Not Impressed!
Happy holidays, Merry Christmas and all that to you all. Have a safe and joyful week or so off from the monotonies of work.
Yesterday I received some new AVROpendous Mini boards, which I’ll post more about soon. Today’s focus is on what I’m NOT impressed with, a set which most definitely excludes the AVROpendous.
Today, the cause of my frustration: Ubuntu. I’ll extend that – Linux in general. I’m sure to raise the hackles of quite a few folk – but let me say this: Linux sucks for the most part. Specifically, its compatibility sucks, although that is more due to the fault of manufacturers than the developers, but using it one can get the feeling that the entire system is a house of cards just waiting to fall down.
Today for the second time on my new laptop, I tried to get a dual boot Ubuntu/Vista system set up. Easy enough – I repartitioned the drive in Vista, inserted the Ubuntu disk and away I went. Towards the end I deliberately disabled the installation of the GRUB bootloader, so that I could use a modified version of the Windows Vista bootloader to perform the dual boot. Big mistake.
First up, the Ubuntu live CD just doen’t play nice with my laptop. Out of the box, there’s no graphics card support, no audio, and no wireless. It also hasn’t got a clue how to manage my motherboard’s ACPI, leading to a failure to sleep, scale the CPU or CPU fan speed, or even stay on reliably. It literally would die unexpectedly occasionally with a hard power-off, despite being plugged into AC power at all times.
Next, the installer decided to remove the boot flag of my Vista partition, even though I explicitly told it not to mess with the system boot. That led to a totally unbootable system, forcing me to go back to the live CD and fire up gparted to fix the flag. God knows what less computer literate folk would have done when confronted with a “No Operating System Found” error on boot.
So, I was back to my Vista boot install. Next, I installed EasyBCD to modify the bootloader and add a modified GRUB to boot to the Ubuntu partition. No dice – I had to Google for the correct Ubuntu grub menu entries for my distribution, as there was no way to get into the Ubuntu parition and find the image name in /boot/.
Having wasted several hours thusfar, all I managed to get was a disk with 10GB less than I started with, and a broken dual boot which would give the option of booting into Vista, or booting into a totally black screen. Nice.
Attempt three: back to the Ubuntu live CD to try to install GRUB. After a LOT of fanangaling around trying to get grub-install to work, more Googling told me to first change the boot flag to the Ubuntu partition using gparted again, and then manually copy over critical GRUB files to /boot/. That required me to first mount the installed Ubuntu partition in the live CD session.
Once more, time wasted, nothing gained – same black screen as before when booting Ubuntu. I eventually decided to start over, wiped the Ubuntu partition and re-ran the Ubuntu installed – this time allowing it to install GRUB. That led to a working dual boot, although I still had the same driver issues in the installed partition as I did with the live CD version.
SOUND: Apparently this requires the installation of some backport packages, and changes to the ALSA configuration files. Gave up before I got around to trying the fixes posted on the web.
VIDEO: Ubuntu has a nice “Restricted Drivers Manager” for the installation of proprietary drivers. Try as I might, I couldn’t get the video driver to install, with the system throwing an error about a xorg-driver-fgrlx not being found. Ran sudo apt-get install xorg-driver-fgrlx, which didn’t work. Eventually gave up.
WIRELESS: First I tried using ndiswrapper and the Windows drivers to my wireless card. As far as I could tell the installation worked fine, but not a peep from iwconfig. Started to try MadWIFI, but couldn’t get the package to download and install correctly.
Eventually, I gave up, after having my laptop go into thermal shutdown from the OS not being able to manage the power features of my motherboard. Wiped the partition and moved back to my Vista install.
Linux is great to tinker with, but I’ll be damned if I can get it working. It’s the opposite problem to Windows; while Windows supports the latest hardware instead of older legacy hardware, Linux will only give a semi-satisfactory experience when installed on ancient machines. Nuts to it – Windows may be confounding to many luddites, but I’ll be damned if it isn’t simple when compared to the alternatives. I shudder to think what would happen if I gave a Ubuntu PC to a non-techie relative.
Ubuntu, and Linux, is to be kept soley as a live CD for use on my other machines, when testing out my USB deivces. While it may fail to work as a normal OS for me, at least on old machines it provides more debugging information about faulty hardware than Windows.
Bah humbug.
I’m not sure the whole dual booting experience would have been any better if you’d had a working Linux install and were trying to install windows as dual boot. Windows would probably have gone right ahead and scrubbed the boot loader. Dual booting sucks period.
Driver support? Yea it sucks… I don’t think I’d bother installing Linux on hardware that I didn’t know was well supported anymore, it’s just too much hassle. But yea, I’ve been there it’s painful. If you want a cheapish Linux box netbooks like the EEE PC are a good buy. The Linux support is surprisingly good!
