Ubuntu
July 3rd, 2006
Since I managed to obtain a Ubuntu CD (which survived a Coke spill so would make a pretty good coaster) I decided I’d wipe my existing install of Gentoo (which hasn’t been used in way over a year) and replace it with Ubuntu 6.06 - the "free forever" operating system with 3 years of free support.
I was expecting from Ubuntu a distribution which redefined desktop linux - a distribution which just worked, was straightforward and wasn’t such a pain to install and to manage. Ubuntu did do better than many other distributions in that it detected and configured all my hardware, etc. but I didn’t find the install any nicer than the time I installed Mandrake 9.
- First of all, during the installation process, it whined about something wrong with my FAT16 partition. This is a small partition around 100MB which Microsoft or Dell or someone stick there for recovery. I dismissed the error.
- The installation process got stuck for about 10 minutes setting up apt-get. I believe this is due to an issue with my router as it gets confused with IPv6. I’ve had the same issue with many other Linux distributions but it’s never actually frozen the install. I decided to disconnect the network interface in the middle of the install and it resumed.
- The first time I went on Ubuntu I had to disable IPv6. This was done by editing /etc/modprobe.d/aliases and changing "alias net-pf-10 ipv6" to "alias net-pf-10 off". A reboot allowed Firefox to successfully connect to the network.
- For some reason, applications such as GNOME and Synaptic still don’t work as they resolve everything to 1.0.0.0. I’ve tried manually changing my DNS server to 4.2.2.2 and it didn’t seem to do anything.
- Ubuntu stupidly mounted the Windows recovery partition so I had to remove this from fstab. It also annoyed me with a dosfsck check every time it started up which took ages so I had to manually modify fstab to remove the check (change the 6th entry).
- Ubuntu’s GRUB menu put itself as the default and didn’t offer any graphical interface to make Windows the default. I had to manually edit /boot/grub/menu.lst to move Windows to the top of the list and to make it default. I think there’s only a certain point you can push usability and simplification - once you simplify too much you make it hard to do something you actually want to do.
I haven’t really used Ubuntu that much as I’m still trying to make it work properly but it feels like a pretty decent operating system. I still can’t see what all of the fuss is about and I can’t see any particular reason why I should use Ubuntu.
Anyone know or recommend any Linux distributions which are worth trying?
Me, I stick to the shadows, use Windows.
- Linux
- Comments(7)
Unfortunately this was the first release of Ubuntu with a GUI based installer, some of the things are not ready yet, although I suspect the next release will fix these issues, or give us an advanced mode.
I had trouble with it, instead of using the vesa display driver, which is a safe standard, it used the ati driver which doesn’t support my GUI.
So before I could even install I had to much about with the X configuration…
However, compared to my record time installing Windows XP, 6 days to get it to work, all because I have an SATA hard drive, thats nothing.
I see it as a plus that it tries to mount every file system that it can. Whether it should check if the partition is a recovery one is arguable I guess.
At least it has a bootloader that can boot other OSes. Windows will happily overwrite any bootloader you might have without giving you a warning, and why shouldn’t it?
I guess so; I just remember distributions I’ve used in the past had a graphical GRUB menu editor and allowed you to select the default.
I’ve had many a trouble with GRUB and Lilo. Always with Ubuntu I’ve had to edit the GRUB config file manually; twice with negative outcomes.
How did you edit the menu list in GRUB to make Windows the default? I want to do the same thing but I can’t find the file to edit. I’m pretty sure I know how once I find it. Did you edit it while booted in Windows?
Hi,
No, I edited it from Linux. Open /boot/grub/menu.lst:
$ sudo gedit /boot/grub/menu.lst
Take a look at some of the comments for instructions on how to edit. I moved the entry for Windows to the top of the list and changed the "default" config at the top of the file.
Definitely, running dosfsck on every system boot is not good. Thank you for the tip of deleting the 6th figure of every Windows drive listed in fstab!