Saturday, November 8, 2008
Yes, I’m still here: 6 months later and Ubuntu
I have not given up on anyone, nor on anything yet.
The last post, which was quite a while back, discussed my latest attempt at an alternative OS and trying out the Linux Ubuntu Distro. I must say, that it is the first Linux Distro ever that installed and pretty well every thing worked on a Dell D600. I was quite impressed indeed.
In the meantime, I acquired an older Mac PowerBook G4 laptop and I also dabbled into OSX 10.5.5. I will discuss my experiences in a later post.
Back to Ubuntu. I also installed it on a Dell C610 laptop, but I must admit that with only 512MB memory, Ubuntu struggles quite a bit on the C610. I even installed the Xubuntu Desktop. Performance improved a bit, but The Gimp was having issues with the display where the Brush Outline never cleared up and was really, really messing things up. I ended up keeping WinXPP on it and it is working quite fine.
On the D600, it’s performance was quite extraordinary, specially since the D600 has 2GB of memory. But somehow, I really like the XFCE Desktop and I stuck with it.
Now that 8.10 is out, I was quite anxious to try it out.
First thing I tried, was the upgrade route… Wow, I should have known better: having tried this many times over the years with Windows, it always usually failed and the best was most of the time a fresh installed.
Ubuntu 8.10 was no different: a truck loads of things broke in the upgrade of 8.04 to 8.10. To name a few: it no longer recognized the Video Display / Driver, not sure; Wireless not OK: new free code version for the Atheros chipset, and many other minor broken things…
Thus, experience prevailed and I installed it from scratch, as I have all /home/UserName backed up. The install worked quite fine and all previous problems disappeared. It took a while to get the wireless (new network manager) going, but once it connected it has run flawlessly since.
Now, I must admit that since I prefer Xubuntu, I still install Ubuntu first as Ubuntu does not bother you with the stupid Key-Ring prompts to get the wireless going on every login, as both naked Kubuntu and Xubuntu do. So, once Ubuntu installed, I install the Xubuntu-Desktop package.
But, all is not quite perfect in this world and just like any new release, there are bugs. It would appear that 8.10 has its shares of them as well. I have heard that 8.04 also had bugs, but I never encountered any of them, at least that I know of…
The Desktop managers (both Gnome and XFCE) are buggy. The most annoying one is in Xubuntu where if you right click on the top panel, it will wipe out all the Panels and you’re out of luck… Lucky for me, I enabled root and allow it to login properly. Initially, after searching the Net, I removed a couple of dot folders and dot files, but was not really lucky. So, I delete the UserID and re-create it. Unfortunately, I have to re-customize the Desktop and that can be a pain. I think I may have found the right files to purge though, as my yesterday’s Panel loss on Xubuntu I only removed the xfce’s dot folders and did not have to re-create the UserName.
On the Gnome side, 8.10 adds some Mac-Like eye candy, but I don’t paricularly like Gnome for now. But Gnome seems more stable than XFCE, but a couple of Applets don’t behave properly.
However, the biggest problem, is that there were some changes in the Samba Environment: and there are some serious issues there… It looks like Ubuntu is aware of these and Bug Reports have been issued.
I was experiencing all sorts of Shares Issues, most specially with rsync, which did not make any sense: I edit pictures on all three platforms and I use sets of rsynch )Mac and Linux) and 2ndCopy on Windows and I sync the Network Shares… It always worked like a charm on all platforms. On 8.10, the errors indicated that it could not change the timestamp on the files as the the files were not valid directories… What? I spent about two days chasing that one in modifying shares, permissions, ownership, etc. etc… I even installed an older version of rsync, which incidentally, Update Manager immediately informed me to update it… wow…
My work-around has been to connect to the Network shares via NFS instead of SMB for the Ubuntu laptop. I had come across this problem but had not realized it, when I was trying to use a simple personal wiki called Wiki On A Stick (WoaS). This wiki uses JavaScript to self update the html file… I’m experimenting with that only, but although it worked fine on both Windows and OSX, it just would not write on the Share! As a last resort, I mounted the share on Ubuntu as an NFS share, and it worked flawlessly from then on… But I had never suspected SMB…
Yes, it is a work-around for me since the Local Server is Debian. But I pity people that have their Shares on a Windows box as there is no alternatives, unless you install the Unix Services on the Windows Server.
That is about it at the moment…
Regards!
