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My Experience with Ubuntu

I’ve been pretty much a die-hard Fedora user since back when Fedora was Fedora Core and the latest version was FC3. A while ago (Septemberish) I acquired a brand new Dell Vostro 1000 at no cost, which came with Vista Basic. It was my first experience using Vista, and I did not like it.

I brought the thing (which I named Luna) back down to Akron for a few weeks to see if I could tolerate using Vista for my classwork. Right out of the box I decided “No” because for the life of me I couldn’t figure out how to set up the wireless to use LEAP authentication. I didn’t feel like digging through miles of user interface and right-clicking to get at it, while NetworkManager had a nice little applet on Linux that gave me wifi in only a few clicks. Between classes I downloaded Ubuntu 7.07 and installed it to Luna at the end of the day. Ubuntu immediately started to Just Work. I didn’t have to jump through hoops to get things working (except for the WIFI which I’ll discuss later..), because Gnome is admittedly slick (this is coming from a diehard KDE user too ;)).

As for the WiFi, I’m not sure what I did wrong. Either the driver was unsupported, or I never turned the device on with the fn+f4 combo I later discovered after upgrading Ubuntu to 7.10. At any rate, I couldn’t get wifi working until later.

My original plan for Luna was to sell it for the list price of $500, since I really didn’t have any use for it. Being the open source zealot that I am, I wanted the next owner to not have to go through the pain of dealing with Vista, so I wanted to sell it with Ubuntu installed on it. I’m not a total nazi about that so I included the original Vista CDs with the offer too. The result? Craigslist is populated by strange people.

Once the craigslist posting expired, I thought “What the heck, I think I’ll give Ubuntu a spin.” I remember there being some new versions of Ubuntu released, so I used synaptic’s distro upgrade feature. At the same time I was going to upgrade my laptop from Fedora 7 to Fedora 8 by using the DVD image. I was interested in seeing which one would be faster :)

Ubuntu won by fathoms, because Anaconda kept sucking up gigs of memory trying to compute package dependencies during the upgrade. I just turned the thing off and kept using Fedora 7 for a while.

When I rebooted Luna, Ubuntu worked even better than before. Namely, NetworkManager’s applet now had the LEAP option. I discovered the WiFi switch key combo and for one whole week I used Luna as my default laptop. The speakers on the Vostro are incredibly loud when at full volume, so I dumped my 8G music collection onto the 80G HD and moved my amarok database over. Ubuntu was very friendly. Incredibly friendly. I really liked the concept of Admin users vs. normal users (can use sudo vs not able to). It brought me fond memories of windows XP’s good qualities. I liked Ubuntu so much that I split my laptop’s Fedora partition in half and put Ubuntu right next to it. It detected all of the thinkpad hardware and worked like a charm. The next weekend I went home (which was thanksgiving break coincidentally), I wiped Callisto’s disk of Fedora and windows XP and installed Ubuntu to be the full-time OS.

Then I tried installing it on to my home desktop computer that weekend.

Ubuntu didn’t like my LDAP authentication system. For some reason, users who were in LDAP but not in the passwd file couldn’t use sudo even though they rightfully had the ability to. I tried every configuration combination possible but Ubuntu still put up a fight. Right down to the end when I got fed up and just rebooted back into Fedora 7.

At the same time, I was trying to do much the same with Callisto. The way I had it set up in Fedora was that Callisto would rely on the LDAP server unless I wasn’t at home, in which case it would use the passwd file. When I wasn’t home, I wasn’t trying to do tricky things with NFS or accounts who don’t use the laptop, so there wasn’t any real problem. LDAP wasn’t working on Pluto, so I didn’t want any bad mojo affecting my only real computer while I’m at Akron. I wiped out the Ubuntu and installed Fedora 8 from scratch. Previously, all my other computers had started at various points in the fedora evolution and I just used yum to upgrade between distros with mixed results (see my archive…).

Then I re-realized why I loved Fedora so much. F8’s fresh install from the KDE live CD went pretty much the same way that Ubuntu did. Things worked right out of the box. For the past 2 years or so I’ve been using Smart as my package manager of choice because it came with a swell UI, it could let me fix cyclic dependencies yum couldn’t handle, and there was a good readline-based CLI. More importantly, it was a lot faster than Yum because it didn’t have to download the repo metadata at every run. Since I switched to SmartPM, Yum appears to have made a good bit of progress. There is now a fancy plugin system and a few very useful plugins such as the priorities plugin which can easily solve many of my previous cyclic dependency headaches by protecting base packages from outside repos like atrpms or livna.

So now, Callisto is running a fresh install of Fedora 8, with no windows installed. I’ve got my whole music collection on it which is nice because now I don’t have to lug around a separate portable USB drive to listen to a quick song. While Ubuntu was nice on it, it just wasn’t ready for my enterprise-level setup. Ubuntu is absolutely perfect for a direct-from-windows replacement. It hides a lot of the power of Linux behind sudo, but has some problems when you want hardcore power. Fedora gives you a good balance between ultimate root power and regular user power. It just needs a good UI for Yum I think, and the whole deal can easily rival Ubuntu.

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