So part of my “see what all the hype is about” thing is trying out Ubuntu on the desktop. It also helps that a) my 3 year old XP install really needed a nice clean format etc and b) my hard drive developed errors and had to be replaced anyway. I’d been threatening to install some linux distro on my laptop and the hard drive thing was the catalyst. Ubuntu seems to be the most hyped distro and Feisty was recently released, plus it was only a 1 CD download. Also Ubuntu kind of has the hype of being easy and “just work”(tm) which is pretty much what I want from my desktop.

So… installation was pretty quick, not too many options but that’s fine. I was pretty impressed that WiFi worked out of the box (I replaced my Broadcom based mini-PCI card with an Atheros based one a while ago in anticipation). Next to do was dial a PPPoE connection. Um, no shortcut or anything, but help told me to run pppoeconf which worked after accepting the defaults to a million questions. Also told me to use “pon dsl-provider”, “poff” and “plog”. Fair enough. It seems that dsl-provider did get added to the networking applet on the top panel. +10 points for working. -1 point for not having an indicator of any sort of whether I was actually connected (I added a network monitor with ppp0 but that’s not quite the same). It also needs to tell me when my ADSL has been conveniently reset by the evil overlords. And a way to automatically connect when my WiFi connects to a certain AP would be good too.

The interface looks very very boring to start off with so I played around with themes etc a bit. Why the hell are all the buttons and menu bars so huge on all the themes that come with Ubuntu? Are we blind? I honestly felt rather cramped real estate wise because of all the huge buttons/menus. “Redmond” and “SmoothGNOME” seem to be the only ones with reasonable sizes. -2 points for looking like poo. This isn’t ‘95.

Next was getting connected to my desktop PC that I’d backed up all my stuff onto. That worked fine with the Places > Network menu and “smb://”. I used the little “Connect to server” applet in the top panel to connect, strangely it doesn’t actually connect you, it just places a shortcut on the desktop. While I noticed this the first time it’s not immediately obvious. Maybe a little checkbox like “open now?” or something? +5 points for working.

+5 for Gaim connecting to MSN etc. -1 for not supporting custom emoticons (how hard can it be?). +5 for connecting to Google Talk, and -2 for making me Google for the settings I needed. I thought they were collaborating or something? Surely there should just be a Google Talk option there then?

I downloaded whatever updates there were. apt-get is a dream and one of the reasons I chose Ubuntu. It’s like the friendly hip version of Debian. After the update I installed a few things including Automatix. My downloads were also going at the max speed for my ADSL line which I was pretty happy about. +20 for apt-get being totally awesome and fast servers.

I see this is a bug so maybe it’s only Feisty, but Totem won’t play files over “smb://”. Mounting it “properly” worked fine though. A bit of an extension to Nautilus to do that would be cool. Or even to that “Connect to server” applet. I noticed a few other apps also don’t like opening files over “smb://” though, like Linux DC++ which tried to hash “/” when I gave it an “smb://” type address. Movies in Totem were super jerky and unwatchable until I converted to Xine. For some strange reason movies in Xine were super bright though. -10 for still not being able to watch a movie properly.

I tried enabling “Desktop Effects” just to see if it would work on my on-board Intel graphic. It did surprisingly well but completely killed movies or any vis etc.

Another small thing I noticed is the network monitor applet and the system monitor network section show “%” as the units but it seems that 100% is adjusted to whatever the max throughput has been while you were staring at it. It also doesn’t distinguish between or even show what adapter it’s monitoring. There’s no options anywhere for this either. This makes it pretty useless because the numbers are meaningless. -2 points.

I only noticed this when I tried to play a DVD, but my CD-ROM is not detected at all. Damn. Bit of a disaster. noapic or noacpi or something might help, haven’t tried.
I tried out “Swiftfox”. Well actually I’m trying out Firefox at the same time as Ubuntu because I normally use Opera. I ran into a pretty random issue with Swiftfox, I can’t go to any typed in URLs. It’s like “enter” or the “Go” button just don’t do anything at all. I can click links etc fine but can’t go to a URL. I could even use the Google search thing. Using normal Firefox now and hopefully it won’t happen again (edit: Nope, happens in Firefox too, tried switching to another theme). Firefox still insists on opening new windows all the time, I only want 1 window with TABS ffs! Arg! I changed my prefs to open new windows in a new tab but some links still open new windows. Also since I have no middle click button I’d REALLY appreciate a setting/extension that opens bookmarks in new tabs as opposed to the current tab. I know I can hold Ctrl but I don’t want to, I want to change the default behaviour not continuously change to alternate behaviour.

Ok, what the hell is up with vi (or Vim rather) in Ubuntu? The up,down,right and left arrows insert an “A\n”,”B\n”,”C\n”,”D\n” respectively in INSERT mode. The backspace key deletes characters but doesn’t show them as removed until you move to another line. It’s not the terminal because SSH’ing somewhere else and using vi works fine.

Are there any image viewers for psd files? Something like IrfanView for that other OS. The GIMP scores -10 points just because. Why can’t they use MDI type windows? Or do those not exist in Linux? It’s impossible to see what’s going on in GIMP unless it’s on a separate virtual desktop. Speaking of windows I found a few times you would do something like open a new app or even just a dialog within an app and the window would appear behind the current one instead of right on top. -5 points for that.

So that brings to points total to: I don’t know, the points are like Whose Line Is It Anyway… If I can get the CDRW/DVD-ROM working I might stick with Ubuntu a little bit longer, otherwise I think next on the list is PCLinuxOS. Maybe Sabayon.

This entry was posted on Monday, May 21st, 2007 at 11:07 pm and is filed under Linux. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.