Re: [Hampshire] Result of the Ubuntu Challenge

On Sat, May 12, 2007 at 16:18:04 +0100 (+0100), Stephen Davies wrote:
> Well, after lots of head shaking and much blood, sweat and tears
> (Not really ;-) )
> we got Ubuntu installed on the server alongside CENTOS.
>
> The O/S OOTB hangs when initialising the desktop. Tony W (The winner
> of the prize) dug around and found that the Sound Card was causing
> the problem. This is a Creative SB24 Live. The Desktop wants to play
> some sounds at startup and if the soundcard does not return an
> answer to the play requested (or whatever it is trying to do...) the
> whole desktop startup hangs.

Just to expand on this, we had to kill off esd (sound daemon), trying
to play a sound though Fedora also stopped the playback program (which
did die - I was _expecting_ that it had gone awol in the driver, but
this wasn't the case).

> Once we installed the O/S we tried to configure the monitor. After
> much apt-get etc the nvidia driver was installed but plainly refused
> to recognise that the monitor was capable of anything higher than
> 1024x768.

It's only fair to point out here that you did say you wanted to use
the command line to do it and not the graphical tools!

And that I don't know ubuntu very well. One thing that confused me
was that it hadn't done an initial "apt-get update" so it knew about
universe (it was in the sources.list file) but hadn't got the details.

> As we were using a Viewsonic VS2235wm 23inch display I was a bit
> miffed. Centos and Fedora found higher resolution OOTB.

I thought you said that you did need to change that? Must be my
hearing :-)

> from Nvidia and then switch to runlevel 3, run the installer and

switching runlevels to start/stop X has always seemed braindead
behaviour to me I must admit.

> then startx in config mode. There seemed to be far more apt-get,
> aptidude operations than should be needed, This is a general
> observation.

I was suprised that I couldn't see pre-compiled modules, so ended up
using modules-assistant to compile them up. If they were pre-compiled
ones that would have made life easier.

> If Linux is to be a real serious contender to Windows in the desktop
> arena the who area of configuring the desktop display OOTB must be
> addressed. Adding second (& more ) displays should be as easiy as it
> is with Windows. If that gets sorted out then there is a chance to
> get "Joe Sixpack" off of Windows and onto OSS systems.

Absolutely. Things have got much better, but there is quite some way
to go.

I wonder if there is scope for a network based tweaks package - i.e.
as part of the install it says "aha, you have a thinkpad T60 (lucky
person), right, we need to do _this_ tweak".

In windows land they won't ship unless it works (ish), we don't have
that luxury.

Adrian