Ubuntu Hardy as sweet as the ‘Laren n Hardy’…

I was eager to try the new release from Ubuntu house… so eager that I could not wait for another 4 days to obtain the iso copy of Hardy Heron.  Today I downloaded the 8.04(LTS) Release Candidate and installed on my desktop.  I’ll not keep the suspence till the last paragraph of this log to give my verdict.  Its 9 out of 10… Ubuntu, you have won me over…!

I now have some experience in installing the Release Candidates (RCs) and found that essentially not much changes in the release after a distro development reaches this stage.  May be last minute touch-ups, polishes…  We can safely download a RC version and install it on our system for regular usage.  Anyway we can use update manager to keep up-to-date and to get rid of any bugs.  Its a good idea also from the point that once the distro is released the servers a bombarded by eager users to get the latest offering thus making our downloads a lot slow than it should be.  The download requests at RC level is comparatively low and if we go the ‘bittorrent’ way our headache is further reduced.  Infact I was surprised that I could download around 700MB file in less that 1 1/2 hour!

Ok, I downloaded the iso file, checked the md5sum and confirmed the integrity, burned it to a blank CD and put it in the DVD-writer tray and hit the restart button.  The first screen has changed a bit (not too much).  It asks whether we want to try it before installing(live CD mode), install it, CD check etc…  I choose the live CD mode and was in the default screen in no time.  I just moved here and there in the desktop, used firefox and afterwards hit the install button.

The installer has not changed much and all it took was around 15-20 minutes get installed on my harddisk.  This time however, the grub bootloader was not forcefully installed.  Nor did it ask whether to install or not.  I have Debian installed on my system and I always want my Debian bootloader to manage multi-booting.  Ubuntu behaved as if it ’sensed’ my preference and left bootloader uninstalled.  I just logged into Debian, edited the /boot/grub/menu.lst to include Ubuntu option and am booting fine into Ubuntu now.  But one thing I see in liveCD is that unless it auto installs the grub, we only see an initrd.img*.bak file, not the initrd.img* file.  If we use this file we cannot boot into the OS.  Don’t remember the exact error message though.  So, I copied the initrd.img.*.bak file to initrd.img.* file and used it in ‘initrd’ argument in the grub loader file.  Correct method or not, its working for me!

Once booted into Ubuntu the first thing that I liked is the default theme, background.  The default theme, which is always a point of complaint againt Ubuntu, has improved a lot this time.  There are minor changes in the layout, default programs etc… For example, Brasero is the new CD-Burner, Transmission is the bittorrent client…etc. All my media is clubbed under ‘Removable Media’ now, though I think my harddisk partitions should not have been there (We have always been taught that HD is a fixed disk )   Otherwise, the look and feel has not improved drastically.  May be its good especially when we know that the actual changes are seen in the way the programs now behave.  Most of them are being executed fast, no crashes as of now, programs look more polished and hopefully are less buggy.

Coming to multimedia, Totem is the default media player.  The .ogg and .wav files played natively but for .mp3, .mpg, .vob etc I had to install the ugly plugins…which ofcourse was as easy as confirm, enter, enter… stuff.  The .vob file does not play that good though.  We see some distortions… I cant explain it in ‘engineering’ terms… but its not clean, kind of hazzy…  Don’t know if its problem with that particular file or the format itself.  Let me confirm that later…

Firefox version is the latest 3.0 beta 5 and I found it to be extremely fast…probably as secure…  Evolution, is the default mail client.  Though I like Thunderbird more, I usually am forced to use Evolution as it has support for the Microsoft Exchange server which is not available in Thunderbird.  Evolution is slow and buggy.  But what to do… either the Evolution team have to deliver better or the Thunderbird team has to provide the Exchange server support.

Although my internet connection is working out-of-the-box, when I go to the Networking Tool, I see that the options are locked.  I clicked on ‘unlock’ and gave my sudo password, still its not unlocking!  Have to try that again sometime later.  And it has not recognised my wireless adapter which is D-Link DWA-110G USB adapter.  May be I have to use ‘ndiswrapper’.  Again, will keep it for later.

Well, overall I’m very much pleased by this release of Ubuntu.  Everything seems to work…work fast too…  Its not as eye catching as some of the other distros like Fedora, openSUSE, Mandriva… but it still has smooth and clean interface.  I’ll try my hand at Fedora 9 (Sulphur) too and then decide which one to install on my newly bought Vostro-1400 laptop.

Fedora, my love, you have a great competitor this time.  Its very tempting.  Keep up to my expectations or bare with the infidelity…

Gibbon may be good but only in the wild; not on my box

I had read some very good reviews about the latest release of Ubuntu-Ubuntu 7.10 aka Gutsy Gibbon. This review is not an expert comment by a geek about its performance, but feelings of an ordinary user. Performance-wise, all the applications – office applications, browser, mail client, chat client, image viewer, etc… all seemed normal. Let me summarize in the beginning itself that I disliked Gibbon for reasons that are very personal.

