4/7/2007
The Ubuntu Experience….
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: 6 Responses to “The Ubuntu Experience….”
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April 7th, 2007 at 1:36 am
Yeah, what happened to you was the mistake I made with my father and OpenSUSE. Holy cow, by the end of the 20 hours trying to fix things it was so bad I really just wish I never touched it before. At this point, Linux is not too stable for the masses. I generally just install Gentoo everywhere and administrate it myself if possible, although it would not have been with my father.
April 7th, 2007 at 2:50 am
You don’t need an image specially crafted for that Lifebook. You can install any Windows just similarly you did with Gentoo. Which means to plug its HDD into a system which has access to other media and copy the installation files into some directory. What is left to be done then is to prepare some Bootmanager just for initiating the Installation of Windows in the real System which will overwrite it then, at least the the parts which reside in the MBR, but we all know this, don’t we?
After this is done you only have to go here http://support.fujitsupc.com/CS/Portal/supportsearch.do?srch=DOWNLOADS the drivers are all there. While we are there, did you read http://www.fujitsupc.com//www/content/pdf/bios/Momus3BIOS.pdf , especially the part about “Selecting the Operating System Source”? I see this is an older Phoenix BIOS which is not uncommon for Laptops, this has ONE quirk, to move some device up or down in the Boot up sequence you have to use the + and - keys. From the Numpad afair, which means you have to to activate them with the FN-Key. Maybe this helps you to get it to boot from USB and get over with this finally. Have fun 
April 7th, 2007 at 2:58 am
s/Gentoo/Ubuntu
Btw. for a System with Specs that low some ligther Distribution like http://www.zenwalk.org f.e. would be better, but even that would be outperformed by Windows 2000.
April 7th, 2007 at 3:07 am
hey,
I have made similiar experiences with Ubuntu. And actually also installed Ubuntu 5.04 on my girlfriends machine. It did work well for some time, but after the first major updates the wholes system got messed up.
Some days ago I have tried the last Beta and I am quite confident. It autodetects all the hardware and runs pretty fast. Using the xorg radeon drivers even metacitys eyecandy compositing f/x work fine.
Ubuntu is easy to use and today my girlfriend is happy linux user (for now).
cheers
jvs
April 9th, 2007 at 12:50 pm
My laptop doesn’t have a cdrom to reinstall windows I network boot it and use unatteneded (http://unattended.sourceforge.net/)
to do the install.
December 26th, 2007 at 11:37 pm
If you still need the Windows files stored in the d: drive of P1120 (from which I’m just writing to you) and explain to me how to copy them, I’ll be happy to send them to you. My address is n.milletti AT indire.it, ciao!