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2009 and still in fear of using new hardware in GNU/Linux!
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Comments (6)
My biggest problem with my MP3 player (cell phone) is that some of my own ripped MP3's crash it. Not really a "Linux" problem per se, but some kind of clash of assumptions between my phone and FOSS.
Quoting:I also believe that while Ubuntu is good at hype and marketing they do NOT provide a particularly compelling distro. I generally find more bugs and issues with Ubuntu than any of the other major distros.
So true! I spend 4 hours today beating Ubuntu 8.04 into submission to run my website (nothing extraordinary, just Apache, PHP, SSL and fileinfo). The same took me ~30 minutes on Debian Lenny.
@caitlyn - Could it be bad luck on your part? I've found 8.04 LTS to be one of the most stable desktops I've ever seen. Everything "just worked" out of the box
@sander - could you provide specifics? why did the same actions take 4 hours on ubuntu server? I'm curious, that doesn't sound right, since ubuntu server is basically lenny/sid anyway.
Having migrated my own servers from suse to ubuntu, I was pleasantly surprised by how smoothly everything went, how quickly I was able to get everything up and running, and how stable it's all been over the past year.
@sander - could you provide specifics? why did the same actions take 4 hours on ubuntu server? I'm curious, that doesn't sound right, since ubuntu server is basically lenny/sid anyway.
Having migrated my own servers from suse to ubuntu, I was pleasantly surprised by how smoothly everything went, how quickly I was able to get everything up and running, and how stable it's all been over the past year.
herzeleid: 8.04 LTS is stable on my netbook with the sole exception of the usual Network Manager slowness/flakiness. 8.10 is less good. On my Toshiba, well... Ubuntu can't configure X since dexconf was introduced. If I boot into the CLI and then configure X manually using xorg.conf to override the autoconfigured nonsense I can make it work. Network manager was still less than brilliant. There are other minor bugs as well, like the lack of audio out the headphone jack with intel-sda audio chips. That requires patching ALSA to fix it in 8.04 and is a well documented issue.
Honestly, no, it's not bad luck. Lots of people seem to find Ubuntu buggy on their hardware. I'm one of them.
Honestly, no, it's not bad luck. Lots of people seem to find Ubuntu buggy on their hardware. I'm one of them.
Herzeleid: Lenny ships with root certificates for CACert.org (all my certs are from CACert). Ubuntu does not. There is a procedure to get these into Ubuntu but it only describes how to add them to Firefox. The update-ca-certificates script that is supposed to install them system-wide did not work. Apache could not verify the server certificate nor the client certificate and gave no error, just a never ending "connecting". I tried to solve this issue for nearly three hours and gave up. I pointed Apache directly to the cacert.org.pem file and that did work but causes Apache to reject all certificates from all other CAs. Not a problem in this specific instance (I was just installing a demonstration laptop with Apache running on localhost with only my certificates) but this would be a major problem on a production server.
The second issue was a bug in the script that's supposed to build and package PECL extensions for PHP as debian packages. Starting with PHP 5.3 the fileinfo extension is part of the PHP core but Lenny and Ubuntu ship PHP 5.2 where you had to get that extension from PECL. However, since PHP 5.3 is the latest stable, the PECL repository gives of a warning that fileinfo is deprecated. The ubuntu PECL builder chokes on that warning, requiring me to modify the build scripts manually. The Lenny build script works fine (it had the bug as well, but was fixed somewhere between the time that Ubuntu forked Lenny/testing and the time that Lenny was released).
The second issue was a bug in the script that's supposed to build and package PECL extensions for PHP as debian packages. Starting with PHP 5.3 the fileinfo extension is part of the PHP core but Lenny and Ubuntu ship PHP 5.2 where you had to get that extension from PECL. However, since PHP 5.3 is the latest stable, the PECL repository gives of a warning that fileinfo is deprecated. The ubuntu PECL builder chokes on that warning, requiring me to modify the build scripts manually. The Lenny build script works fine (it had the bug as well, but was fixed somewhere between the time that Ubuntu forked Lenny/testing and the time that Lenny was released).
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His solutions are almost as clueless as the vendors. First, I don't really believe "frangementation" is a problem. A Linux kernel driver works on every distro. Standardizing on Ubuntu, making Ubuntu == Linux on the desktop, is trading one corporate overlord for another. Ubuntu is benign now but given a Microsoft-like position would they remain so? I doubt it. I also believe that while Ubuntu is good at hype and marketing they do NOT provide a particularly compelling distro. I generally find more bugs and issues with Ubuntu than any of the other major distros.
He claims he doesn't see Linux on the desktop anywhere. Either Australia is very different than the U.S. (I'll concede that is quite possible) or he isn't looking very hard. I bought my netbook (the system I'm typing this on) preloaded with Linux. Oh, and yes, it was Ubuntu. It did just work but so do other distros on this machine. Perhaps the reason we aren't "door knocking" is that for most of us things just work. Again, most of us don't live in Australia.
Buying preloaded systems bypasses any issues of "late" drivers as well.
I found this article lacking clue. He may have fears. A lot of us don't.