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Ubuntu Linux, Dapper Drake Flight 7 - How Linux is getting very close to mass adoption
I decided to try out Linux again. A couple years ago I gave SUSE
Linux a shot for the desktop, and it was not quite ready for
primetime. UI elements were all over the place, the system would
not always respond as intended, it was a bit messy. Today I
thought it would be fun to try
Ubuntu and
Kubuntu Linux (
GNOME and
KDE respectively). I could not remember which I liked better, so I gave them both a shot. My setup is a
Fujitsu TabNote 4020d.
To make a long story short, I found that I liked Ubuntu or the GNOME
distribution a bit better. This is purely personal preference, I
just liked the way things were organized. I did like some
elements of KDE more than GNOME, but I decided upon Ubuntu for my final
Linux test. I downloaded the
Drapper Drake
builds of both Ubuntu and Kubuntu (Flight 7) since I wanted to be
bleeding edge here. Ran the live CD and was able to install on a
second/third partition right from the CD. The Kubuntu installer
had a few more problems than Ubuntu did, but it is a beta and both
installed just as easy if not easier than Windows XP. I was very
impressed. In fact, the only operating system I know of that is
easier to install is Mac OS X.
Within about 30 minutes I was up and running on Linux. This was
awesome and I must give kudos to the Linux community for making the
install process so simple. I had access to
Firefox,
OpenOffice.org and a few
other nice tools. I was able to install
Thunderbird
and set up my IMAP e-mail very quickly and easily. I would say
that within 1 hour I had my system running like I wanted with browsing,
e-mail and system prefs all looking good. If this is where the
story ended I would be porting every system I own over to Ubuntu Linux
right now. Actually, I would probably be a convert from Mac OS X
to Ubuntu yelling the praises of Linux from the hilltops.
Alas, there were a few smaller items that ended up being big
gotchas. My Atheros WiFi card was not seen at all. After
messing around for a couple of hours I was able to get the
MadWiFi driver
up and running, which allowed me to see my adapter. There was no
way to scan for networks, so I manually typed in my WiFi network
name. My network was encrypted via WPA, which was not supported,
so I turned encryption off for this test. As much as I tried I
could not get WiFi to connect. It didn't give me an error, it
just would not connect to my WiFi network. Even if I was able to
connect, not supporting WPA security is a big no-no for me. I
would have liked to have seen much broader WiFi support built in, with
a much better toolset for joining wireless networks. Nothing too
fancy, actually I would love to see something as elegant as what Apple
has built in to Mac OS X. I'm sure that if I messed around for a
lot longer I would have been able to not only get the WiFi adapter
working but also using WPA; however, that's not the point. Users
should not have to work for hours to get devices working on any
platform. The geeks can do it, but for mass adoption the process
needs to be as simple as humanly possible.
Other little items didn't work too. My SD/MMC/MS reader would
show up as not supported nor would it mount any media, my keyboard
shortcuts for screen brightness did not work, no fingerprint sensor,
and the pen of the tablet did nothing. The non-integrated devices
such as my Logitech camera, PC-5740 EVDO card and USB headset all
failed as well. Most of these are not big items, but they do add
up. Of everything in that list it's the EVDO card that would have
hit me the hardest, but it would have been nice if all of them
worked. Once again, with enough time and patience it's possible
to get all of these items working very well, but I'm going for the
whole package here. I want to be able to give this system to my
brother (not a techie) and have him install from scratch. The
moment that happens is the moment Linux can take over the world.
Frankly, if I had more time to get WiFi to work I would have probably
kept Ubuntu on the system, alas, I needed to get some work done and
restored my system to the original XP Tablet Edition. The other
items such as the memory card readers, keyboard controls and whatnot
were not big deals to me but each one became one additional device that
was not working. What would be really, really, really cool is
some form of an automated driver downloader. When Ubuntu is first
installed it will scan the system for all hardware. From there it
will query a centralized, user contributed server of packages that
contain the drivers for the device. These drivers would be listed
off by device and the user could simply click 'install' to active each
item, or 'install-all' to get all devices working. Even
Microsoft does not have something like this, and I think it would be
very powerful to be able to have the latest and greatest driver for my
specific system. This would enable the Ubuntu team to keep the
distribution of the actual core OS small yet support just about any
type of device that they can create packages for. This would also
improve the user experience as the end user would not need to make
anything, it would just install and work. There are probably some
pretty big technical hurdles keeping this from working, but I thought
it was a fun idea.
