Trying Ubuntu 9.10
While I’ve been using Linux on my servers forever and am happy with it, I haven’t tried Linux on my desktop in several years, since grad school. So it’s been about 5 years since I saw the state of the art of the Linux desktop. At the time, my distro of choice was Gentoo. Compiling the entire OS from source on a 700 MHz laptop took obscenely long. Once it’s installed, keeping your software working is a constant struggle; you never know which software update is going to break X. And the UI was always borderline unusable.
Since then, my desktop computers have all been Macintoshes running Mac OS X. I gladly forsook Linux on my desktop for an operating system that Just Worked. I did like all the tinkering, and I missed that, but it’s paramount to be able to count on using your computer to get some work done.
Grad school was mostly before the meteoric rise of Ubuntu as the final solution to the user-friendly Linux distro question. Over the years I’d heard nothing but good things about the usability of Ubuntu. Finally Linux on the desktop is a reality. Too good to be true? Well today Ubuntu 9.10 Karmic Koala was released. And I happen to have an extra PC laptop I’m doing nothing with, so I decided to take it for a spin and find out. It wasn’t pretty. Actually, Ubuntu 9.10 Karmic Koala worked wonderfully. It was my error; I mistakenly installed an old version.
My first complaint was during the install. On the disk partitioning step, I was presented with several options: side by side install, use all free space, and advanced. I had wiped the drive a week before to install Win7 and had left a large partition in anticipation of this install. So the second option was for me. The UI gave no feedback about what partitions it would create, how large they would be, whether anything would be erased. It simply showed a single bar which indicated that the windows partition would be resized to take the entire disk. WTF?? I had to go back and play with it several times because it was so unclear whether it was going to do what it was supposed to. Bad.
It was a minor nit. And once the install is done, you never have to deal with it again. Once it was up and running, it seemed to be OK. I started poking around to see how much of my hardware was not recognized. The WiFi indicator light was blinking on and off, though the OS seemed to think the connection was good. A little weird, but OK. I started composing this blog post in the Ubuntu text editor.
The update manager launched, telling me that Ubuntu 9.10 had just been released, and that I should upgrade my system. A little weird, that’s what I’d just installed, but who knows, the final image may not have been entirely up-to-date, right? And who doesn’t want an up-to-date system? So I let it do its thing.
Then I left my computer for an hour, and when I came back, without any indication, the root partition had been remounted as read-only, and several of the windows had stopped refreshing. I had not saved my blog post, so I was unwilling to just reboot. It took me a while to figure a way to get the file off the system, what with the windows not working and the disk being mounted readonly. Finally I saved it to a Samba share on my Mac. With relief, I rebooted. Of course it hanged during the reboot, forcing a hard restart.
I’m about ready to wipe the partition, but I’ll give it one more try. Maybe I should’ve gone with Kubuntu anyway. I always liked KDE…
