I've looked at this distribution in the past and this time I decided to have another look. One reads so much about Ubuntu - on a rough count, about 2 out of every 10 Linux-related articles seem to be about Ubuntu - so I thought I needed some education about the new messiah as well. After all, I do occasionally write about Linux.
But for me there's been nothing but disappointment. I disturbed an existing Mandriva installation on my spare computer - admittedly an old machine - to have a look at Ubuntu. If anything installed on this machine runs slowly, I have no complaint - but if someone tells me that the hardware isn't Linux-compatible, they would be very, very wrong. I've run Slackware, Debian, FreeBSD, Desktop BSD, MEPIS and Mandriva on this old faithful over the past seven years. For one year it even ran Windows!
Booting from the Ubuntu CD - I used version 7.04 which is supported uptil 2008 - posed no problem and after a cursory look, I used the installer which is very conveniently positioned on the desktop. The installer is neat; just seven steps and all of them easily understandable even by someone like me.
After leaving the installation to run overnight, I rebooted the machine first thing this morning, took out the boot CD and waited. All I get is a message: "GRUB loading, please wait... Error 18."
A web search tells me that the error in question is generated because the hard drive cannot boot because of the age of the BIOS. Or "This error is returned when a read is attempted at a linear block address beyond the end of the BIOS translated area." I know how to fix it. But that isn't the point.
Any distribution that's positioned as the easiest to install, the one for beginners, the way to get into Linux, shouldn't have these errors. Not on a machine which has run - and continues to run (I'll be reinstalling Mandriva soon) Linux without any problem.
I rebooted the machine, stuck the CD in and had a look at the desktop. I couldn't access the web even though I have a DHCP server running on my own workstation. My son's Macbook, sitting a few metres away, has no problem picking up an IP address from my workstation; the same goes for my daughter's Windows laptop which is also positioned nearby.
Once again, fixing this is child's play for someone of my vintage; open a terminal and run "sudo dhclient <network_interface_name>". But then is a new user, one of those possible "converts", supposed to know this?
In sharp contrast to the PC on which I tried to install Ubuntu, the monitor I used is a new one, a 22-inch LCD; I run Debian for the AMD64 on my workstation and setting up the monitor to yield an image that used the entire screen was very easy.
On Ubuntu, the image looked distorted - something like a smaller image yanked sideways. When I ran the xserver set-up on Debian, the monitor was picked up correctly so there shouldn't be any reason why Ubuntu cannot emulate this behaviour. One more minor irritant - the time zone that came up for me during the installation was wrong. It was off by an hour.
These annoyances are really of no consequence to me since I don't plan to run Ubuntu on any of my PCs. But then I'm not the target audience. Presumably, the targets are those who are looking for a Linux that installs easily and allows one to carry out normal day-to-day tasks without breaking out into a cold sweat.
I may try again later in the day and tweak things so that I can install it but in all honesty it's been a sore disappointment. The name of the release - Feisty Fawn - seems a bit juvenile to me but that's a personal opinion; had it worked as expected, you could have called it any damn thing, I don't care. Right now, it's just dead on arrival.
P.S. At the start of the installation procedure - the language selection screen - a message says "if you have internet access, read the release notes for information on problems that may affect you." A link to the release notes is provided but when the system cannot obtain an IP address from a working DHCP server, how is one expected to access the internet?