Linux gives you a solid UNIXlike platform. I didn’t really get the advantage of that to begin with but having all the standard utilities and a powerful commandline is really useful. I don’t think Linux is really ready for your average user, unless it’s all been setup for them and they only want to browse the web and never install any hardware. But for hacking around I could never go back to windows.
I would say that the compatibility issues you are having are 100% the fault of the manufacturers and not at all the fault of the kernel developers. All manufacturers are welcome to submit their hardware information to http://www.linuxdriverproject.org/ so it can be supported by the kernel. The kernel devs will even sign NDAs if required. The problem is that manufacturers just don’t care despite all the advertising and contact attempts that the Linux Driver Project has made. The kernel devs are actually underworked; there is not enough work to go around for the 200+ devs that volunteered for the Linux Driver Project. So the blame lies squarely on the manufacturers for not even trying.
Hardware compatibility issues arise on any operating system that the hardware manufacturer didn’t design their hardware for. As an example, Microsoft had to do a ton of work to get Windows running on the OLPC XO-1 because running Windows on the XO-1 was not a design consideration when the hardware was made. The real issue is that almost all consumer hardware manufacturers test specifically with Windows and even make hardware changes to accommodate the idiosyncrasies of Windows, ignoring Linux testing completely. This is why virtually all consumer runs fine with Windows: because the hardware was designed for Windows, not because Windows was designed for it.
When a Linux distro is pre-installed, all hardware compatibility issues go away because the manufacturer ensures that it works. For example, laptops purchased through http://dell.ca/ubuntu works just fine with Ubuntu; there are no hardware compatibility issues at all. This is similar for other laptops, such as the Eee PC, that run Linux out of the box.
Please put blame where blame is due: on the manufacturers, not the kernel devs, the distros, or the Linux kernel itself.
I think you should read your own comment. Howe many “average users” *ever* install an OS themselves or change any hardware? Answer: none, because the moment they do, the cease to be average users.
Disabling options that are specifically there to may your life easier will likely make your life difficult.
I do it all the time. They really like it. The less technical they are, the more they like it. They usually like it because it will “just work” and support their hardware out of the box (many onboard sound features, for example, are not supported by Windows unless you have a driver disk, which they have often lost. Ubuntu has never failed to support this hardware) and also because the interface is easier to understand.
Sounds like you’ve ended up with a particularly nasty laptop tbh.. (in terms of standards-compliance and driver openness, or lack thereof)
When buying a new machine I always look for hardware that is known or trusted to be compatible. NVidia for graphics, for example, and say Intel or Prism for the WiFi. That said though, incompatible hardware is usually pretty rare these days.. Most Wifi cards work or can be made to work painlessly. Sound nearly always works out of the box and so do graphics cards, until you want GLX.
As such I am running (only) Debian Sid on a brand new core2 based laptop with 4G RAM (yes 4G in 32bit mode – suck that nubos) and ridiculously fast nVidia graphics. Not a single thing on it doesn’t work. Well, I tell a lie – the fingerprint reader doesn’t work, but I’m working on that 😛
To be honest, a fan controller that is by default OFF until some software tells it what to do, regardless of temperature, is a SERIOUSLY FAULTY fan controller, and your laptop is rubbish. 😛
Your ACPI sounds a bit like my old Acer’s, in that the DSDT was compiled using a broken Microsoft compiler that does not follow standard ACPI conventions and thus, only Windows can read it properly. But at least that motherboard had sensible hardware defaults.
Most hardware works fine, but every now and then you get some manufacturers (particularly with laptops) that keep all their specs to themselves and don’t follow any standards. This is not Linux’s fault.
Also, it was thoroughly silly to trust the Windows Vista bootloader to load Linux. 😛
I tried to make my PC dualboot Win95 and Linux when I was like 14. That was my first PC and I had to wait like 2 years to get it. Imagine how pissed I was when I wasn’t even able to run fdisk. Dunno how I fixed it but never layed a hand on any Linux ever since then.
What is the make and model of that laptop ? Good to know to avoid it for us others.
Linux (Ubuntu & others) has installed fine for me whenever I have had to install it. Sometimes manual intervention was required to get a better performing video driver. Sometimes something does not work after waking up from standby. My Laptops are various Thinkpad models, known to contain Linux-friendly hardware, though.
I’m very surprised that you find it so difficult work around Linux problems, but still manage very well with all the crap of M$-standards in LUFA. I guess it’s a matter of focusing your work…
Anyway, these days one may install Linux distributions directry from internet and even inside working Windows installation. The only apparent drawback is some slowdown due to the NTFS-dirver. I bet you’ll be happy with the speed on debugging though, but maybe not with video editing.
http://wubi-installer.org
By using Wubi you also save our valuable natural resources by not making a redundant CD. Most importantly, you may edit ALL your configuration files comfortably from Widows as the whole linux install is just one directory (folder). Wubi and associated Linux installation behaves just like a regular Windows executable, so normal installation and uninstallation tools are in your service.
Happy and productive year 2009!