Has it been a week with Ubuntu already?

The Norfolk Punt David Norfolk 2nd December - CU2008 Day 1

Teblog David Tebbutt 26th November - Sidestep formal structures for effective change

Quocirca Fran Howarth 26th November - Just who is sharing your sensitive information?

Quocirca Rob Bamforth 26th November - No north-south divide on the internet

Freeform Comment Tony Lock 26th November - Backup and Recovery - Still Imperfect After All These Years

Fern Halper Dr Fern Halper 23rd November - IBM and the Smarter Planet

Blogs > Total Immersion

Has it been a week with Ubuntu already?

By: Jon Collins, Service Director, Freeform Dynamics
Published: 1st December 2007
Copyright Freeform Dynamics © 2007

Its been an interesting experience so far—notably my reading and writing of blogs has suffered as I've been tinkering and tweaking, but I think I now have a stable environment, notably:

Ubuntu 7.10 running Gnome
VirtualBox for Outlook, Office and Mind Manager access
Firefox and Thunderbird for Web and personal mail
KDevelop for Ruby development
gTwitter, Skype and Xeyes in the toolbar
OpenOffice for simple word processing and looking at presentations
Drivel for typing this

And it all works OK—well, it should, shouldn't it? I've tested pretty much all the options and features that could be alternatives to the above, but for the most part they're either not suited, or not working. Specifically, there appears to be a bug in the current release of Evolution, which is preventing me from accessing Exchange directly. I haven't spoken to the Evolution guys but I've read pretty widely on this and no dice. Its not blocking but it woudl be nice if it worked. I've also tried the gadgets tool (name eludes me)—it doesn't work under Gnome, which for some reason I keep coming back to from KDE, don't ask me why but its just simpler and cleaner. Ah, that's why

I have had inordinate problems with screen resolutions on my external display; I was also having issues with the screen freezing up for periods but it now transpires that the latter was caused, or exacerbated by, the former. Newbie tip: don't try (like I did) to hack your xorg.conf file, before running the command to detect and auto-generate such a file from scratch. This worked much better—its all documented in the Ubuntu display howto here. There are issues with the display freezing in Gutsy, but I would recommend sorting this first and see if it resolves them.

Update: I was also having an issue with suspend/resume not working, which seems to have "gone away" now I'm running with the new xorg.conf. Spooky

I've also got to get my microphone working. I was surprised to receive a Skype call a few days ago—surprised because we don't tend to use it that much for work any more (default action: reach for phone). I grabbed my headset and plugged it in to find that I needed to configure the ALSA device driver, and it wasn't going to just play so I left it. Still need to get round to that.

I also want to look at Kandy as an alternative for driving my USB 3G dongle. Apart from that, I think I'm done. It was interesting—a few days ago I went back to my Vista install for some reason, grumbling as I did about the Ubuntu display issue. When I logged in however, I did have a similar issue with recognising the display resolution etc, which made me have a bit of a rethink (conclusion: displays are tough in any OS). I've tried a couple of other things—for example installing a software configuration management tool for my development efforts, before remembering that it could be quite a tricky thing to deploy, and removing both it and Apache. Lesson learned—there's such a thing as too much choice!

As a final point I had a sudden 'ah-ha' moment as I used XP within VirtualBox. I had been worrying about what happened to my data if the virtual machine should get corrupted in some way—but then it suddenly occurred to me that everthing within the computer was virtual and at risk, being converted into a string of 0's and 1's and processed through this sexy-looking, but ultimately deceptive Von Neumann machine. The answer: to back up the data, of course. So I have now installed SmartSync within my virtual environment, and it is doing exactly that. Whoa!

Reader Comments

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4th December 2007: 'dbro' said:

Response to T I's article "Has it been a week w/Ubuntu?"
So basically are you saying your probs w/Ubuntu were "U" related and not true issues with the system?
I'm considering a switch from the "W" and am reviewing responses from current users about how the product "really" functions. Thus far, the main complaints arise from start-up issues usually caused the users themselves not reading or following instructions provided by the 'U' and they seem almost happy to acknowledge this, once issues are resolved and they're up and running; and, like you, seem greatly relieved to be released from "W"...I can't imagine why. So my question is...drumroll, please...what is your final synopsis on Ubuntu & Linux? also, what issue(s) prompted you to switch (apologies if you've addressed this in other blogs, I've not read any of your previous publications)?

My thanks, D

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5th December 2007: 'Claire' said:

Well, you ask an honest question and I couldn't help but provide my own honest answer.

I switched to Linux about 2 years ago. I am a female uni student and definitely a user - not a programmer! - but I swore that I was never going to use XP on my computer (I had seen the troubles that my family were having) and I was convinced that there must be a better way! I bought Xandros and used that for about a year (top marks for a dead easy to learn distro) and now I use Ubuntu exclusively on my own computer.