My last gripe is networking in general. I have a Broadcom
10/100/1000 NIC in the laptop and on the dock. I was able to
connect fine, but was unable to find where I set speed negotiations in
the GUI. I'm sure I could do it via ifconfig, but I wanted to be
able to do everything through the GUI, just like Windows or Mac OS
X. Keep it less geeky. The problem was the connection speed
itself. All networking tasks were painfully slow. I'm not
sure if it's because Ubuntu was unable to auto-negotiate 1000
full-duplex or if the TCP/IP stack still has some optimizing to be
worked out before the beta is done. I would say that pages in
Firefox rendered in 2x slower than they do on my Mac or Windows
systems. File transfers were painfully slow. I think this
is less of a beta issue and more of a needing to properly set up my
network, which I could not figure out how to do in the GUI.
I only played with Ubuntu for about 6 hours today, then moved back, so
I openly admit that it's not a fair test. I also understand that
I was using a beta, so additional bugs and problems may have been
introduced by that. I will say that I was very impressed overall
and once the driver support is as vast as Windows or Mac OS X, then it
will be a very, very, very amazing platform. Microsoft should be
worried, there are a lot of things that Ubuntu is doing a lot better
than Windows. It is my hope that within the next year or two the
Linux community will find an amazing new way to support hardware and
install software packages. Once this happens the flood gates will
open, and Linux will crush everything in its path. Until then, I
see Linux remaining a server product where items like WiFi, Bluetooth,
and EVDO cards don't really matter,
To be perfectly fair to Ubuntu I had also played with a copy of Vista
beta. My sound card was not found, the ethernet adapter was not
found, and my graphics has severe issues. So all in all the
Ubuntu beta is ahead of Vista right now. I'm excited to see where
both of these systems go in the next year. Since I didn't play
with it for very long I may have missed a few items, and if you're an
Ubuntu expert please feel free to put me on the right path in our
comments.
Best Open Source Project?
There you are, staring at a crashed Gnome session, CTRL-ALT-BKSPC does nothing. ALT-CTRL-F1 won’t bring
you to a terminal where you could cd to /etc/init.d and restart gdm. In short, your choices seem to be limited to holding down the power button and chancing file system
corruption or nothing.
But wait! There’s two more options that you may not have known about!
Here are two ways to first try and kill just the process on your
current terminal (thus allowing you to get back into your machine and
at least attempt a ’shutdown -h now’ command) and if that fails, to bring your machine down in a more graceful manner than a hard shutdown.
First, we’ll try and kill all the process on your current terminal. To do this, hold down the following keys -
ALT + SysReq + k
What the heck is a SysReq key? Look for it on
your PrtSc or Print Screen key. The k in this instance stands for Kill.
If that doesn’t work for you, it’s time to take drastic action.
You’ll now enter a series of keystrokes that will tell your computer to
do some housekeeping before shutting down.
ALT + SysReq + r
This stands for Raw keyboard mode.
ALT + SysReq + s
This syncs the disk.
ALT + SysReq + e
This terminates all processes
ALT + SysReq + i
Kill’s all processes that weren’t terminated nicely.
ALT + SysReq + u
Remounts all filesystems as read only.
ALT + SysReq + b
Reboots.
That’s a heck of a lot better than simply holding down the power button and hoping everything works out okay.
How will you ever remember all those keystrokes? There is a long held mnemonic
that makes it a bit easier:
Raising Skinny Elephants Is Utterly Boring - RSEIUB
You should use this method only if other methods (mentioned above) fail.
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