Ubuntu review

[p4man]

Originally Posted by sydbod

Hmmm!!!! Well I have been a little disappointed with Ubuntu in my last 2 attempts.

Download the release of Karmic Koala as soon as it became available.
Decided it was time to do some testing based on trying Live CD mode. I wanted to see if it was worthwhile to switch over to Ubuntu for my development work ... just wanted to make sure things worked as advertised, and that I could work OK with it.

Pleasant surprise when the system booted up fine, and a nice little message tells me that priority drivers can be installed for my ATI video card.
No problems, I select the option and it starts to download the relevant driver files. I select the install for these files and the system tells me to reboot my system. After rebooting, everything loads up properly and again I get a message that priority drivers can be installed for my ATI video card.
....... This is not very good ... looks like that Koala is stoned to the eyeballs from the eucalyptus leaves and maybe an update/fix may be in order further down the line.

Not really, you misunderstand. The live cd is non persistent. You can install drivers, change wallpaper and erase the entire livecd filesystem, reboot and it was just like it was the first time. Those drivers will never get installed untill you install the OS first. LiveCD sessions are very neat for a lot of reasons, but you cant use them to test proprietary video drivers.

The install to the USB drive went very nicely. I was given the option to carefully select the USB drive without any chance of disturbing my C:.
The data could be seen to go to the USB drive by the activity light on the USB drive.
Fine ... all is good, .. time to set the boot device to the USB drive ........ UGGGG!!!! ... SHIT!!! ....... machine does not have an option for this mode in the BIOS.
Time to give up for the evening and just do a bit of internet surfing before going to bed.
Reboot from the C: drive and that SLIMEY JACKALOPE has put GRUB on my HDD and now all that I get is "Error 21".

Guess what, you can only have 1 bootloader per drive. If you do a regular install of ubuntu (or any OS for that matter) unless you tell it differently it will put its own bootloader on the first bootable harddrive. Windows will do that and rerase grub, linux will do that and overwrite the windowsbootloader (only difference being that it will still let you boot windows)

Now if you borked or aborted your install you have grub stage1 on your MBR and but the bootloader itself somewhere else or nowhere at all (if you installed it to USB and removed that) unsurprisingly you cant boot.

I can honestly say that these sorts of problems have never happened to me with any version of Windows that I have used up to this date.

Because you never installed windows on a machine with a non windows OS that you wanted to keep

Anyway, NOW it is a matter of PRIDE, and we will see if Ubuntu will defeat me and make me into a whimpering idiot, or if I can break its spirit and bend it to my will.

If you cant boot from USB then install ubuntu on the hdd. If you do a side by side install it will resize windows and install grub and let you dual boot. Just dont abort the process halfway

If you can boot from USB then in the ubuntu installer make sure in the last step you set the bootloader to the USB stick and not the internal harddrive.

[rich wargo]

Which is why I keep an older machine around. It runs Ubuntu for my general use, while my son gets the new machine with WinXPsp3 for his school work and his games.

[not_so_humble_german]

ubuntard.com

[Dudler]

How to dual boot article here:

Nice howto guide. If you have to download Ubuntu, tru the torrent version, got over 6MB/s

When my 5850 arrives sometime next 2 weeks this will be interesting.

[grndzro]

Originally Posted by PY-Intel

I find it hard to believe that they would forget to put SATA drivers into installer in the latest version of Ubuntu.

9.07 and 9.10, and Linux mint 9.07 all installed fine to my sata drives, no problems whatsoever. And I had my IDE drives disabled at the time.

[charlie]

I have never had a problem with Linux and SATA except in some of the really early days of SATA with a few NV based boards.

-Charlie

[not_so_humble_german]

as someone who has posted on lkml:
if there is a hardware quirk that needs a workaround it is always a good idea to report it on lkml. Devs are pretty quick on fixing it.

[Copper]

OK. About the 20% bugs reports that Andrew mentions - yeah, so what? There are that many problems with XP or Vista or anything else except the people who have the problem rely upon their "tech support" be it a friend, family or dear gawds Best Buy. At least with 9.10 they're FINDING the forums and reporting the bugs and understand that there is a fix on the way. That is far better than the "temporary workaround" that becomes permanent in short order. That and there is a learning curve (however steep or flat that may be I don't know). Users that better understand the tool are better users.

Myself, up from 9.04 to 9.10 about two weeks ago. No problems except with Blender but I always seem to have problems with Blender and audio shit within. Nothing new there.

[grndzro]

As far as Linux tech support goes you can pretty much ask anything and get a line by line tutorial by someone to fix the problem within hours on the distro's forums.

I call that really good tech support.

[deusexm1]

i think linux sucks because there are no games for it. (small marketshare). Having said that i might as well add that i just finished installing Ubuntu 9.10. Still better than windows for everything else.