Garbage salad
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| Author | Content |
|---|---|
| caitlyn Oct 20, 2009 5:00 PM EDT |
[rant] I used to like (K)(X)Ubuntu. I really did. If anyone remembers my reviews of Xubuntu Dapper and Edgy you know I was impressed. I even ended the Edgy review with the words "Highly recommended." (See: http://www.oreillynet.com/linux/blog/2006/12/xubuntu_gets_ed... ) I haven't done that often. No, I've never been that positive about VectorLinux, for example. Then came Feisty. They shipped the Xubuntu Feisty live CD with a severely broken desktop. See: http://www.oreillynet.com/linu fx/blog/2007/05/xubuntu_gets_feisty.html for my description. WTF? Since then every Ubuntu release has had major, show-stopping bugs on my hardware, everything from Network Manager hanging, all sorts of wifi problems, sound problems, support for Trident graphics chipsets no longer working, and, of course, the whole Intel driver fiasco. Mr. Wyatt's description of how bad the Intel issue was botched in Jaunty is at: http://www.fewt.com/2009/10/i-give-up.html He's absolutely right, too. OK, Hardy (8.04 LTS) works well and is rock solid now. That wasn't true of the initial release. The first maintenance release was when things started to really get sorted out. Hardy, in general, was significantly better than Intrepid and Jaunty anyway. So, yeah... "garbage salad" is a very good description of Ubuntu's recent releases. I sincerely hope Karmic is better. I also hope, if it isn't a relatively clean release, that some other distro comes forward as a desktop leader. I am really tired of so many in the press equating Ubuntu with Linux when, IMNSHO, Ubuntu hasn't even been a good example of a Linux distro since at least Hardy. If we want to show the world how superior Windows 7 is all we have to do is claim the Ubuntu is a prime example of Linux. It can do a great job of scaring off Windows users permanently. [/rant] |
| Steven_Rosenber Oct 20, 2009 5:04 PM EDT |
I stuck with Ubuntu 8.04 for a lot longer than I had expected. But now that I'm running 9.04, I've been very happy that I made the switch. Everything works better, especially NetworkManager. |
| caitlyn Oct 20, 2009 5:26 PM EDT |
@Steven_Rosenberg: I'm willing to bet you don't have either an Intel or Trident CyberBlade graphics chipset. If you did you'd have nothing nice to say about 9.04, which is why I said "on my hardware." Andrew Wyatt made clear EeePC hardware is no better. The big question: even assuming Jaunty works well for you, might there not be another distro that works equally well and would be more consistent across a wider range of hardware? |
| Steven_Rosenber Oct 20, 2009 5:51 PM EDT |
I do have an Intel graphics chip (the 82830, I believe). The trouble with Intel graphics has been affecting me for a long, long time, so I was ready to go beyond 8.04. Slackware 12, Debian Lenny (during the testing phase and beyond), OpenBSD 4.5 -- I saw the problem in all of these and had my xorg.conf fix in place by the time I pushed from Ubuntu 8.04 to 8.10 and finally 9.04. The xorg.conf fixes (different fix for Lenny/Slackware and Jaunty) are courtesy of the Arch Linux forums - a great place to get help even if you don't run Arch. |
| Steven_Rosenber Oct 20, 2009 6:33 PM EDT |
My satisfaction with Ubuntu 9.04 notwithstanding, I will probably proceed just as cautiously in my upgrade to 9.10 as I did with 8.04-9.04. I won't be doing anything during the first week or month after the release date, and I may wait longer. I hate to mess with an install that's working until I'm sure that enough bugs are shaken out of the next release... |
| herzeleid Oct 20, 2009 7:17 PM EDT |
I've been running 9.10 beta on 2 different test machines and I am finding it quite usable. Much better than 9.04 even in this beta stage. |
| caitlyn Oct 20, 2009 7:29 PM EDT |
@ herzeleid: I've heard that from a number of people and I found a couple of the alphas promising. I would *love* to write a positive review of Ubuntu for a change. I really would like them to just get things right again. They've done it before so they can do it now. |
| caitlyn Oct 21, 2009 1:41 AM EDT |
Well... I'm trying the Karmic beta on the HP Mini right now since Ladislav Bodnar has such good luck with it on his nearly identical machine. Guess what? Network manager still can't get my WPA2 encrypted network right and I can't connect to it properly. I'm doing a slew of upgrades now and if it's still borked, well... I'm already logged into Launchpad. My usual solution is to install wicd and rip out network manager. It may come to that again. |
| Sander_Marechal Oct 21, 2009 4:56 AM EDT |
@Caitlyn: What wifi chipset does your HP Mini have? I'm running 9.04 on my EeePC 900 which has an Atheros chipset and Network Manager has no trouble at all with my WPA2 network. |
| jdixon Oct 21, 2009 9:20 AM EDT |
