Danny Ayers : Raw Blog

Ubuntu comes to Mozzanella@en

I've spent an awful lot of time in the past few days trying to get a generic wireless card working in a desktop machine. The box is one from a local shop, which I've tweaked a bit. It was running Debian. I needed newer versions of a few libs before I could try the driver, then it didn't like the fact that my kernel was a different version, so I had to recompile that. Which knocked out my (nvidia) video driver. But by yesterday evening I'd updated a lot of the libs (taken them up to testing, in fact) and got the full video running again.

But a few weeks ago I ordered (for free) the Ubuntu CDs (downloading distros not fun on a 128k line), this morning they arrived. Couldn't resist. Basic stuff installed a treat, but not the new wireless card driver or the video one. Currently downloading gcc so I can sort the latter out.

Good:

Install of the basic system went smoothly, attractive installer
Samba (or something) worked out of the box - could see the 2 Win machines here
Although Gnome's fine (that's what I had before), there was kubuntu and edubuntu CDs as well

Not so good:

Ubuntu is a Debian derivative, yes? So why didn't I have a simple "upgrade" option in-place. The partition options weren't at all clear, fortunately I'd got a chunk of free space on one of the drives.
I had to manually edit fstab to see my existing partitions
Ubuntu (grub) hasn't recognised the previous bootability (lilo)
rsync seems to be playing silly buggers
runlevel 2 is GUI. I guess I'll have to gnobble the symlink to gdm somewhere to be able to run without X, as needed to install the video driver
No emacs, ssh, gcc...

Now I've got to download gcc and associated stuff to get the video driver going (did I mention I've only got an ISDN line?). Then I'll start all over again with the wireless card.

Now ok, I'm totally behind the aims of Ubuntu, and the basic install went very nicely, it looks good. I believe they've done a huge amount of work on i18n too. But still things aren't smooth for a fairly common video card and a nothing-special wireless card. For my own purposes, I don't really see any major benefit over regular Debian, though the regular releases are very welcome. (As were the free CDs!).

But I can understand Mac-heads like Mark Pilgrim and Cory Doctorow jumping ship when there's a convincing alternative. Data lock-in isn't good, nor is having to buy Apple hardware to run OS X. And Ubuntu's ( still!) cool & trendy. But do I really have to use IBM hardware to get an easy install? Ok, that's a bit melodramatic, but it still seems there's a way yet to go before it just works, irrespective of the hardware.