or both). Will you be covering step-by-step installation including networking? Additionally, i'd like to see the article cover both laptop and desktop installation/usage. If you could throw in some other items like software upgrades, app installation etc. that would be dynamite.I know there are plenty of articles out there for this stuff, but I prefer the well written AT articles (for the pictures :) ).
Xenoterranos - Friday, February 15, 2008 - link
Are you going to do this on a portable or a desktop.I'd kind of hope for portable, since that's harder and waaay more fun :)
Waziir - Friday, February 15, 2008 - link
OK - at work I decided I'd start using Linux. Ubuntu was the first choice for a desktop workstation for software development. We use RHEL on our servers, and I've been a dabbler in Linux and BSD usage for about 10+ years now.I originally Installed Ubuntu 7 - and then went through the upgrades to Ubuntu 7.10 Gutsy Gibbon. It was all pretty painless. No more painful than Service Packs are on Windows. A little bit of a longer download though (I left it running overnight at the office).
Took me a little bit to get Java all configured up correctly (I prefer to use the Sun standard JVM over the plethora of VMs out there). Not a huge deal for the average user - but a little time consuming compared to Windows in terms of getting up and running with a complete Java dev. environment (IDE, Web Server, etc).
And now we come to the problems.
Since I still had an older Windows workstation - and it had the larger monitor, I figured lets switch monitors since the Linux workstation was moving into it's roll as my primary dev machine. Well that threw it off quite a bit. Big surprise. It couldn't quite identify my monitor, so I ended up selecting Generic 1280x1024. And it works. But non of the cool special UI effects worked anymore. The nVidia graphics card (an AGP 4x 6600) is more than sufficient for the effects... and they were working before. Poke poke poke. Ahhh - something in the X config is messed up. A little command line mojo cleared things up (the Compiz website has some useful instructions). But opening up the X config file shows that the GUI front-ends for managing that still have only the vaguest sense of how to keep track of things. The file was in a schizophrenic state confused about the graphics card, and what monitors, exactly, were in use.
In general though I am pleased. The Add/Remove software to the menu works wonders. It can be a little hard to figure out what's what though as the application naming in the open source world leaves a little to be desired. Perhaps the addition of a user driven "tagging" system would be helpful to increase the meta data about the software on offer. Also some filtering (K-desktop, Gnome, etc) would help for that search tool.
Good luck, and have fun doing the eval. So far, if I hadn't run into the issues with upgrading the monitor - I'd be very impressed.
kmmatney - Friday, February 15, 2008 - link
This sums up my experience pretty well. everything was fine on the initial install, but as soon as I tried to change or add new hardware - nightmare! I was finally able to get a USB wireless network adapter working, but it was not fun...Spivonious - Friday, February 15, 2008 - link
Can you include a hardware upgrade scenario?I don't know if things have changed, but way back when I tried out Linux (Mandrake 7.1) for the second (and last) time, I had a smooth install and everything ran fine until I got a new videocard. This completely crashed X and I had to boot into Windows, download the new driver, reboot back into Linux, and install the driver from the command line before X would display anything. I think I uninstalled Linux the very next day.
Wolfcastle - Friday, February 15, 2008 - link
I agree with Spivonious. I was using an onboard video card just fine. Then I put in a PCI-E video card. Gnome wouldn't start on Ubuntu 7.10.When I reinstalled Ubuntu with the PCI-E card and the took the card out to try the onboard card, Gnome wouldn't start up.
I like Ubuntu quite a bit. If Linux could be a bit more robust with hardware changes, especially with the video cards, I would give them a try once again.