> Network manager still can't get my WPA2 encrypted network right and I can't connect to it properly. We run a WPA2 Enterprise network here at work with LEAP authentication. The latest updates to Hardy allow my Mini 9 to see and connect to the network, at which point the computer locks up and requires a power reset. :( |
| jacog Oct 21, 2009 9:49 AM EDT |
This sort of thing is embarrassing. I will go hide over there... *points* |
| hkwint Oct 21, 2009 12:23 PM EDT |
Quoting:If anyone remembers my reviews of Xubuntu Dapper and Edgy At least you did a review, or you did find out Ubuntu is a 'garbage salad' nowadays. I planned to do a review of Fedora 11 but it didn't boot. Worst screwup I encountered, only to be surpassed by OpenSuse last week. Then I planned to do a review of Kubuntu 9.10, but because 'searching for a CD-ROM' is almost hardcoded in *ubuntu and I have to open my case and fiddle with the cumbersome IDE-cables to re-enable CD-ROM (this includes pulling out two of my RAID-drives to make room), another show-stopper. I thought, maybe it's just hard to boot from USB with Linux. Tried Suse LiveUSB with the 'dd' command. The real big screwup here is probably beyond your imagination: It took Windows (!) to delete the ISO9660 partition from my USB. Please never, never try to 'dd' an ISO-FS to your USB stick, unless you are not afraid of using Windows to delete it (luckily this can be done from the comfortable environment of VirtualBox by means of forwarding your memory stick / SD card). Then I thought if *ubuntu 9.10 and the newest Suse can't do it, maybe it's just too hard. These are supposed to be user friendly, and also aimed at stuff like Netbooks with don't have a CDROM nowadays. Suse even advertizes being able to run from USB as of Milestone 4 (I was running RC). That's when I tried my Gentoo Netinst; probably never meant or tested to be run from USB. It's a CD image from 2008, 50Mb 'CLI' environment' meant to do a netinstall, but great to use as a LiveCD. I provided the iso to "unetbootin" and in contrary to Kubuntu 9.10, 9.04 which I tried using memory stick, SD card, syslinux, grub, unetbootin and manual fiddling without unetbootin in all sort of combinations, this booted the first time. Even my framebuffer, which I always disable because it screwed up in the past - just worked. But it's only a CLI, no graphics. So I downloaded TinyCore and tried again: Just provided the ISO to unetbootin, and it booted the first time. It even was able to configure the graphical environment for me, as one of the only distro's in history (probably I should thank TinyX for this, a replacement for the cumbersome Xorg). Then I realized it wasn't because of me. |
| caitlyn Oct 21, 2009 2:06 PM EDT |
@Sander; The HP Mini 110 has the Broadcom 4312 wireless chipset. It uses the proprietary wl driver. Ladislav made it work so it can be done. It does work under the factory preloaded Hardy installation with the (awful) HP Mi interface. I've downloaded a PCLinuxOS build and I'm now downloading Fedora 12 and the RPM Fusion Broadcom driver to try next. @Hans: Interesting, because I did use unetbootin to install Ubuntu and it did work. Did you try skipping the Ubuntu installer entirely and installing a bare bones system with debootstrap? That always seems to work. |
| caitlyn Oct 21, 2009 4:08 PM EDT |
I did get wireless working on my new netbook under Karmic. It was a driver issue. However, once I got that sorted, network manager would intermittently hang and my whole system would briefly lock. It's essentially the same problem I complained about way back when I tried the 64-bit version of Gutsy Gibbon (7.10) on a Gateway laptop with a Broadcom chipset. (The HP Mini 110 also has a Broadcom chipset.) Ripping out network-manager and replacing it with wicd solved the problem and my wireless works perfectly. I find it very interesting that a distro touted as easy and just working still hasn't solved a problem with a key app (network-manager) reported two years ago. Of course, 9.10 is still in beta so it's unfair of me to judge it until the final version comes out. Anyone want to bet the problem still isn't solved nine days from now? I hate to say it but "garbage salad" really does seem appropriate if a two year old problem is still not fixed. |
| caitlyn Oct 21, 2009 8:37 PM EDT |
BTW, someone in Spain has registered garbagesalad.com I wonder if that happened since the Andrew Wyatt comment? :) |
| Steven_Rosenber Oct 22, 2009 11:53 AM EDT |
Like I said above, I'm finding NetworkManager in Ubuntu 9.04 to be a great improvement over the app in 8.04. Once I got over the initial teething (modifying the config file so it would actually manage my wired Ethernet) I had no additional problems. My setup is a bit more complex than some: I'm running multiple NICs on multiple networks, all with different DNS servers, and thus far NetworkManager has been great with it ... Now that we also have Wicd, it's very nice to have choices in what app manages the network. And there's always the manual way (or, in OpenBSD, the only way -- no Wicd or NetworkManager in Ports) |
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