Windows Guy Tries Ubuntu 7.04

Windows Guy Tries Ubuntu 7.04
Posted on July 14th, 2007 by Tom Baker

I’m Live Blogging my first attempt at the newest version of Ubuntu , version 7.04. Let me get this out of the way first - I am a hard-core Windows fan. Say what you want about Microsoft, it powers the world. I can use any hardware, play any game and use nearly any software ever written. I can do it securely, and with little frustration. Every attempt I have ever made at using Linux has left me disappointed. I am a geek, but I do not relish spending 3 days to get a wireless card working when I can do it in 5 minutes in Windows. There, is that enough of a disclaimer? OK then here we go.

7:41 - Insert Ubuntu CD into my Dell Latitude 620. I’m using the Live CD because I cannot wipe out my Vista install. Monday I have real work to do, and we kind of frown on end-users (even us admin type) wiping out their systems and installing rogue OS’s.

7:43 - I’m in Ubuntu. The desktop is a nice tan color. It has a vague Vista look to it, though my task bar is on the top, not the bottom. I see my battery life indicator, sound card indicator and the correct time. I also see a weird icon saying Restricted Drivers are in use. Is this my first Ubuntu roadblock? (Yes I am willing to cut some slack given the fact I booted off a CD, and I did it 10x easier than trying to boot windows from one).

7:47 The restricted drivers messages says it is using an unsupported Intel(R) PRO/Wireless 3945 Network Connection driver for Linux. Hey that’s a plus first time out and it found my wireless card. It also says it is not using the NVIDIA graphics driver. I can click Enable if I want.

I want! I can use the card in Vista; I should be able to use the card in Ubuntu.

Click

7:48 I have a warning that the NVIDIA driver is needed to “fully utilize the 3D potential of NVIDIA graphics cards.” Well, no kidding Skippy. Click enable driver and hold my breath!

7:50 “An error occurred” Failed to fetch http://archive.ubuntu.com. Well of course, the machine is not configured for my wireless network. Guess we should go their next.

7:52 Notice an icon in the system tray (apologize to any Linux person if it’s called something else. To 90% of us it’s the system tray) that says No Network Connection. It looks like my Vista icon when I’m not on my network. I click it and see my home wireless network. Folks this is a MAJOR plus. I threw away Ubuntu 6 because of this. I click on my network and now have a spiffy wireless network window. I can enter my passphrase. Now, at this point I only see an option for WEP. I’m not sure if that’s because that is what I’m running (yeah I know about WEP being about as secure as Baghdad, but blame a Linksys Xbox Wireless adapter for that) or if it will not do WPA authentication. That is a big issue. I’m positive there is some way to do it, but I hope it is out of the box support and not some driver that I need to download. WPA is a big deal. Anyhow I type in my key and watch the spinning icon that says waiting for Network Key from wireless network. Hmm I typed in the wrong passphrase I guess. Let’s try it again. There is a neat option to actually see the phrase I’m typing in and not get stuck in typo hell. Great move since I don’t really worry about my 6 year old jacking the password over my shoulder.

7:57 I make a dumb discovery. The default wireless setting was for a 128 bit passphrase. I thought that’s what I used (vs. a Hex string). Nope - I used 128 bit ASCII to connect to my D-Link DI624. Even though it is a phrase and used in the same way, I guess it is different. Well live and learn. At least I figured it out. I also notice that the D-Link stores the ASCII password in clear text. Why does that not surprise me?

8:04 now I’m connected to the network. I have a window on the screen that says “Choose password for default key ring.” Is this for some sort of digital encryption? The description isn’t very helpful, but I’ll type in the password none the less. One cool feature is that it shows you relative password strength. Mine is somewhere in the middle. Cat is not. I’m surprised it didn’t laugh at me when I tried that.

8:06 I’m not up and running. What I am going to do I have no clue, but I have a desktop (still no NVIDIA driver, that dialog box is gone and I don’t know where to go to retrieve it) but I do have Firefox installed by default. That’s a nice touch. I never liked the old default browser in other Linux versions. I like Firefox. It feels like home. Me very happy man now.

8:08 I open Firefox. It takes a little longer, but that’s because I’m using the Live CD I’m sure. I go to CNN and sure enough it’s there. The screen quality is not nearly as sharp as Vista. I need to adjust the graphics or this will drive me nuts. I wonder if I right click on my desktop if I can do that.

