Ubuntu looks good (September 16, 2007)
The first time I heard about Ubuntu, I went to the web site and
was greeted by fluffy pictures of children
dancing in a circle. I could not figure out what they even THINK
is good about their distribution. I mean, sure, I like children, and
I like the world, but so do the people making all the other
distributions. Bill Gates
likes children, so should I switch to Windows? After an hour or
so of browsing around I gave up and continued using Debian, with which I was and am
happy.
Since then, I have run into a number of people who use and like
Ubuntu. Within my research group at
EPFL, in fact, I believe it is the only distribution of
Linux that is in use. Thus I decided to give it another try, and I
spent much of my recent vacation I put Ubuntu on my laptop and spent
most of my time doing that most leisurely of activities: reconfiguring
a computer.
It has been about a month now, so I thought I would share my
impressions. In general, it feels just like working on Debian, except
that many more things are configured with good defaults. More things
Just Work. Some specific examples:
- For wireless networking, Network
Manager is installed by default and makes it really easy to switch
between networks as you move around with your laptop. It is just as
smooth as the wireless network browser on Windows, albeit with the
small extra perk that it also handles wired connections.
- Automatic mounting works out of the box, including for cameras and
flash drives. I do not know how it is all set up,
- Thinkpad audio buttons are intercepted and processed, so when I
adjust the volume or toggle the mute, that request gets passed on and
affects the low-level ALSA settings.
On the down side:
- Hibernate and suspend are buggy out of the box. Google came to
the rescue, though. As suggested on Ubuntu forums, I now use userspace software suspend
for both suspend-to-disk and suspend-to-ram, along with a few hacks to
the hal)
scripts in
/etc.
- Something is wrong in the graphics toolkit, and windows do not
always refresh when they should. Thus, a lot of times I cannot see
the windows I am trying to click on, and have to guess where to click.
- My webcam Just Works, but none of the webcam-using applications
seem to use it.
UPDATE: After another couple of weeks, it seems that Network Manager
is not really ready for prime time. It is great when it works, but I
find myself restarting it all the time. If it takes that amount of
effort, you may as well start and stop interfaces from the command
line.
Lex Spoon