She's lovely! She looks just how I want her to, performs great on the 3 year old (recently upgraded) computer that I own and I can do everything that I want to (need to listen to music? OK! need to download tv shows? OK need to surf the net, watch youtube, play with photos, write essays? Play games etc etc. OK!) That said these are my criticisms of my great little computer that you may want to know about: * In order to log in to the other computers on my home network I needed to use the command line (all of about 4 lines and then it was set permanently, but I still had to be able to copy and paste!)
* No problems with drivers or anything but when I got a new ATI graphics card I needed to download another package to make the pretty compiz stuff work (again not a big problem - open the Synaptic program tick the box and press 'apply')
* If you download very new programs they may not work properly - for example the wonderful Internet TV program Miro has not connected properly a couple of times but it is still at version .9

I provide these as examples - everything else has been perfect. All in all these problems took about 10 minutes each to fix (a little looking on the net and downloading the missing package or ticking the different box etc.)

Not big problems, and certainly easier that the issues that my father has had adjusting to Vista recently (His printer didn't work, he needed to download a commercial program to make PDF's from files and then he had to solve three separate problems for his CAD program to work - and it still comes up with an error message every time you try to open it!)

So if you can handle doing a search on the Ubuntu forums to solve any little problems and you can copy and paste (literally copy and paste) into a command line if you ever need to, then by all means friend - Free yourself!

BTW - When I started looking at linux I explored three separate distros before settling on Xandros - I suggest you do the same. While I adore my ubuntu, I have heard a lot of people plugging pclinux and Mandriva too so they may be worth exploring so you have a nice comparison or two - Good luck and Have fun!!!

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5th December 2007: 'Jon Collins' (Author) said:

Totally agree - I think the massive (and very public) backwards compatibility issues knocked any wind Microsoft was trying to put into Vista's sails. Shame really, as I do prefer it to XP.

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5th December 2007: 'Jon Collins' (Author) said:

Hi there,

Interesting question - as it falls somewhere between the "RTFM" requirement for software, and the fact that much of Linux is supported by the community... and is not always particularly intuitive. There are some bugs in Ubuntu and its "bundled apps", many of which can be worked around if prepared to read up a bit and dredge through bug reports, top tips etc. There are also configuration complexities - one thing Windows does pretty well is to make things as simple as possible, the downsides are that (a) even Microsoft can't reduce the simplicity of a computer to that of a VCR, and (b) sometimes simple becomes simplistic, and is counterproductive. Its never perfect, but in general things do work. Case in point: right now, there are issues with the clipboard in my install of Ubuntu. I have had a browse but noting obvious has yet presented itself: I'm sure there will be a workaround (e.g. restart the clipboard daemon, try a different one etc) but call me old fashioned, I'd rather it just worked in the first place. The same could be said for suspend/resume and for wireless networking. This isn't some pro-Microsoft rant - one thing a Mac user will tell you is the way everything just works (quelle horreur when it doesn't!) but the trade-off for ease of configuration and use is vendor lock-in.

To answer your question, the jury's still out as I'm only a week or so into the pilot. The question will become a simple one of value - whether the sum of the benefits is greater than the sum of the costs. Right now I'm prepared to put up with a few foibles to gain a few extras, so I guess I'll be deciding how long I am prepared to sustain that situation or whether I revert to Windows.

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5th December 2007: 'Duncan' said:

Jon, have you tried www.getautomatix.com with Ubuntu - many of the bells and whistles you learn to love in Windows are available via a simple installer.

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5th December 2007: 'Humphry' said:

I've tried both Linux (KDE and GNOME) and OS X desktops and prefer the simplicity and robustness of MS Vista hands down.

Linux Desktops are okay for geeks in closets with an old laptop and loads of time to waste, but that's where they'll stay until some one wakes up and forges a unified desktop out of KDE/GNOME/xxx. When this happens Vista might have some real competition, but I suspect it never will - look at all those web browsers which render sites differently ... its the same story all over again.

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6th December 2007: 'Slimer' said:

I do agree with your fundamental point that commercial developers would find it easier to target Linux desktops if there was a single desktop to target ... but seriously ... as if! Linux is all about choice and freedom. Why would they want a single desktop after all many have left Windows to escape the GUI lock-in.

If you want a good, commercially viable desktop capable of supporting business applications then look closer at Mac OS X - it is good, just dig a bit deeper. This is especially good for designers who can access a wealth of software from Adobe...

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6th December 2007: 'Jon Collins' (Author) said:

"Linux Desktops are okay for geeks in closets with an old laptop and loads of time to waste..."

Damn, that's me found out then :)

I see where you're coming from, but I think Ubuntu has already come a long way in resolving this. I'm collating some questions for the Ubuntu team and this will certainly be among them.

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