8:10 Nope. But I do change to a nice background called “smooth chocolate.” Now I’m hungry though. BRB

8:11 I’m back. Thanks for waiting. I find the place to change my screen resolution. It’s under the “System” menu. That’s not as easy as right clicking, but it isn’t hard. What is hard is living with the fact my laptops screen resolution is not supported (NVIDIA driver better fix that). I can only show 1280×800 and the laptop is higher than that. Everything is readable but blurred.

8:14 I find the Restricted Drivers menu. It’s under the System, Administration menu. I appreciate the logic there. I click the button to install the NVIDIA driver and…Hey it’s downloading!! Success. Now it’s installing. If this works I’ll kiss my screen!!

8:15 well it works, sort of. The driver installed but now it says it needs to restart the system. I’m betting dollars to donuts that as soon as I do that, the changes I’ve made will be lost since I’m not actually installing it. Had this been a real install and not the Live CD then this would have been great. The download, install and config took about 1 minute, 30 seconds. The “same” download on Vista took about 3 minutes (I have a fast connection) but 5 or 6 minutes to install. It was a much fatter package too…. Anyhow let’s reboot just to see what happens.

8:18 A pretty closing sound plays and the Ubuntu reboot shut-down screen comes on. It pops out my CD and starts rebooting my machine. That’s a nice touch except that I need CD. Shove it in and reboot.

8:20 The laptop has rebooted and the services are firing up. It looks like I’m back where I started. If I want the proper screen resolution, I’ll have to install it on my laptop. Hmm for the first time I’m actually intrigued enough to do so.

(Note - I’m sure there is a way to create some sort of storage on the machine or a USB key to hold my settings. I’d be shocked if there isn’t - but the OS never offered that option to me, and I am not going to go hunt for things. That is not the point of this install.

8:24 I’m back on the network (much faster now that I know that passphrase\ASCII thing)

8:25 Time to look at what Apps are installed by default on the CD. I click on Applications and start looking. Under accessories I see the usual Calculator, Character Map, and terminal stuff, as well as some cool little programs like Dictionary (just what it says - I really like that) a screen shot program that I wish was in Vista, and something called TomBoy notes. It looks like a little yellow Outlook Note combines with One Note. Interesting, but I not something I need.

8:28 I look at the Games menu. Other than Sudoku, I don’t see anything I want to play.

8:29 Things are way more interesting under the Graphics menu. Two programs jump out at me F-Spot Photo Manager and GIMP Image Editor. Totally cool. It’s like getting Adobe Photoshop Essentials thrown in for free (though, in my opinion, less polished and harder to use). I have not used the other 2 programs - gThumb Image Viewer and Xsane Image Scanner. Still, between the 4 programs, my graphics needs would be met for the most part. I like Windows Photo Gallery better, but having GIMP installed by default is light-years ahead of Paint. Why does MS still ship Paint??? Why god Why?

8:33 No answer from God or Bill Gates to the last question, so it’s time to look at the Internet Menu. Ekiga Softphone looks like some sort of VOIP application. I fire it up but it wants me to fill out 10 pages of stuff. Maybe later. It looks like I need to go to ekiga.net to get some sort of account anyhow. Ubuntu also includes Evolution Mail and the Gaim Internet Messenger client. No need to go without IM just because you’re using Linux. I know it works well too because a dear friend of mine has been telling me about it for the last year. Over, and over and over.

8:40 OK EKiga curiosity gets the better of me. I follow the prompts to set up an account. It reminds me a lot of Skype, though not as pretty. I don’t think I can make a call to a real phone either, but I might be wrong. Wait I am wrong, but just like Skype, I have to pay for that. Not really useful for me, but I guess as an Open Source alternative to Skype, it’s pretty interesting.

8:44 My experiment with VOIP done, it’s time to turn to the Office menu. I knew OpenOffice was installed by default and was anxious to see how well it worked. It’s not Microsoft Office, but then again, it’s not Microsoft Office. That isn’t necessarily a bad thing. All of the things that 95% of people would need are there. The Word Processor is solid, the Spreadsheet program is very very good and it even comes with a Power Point type application called Presentation. They do not have the bells and whistles of the MS products, but they are free. Free is a huge bell and whistle all on its own. Hell, it’s a brass band playing on the Fourth of July.