I’ve a very modest pc and a 256kbps connection. For most westerners/Americans it may be nothing. I’ve read them talking about speeds in Mbps/Gbps(?!). Here in India and the place I stay, 256kbps is pretty good speed. Anyway I was impatient to use Gibbon so thought of downloading instead of ordering free cd or purchasing it. It took about 10hours I then checked the md5sum to make sure the file is not corrupt and burnt the iso (in terminal using cdrecord. Its a nice geeky feeling you know ).

Once my install cum live cd was ready I booted through it and once I was in the desktop tried to move around. Found the layouts to be similar to Fedora except the colour-scheme and icons! It could be the feature of new GNOME. Then I clicked on the installer and it started to ask the regular questions. I choose the manual partition and continued to install. The first time however the installer got stuck. The busy curson icon kept rotating for a long time. I dont know if it takes that much time or it really got stuck as I thought. Anyway I restarted the installer and this time it went smoothly. It started copying files and then came the two most irritating parts.

First, it automatically started updating the apt by ’scanning the mirror…’ . It took hell lot of time. Why the f**k should it update apt while installing. It could very well do it afterwards. What if I had a 56k modem connection. I had no Idea it would to it otherwise would have disconnected the wire. No information, no choice

Second, it automatically installed grub on MBR. Why? Why do you assume that people only run Windows and its ok to install grub provided you make it dual-boot? Again where is the choice? I have Debian as my main OS and want Debian to run its grub. Well I’m not an expert and probably it doesnot matter what os runs grub. But _still_ I prefer Debian to take care of bootloading. Its for the same reason I hated Mandriva installation.

In both the cases why are they trying to be over-smart? They can give choices and tell the novice users what is the defaults are and ask them to stick to defaults if they get confused. Do they think users are idiots? As I type this I remember Linus’ comment on GNOME. He while asking people to prefer KDE to GNOME said if one thinks that users are idiots only idiots will use their products.

Ok, it finally finished installing (took 40m) and then I rebooted the system. Dont know what went wrong the boot menu was a trash. There was 4 repeated entries of Slackware, 2 of Fedora, no mention of Debian, CentOS! I restarted the system with my Debian DVD and reinstalled the grub. Then booted into Ubuntu.

Once inside, it was pain to see all my partitions auto mounted. Why do you auto mount all the partitions? Mount windows drives if you want (except the c drive which users can f**k up by mistake now that Ubuntu supports ntfs write).

By default, in Gibbon all the partitions are mounted in /media. May be others too do the same. But I’m kind of fuzzy about this. Ideally I want only the removable media(floppy, cds, pendrives) to be mounted on /media and all the harddisk partitions to be mounted on /mnt. I edited my fstab but it doesnot seem to work. Still all the drives are auto mounted. May be there is some tweaking which I dont know.

Now regarding performance, I found nothing very special to mention. All the applications – office applications, browser, mail client, chat client, image viewer, etc… all seemed normal. As I said except for the colour-scheme and icon graphics, it seemed similar to Fedora desktop. They may be just the updated versions with security fixes and optimised for the new kernel/GNOME etc… In that sense, ya it sure ‘just works’. As for music playback, there is one thing to note, the choice to install ‘ugly’ codecs to play mp3, mpeg, divx etc… some choice at last!

Last but not the least I dislike about Ubuntu is their too much talk about humanity. Sir, its good that you have such high ideals but why tomtom it. That Mandela speeches, brown colour themes, ‘linux for human beings’ stuff… Why over do things? Too much of anything is too bad. Look at Fedora. They dont talk much. Though their products are not the best all the time they dont irritate me by their touchy-touchy ideals. Have ‘freedom’ as your ideal and then shut-up and do your work.

If my vote counts I would give only 2 out of 5 to Gibbon. This release will not be my default desktop OS. Of all the releases of this year, Fedora has no competition-atleast on my personal computer!

Fedora Rocks!

Few days back I reinstalled the Fedora 7 (KDE ed). The installation took only 10m! Thats really ‘fast’ for me. Ofcourse boot time is lil longer than ubuntu/windows may be because it initiates so many processes. I guess a little tweaking may help in reducing the boot time.

As the default KDE install did not have Firefox and Thunderbird, I tried to install it through pirut. Pirut did trouble me. ‘Retriving information…’ went on and on and on… I lost my patience and force quit the application. I then used yum to install them and in about 8-10m I was browsing and mailing using my favourite applications. Dont know if that was a temp problem with pirut or it seriously has some bugs. Anyway I’m comfortable using yum so guess that should not matter much.

Fedora doesnot come with mp3/mpeg plugins for license/patent reasons. Its one factor that many take into consideration while choosing a distro. But inability to play the mp3s/mpegs doesnot bother me for two reasons. Firstly, I’m not a music guy. I won’t die without it. Secondly, I’ve found a script that converts mp3 to ogg and I’ve converted all my mp3 songs to ogg format. My ears are not sharp enough to notice the reduction in quality after conversion from one lossy format to another!

Apart from pirut all the default applications ‘just work’! I just love Fedora. Its going to be my primary desktop OS for a long time if they continue to keep this standard.