Doug Goldstein

The update to Ubuntu 7.04 finally completed and once it rebooted I knew that I wouldn’t have any better luck with this release. The machine’s screen stayed black for 3 minutes however I could hear the hard drive working on and off. Then magically the GDM startup image appeared. So far it appears that the bootsplash no longer works with 7.04. Upon logging in, half way through the startup sound the sound got hung and stayed that way until I powered the machine off. I noticed that NetworkManager started up and gave me an icon by default along with the GNOME Network applet that had been previously starting. I attempted to use NetworkManager to connect to my wireless which failed. I then tried to use Ubuntu’s stock network management to make the wireless work however that failed as well. The card can detect my SSID being broadcast but no matter what, I can’t get the card to actually connect with a basic 40-bit WEP open (not shared) key.

At this point I’ve decided that Ubuntu is no where near as usable and user friendly as they bill it as being. The next trick will be to try to use Fedora on the machine. We’ll see how that goes.

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Well it looks like Ciaran must be active on the gentoo-dev mailing list again because there’s been yet another wave of developers retiring. I just want to encourage people to focus on one and only one thread on -dev right now, and that’s the one started by Mike Cummings. It’s really starting to get to me how many good developers are leaving the project. We’ve got people like blubb, antarus, pylon, and possibly vapier and christel. These are developers that make the distribution operate on a day to day basis. Sure we’ve got an influx fresh blood but heck, I’m the 5th oldest developer in Gentoo.  (Grant, Seemant, Mike F, Jason, and me) And that really shouldn’t be. Sure people retire but it’s nice to have people just stay and are very experienced.

It feels like this experience void and this void of people that are known in the development circle is growing bigger and bigger and swallowing up more and more people. People that I never expect that it would. It just feels like Gentoo is crumbling under it’s own weight.

On a completely unrelated note, in my time spent ignoring the mailing lists and steev’s awesome work on getting HAL 0.5.9 into the tree (it’s masked). I’ve found a bit of development life and have been working on HAL related bits. I know HAL is the package that we all love to hate but I have some ideas I will outline in a blog post that will further the divide of a Gentoo desktop and a Gentoo server. It will make more things “just work” and provide for a better Gentoo desktop experience. It’s going to involve tweaking some base-system packages and some help from the release engineering guys. I won’t bring the ideas to the -dev mailing list and I won’t even address any questions on the mailing list.  Stay tuned to your favorite Planet Gentoo feed for more info.

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Well the story begins with my girlfriend’s laptop, a Fujitsu Lifebook P1120 dying. She mentioned the hard drive making a clicking noise about 15 minutes before the hard drive completely stopped functioning. Unfortunately the laptop does not have a CD-ROM drive and does not like to boot off of any USB CD-ROM drives so there’s no way to install Windows back on the machine (it’s not like I didn’t try), so she automatically becomes the next Linux convert.

I choose Ubuntu 6.10 since it’s targeted towards entry level Linux desktop users which she clearly is. I popped the new hard drive in my Dell Inspiron 600m and booted the Ubuntu 6.10 CD. Everything went very smooth and the installation was going great.

Just at the very end of the installation process is when things started to go wrong. At 99% the installation hung completely. Ctrl-Alt-Bksp didn’t even exit me out of X. I had to pull out the power cable and the battery from the laptop to turn the machine off. This has NEVER happened in the 3 years I’ve owned this laptop.

But I trudged on, I installed the hard drive back into the Fujistu and proceeded to boot it up. It detected all the devices just fine sans the touchscreen. It prompted me to run it’s update tool and that’s where the next problem began. It downloaded a large set of updates, one of them being 2.6.17-11 from 2.6.17-10 kernel. Once it rebooted into the 2.6.17-11 kernel, I noticed the wireless card was gone and no longer detected. The card that’s in this machine is a fairly straight forward Prism 2 based mini-PCI card.  I still to this day am unable to make 2.6.17-11 work but 2.6.17-10 works just fine so that’s what the machine uses. The next issue that cropped up is after any bit of usage with anything that uses graphics or animation (websites), the screen suffers from terrible screen corruption. I had mentioned these issues on this blog a long while back and they had been fixed in the X.org ATI driver months and months ago. However, it appears Ubuntu never pulled in these fixes. The video card is a ATI Rage Mobility. The screen corruption gets so bad after going to any website with Flash on it that the whole system is nearly unusable. This definitely does not make my girlfriend happy. The last complaint is that the laptop is noticeably slower then the Windows 2000 installation that was on there previously even though the new hard drive is a 5400rpm hard drive rather then 4200rpm.

The kicker came today when I noticed the Update Manager icon wanting attention and I allowed it to run it’s updates. One of them was xserver-xorg-core. Immediately after this update the keyboard stopped working correctly. Like many laptops this one has a Fn key and it overlays the U-P keys and down to the M key a number pad if you hold down the Fn key. However, the update inverted this behavior. Now to use the regular keys on the keyboard, you have to hold down the Fn key. This is completely unusable and unacceptable.

As my girlfriend puts it “Linux is unstable and not usable. I don’t trust that machine to store any of my data.” But who can blame her with an experience like what Ubuntu provided.

1) Terrible screen corruption that doesn’t allow her to visit websites or be very choosy about the ones she visits.

2) Slow performance compared to Windows.

3) Not all hardware supported or updates breaking hardware support even further.

That does not sound like a terribly stable operating system.

Currently the machine is upgrading to Feisty Fawn or Ubuntu 7.04 (Beta) since it’s basically the last chance I have to give Ubuntu. Before I need to find someone who owns a Lifebook P1120 and still has their Windows image intact that can send it to me. I would just re-inject her Windows license key into it.

Filed under: General, Linux
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