8:50 The last Application menu is Sound and Video. There is a Movie player, music player an audio CD creator and a CD extractor. Oh there is also a sound recorder if you need one. For fun I fire up the Totem Movie player to see if I can watch any of the movies on my network. I see all of my machines on the network and can browse to the server that holds all of my movies (yeah I’m that kind of person) I see the list of movies, all in .wmv format so that I can stream them to my Xbox 360. It says that I cannot open them because I do not have permission. That may be true. At least it wants to play WMV files (a quick look shows that I may need to download a codec package to do so. That’s beyond the scope of this, but still that’s not a big deal I have to install codecs all the time on WMP 11.

9:01 Click on the Places menu. It looks like the standard Windows My Computer view. I see my laptops hard drive and click on it. I forget I have to mount it in Linux, but after a second I see that it has done so for me. I click it again and can see my files. Native NTFS support is nice (though I think I read that it is read only. Well read-only is fine by me frankly. I don’t need to screw up anything. When I install it (yes you heard me, when. It’s a when now) I’ll go for write support too. As it is I’m pumped I can get to my files.

11:11 PM. I’m writing this on my newly installed version of Ubuntu. I can honestly say it was a piece of cake getting it up and running. I had to do a few things first, like create some partition space on my hard drive to install Ubuntu on. Lucky for me, Windows Vista has a handy new “Shrink” command to shrink the size of your partition. Thanks to that, I was able to free up about 9 Gigs to devote to Ubuntu.

After restarting from the Ubuntu Live CD, I clicked on the “Install” icon on the desktop. I had to answer a few questions (time zone, keyboard layout, user account and password) and then sit back. I spent the next 15 minutes watching my laptop install the OS, configure the applications and finish the various setup tasks. Before I knew it, I was logged on, surfing the Internet and downloading the latest updates for my software. Total time between the start and the finish was 30 minutes (10 of which were Vista).

So far it is working well. I have all the basics I need to work, including my NVIDIA driver and correct screen resolution. I will start to dig through the slew of optional software packages that can be installed using the Package Manager. I also need to setup a PPTP connection to the office so that I can work from home. From what I can see, it should be possible, if not simple.

So, what are my final thoughts? I’m impressed for the most part. This is the first Linux desktop OS that I think could be used by just about anyone. The basic needs of most computer users are handled out of the box, and there are thousands of programs you could install to fit about any other need you might have.

Of course the major downside is that my Windows programs are s.o.l.. That’s not a big deal for most things, but for games it is. The level of support just isn’t there. Sure there are some fun games that are Linux compatible, but by and large it’s just not the same. For the time being I’ll have to use Vista for my gaming Jones.

Ubuntu 7.04 lives up to the hype. I doubt it will replace Vista for my day to day use. I admit that’s probably personal bias more than any functional deficiencies with Ubuntu, but it is the truth - I like Vista, warts and all. That said I’m looking forward to delving into Ubuntu further. Even if it’s not my primary OS, I think it just earned a permanent place on my PC.

I never thought I’d say that.

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Windows Guy Tries Ubuntu 7.04: Part 2 - Two Weeks Later
Posted on July 29th, 2007 by Tom Baker

So it’s been two weeks since I started using Ubuntu 7.04. I have to say that it has been a very interesting experience so far. To say that it has been easy and seamless would be a lie. However, I have to say that I’ve been able to do 99% of the things that I set out to do. Now that I’ve spent some time digging into the system I wanted to write a follow-up piece to my initial review. The goal isn’t to trash or gush over Ubuntu in any way. The goal is to point out things that I’ve run across in trying to make the transition from a polished, commercial package like Windows XP\Vista to a polished, open-source package like Ubuntu 7.04.

1. Look and Feel

My initial impression of Ubuntu 7.04 was that it had a clean, nondescript look. The tan background and big blocky icons were a throwback to Windows 95 days to my eyes. It wasn’t that it was bad, it just wasn’t flashy or fun. Note to the world - I understand that flashy and fun are not needed. I get that flashy and fun get in the way of actually doing work. Still, I like eye candy as much as the next guy. I can only guess the minimalistic look has to do with making sure the system actually will load on most peoples machine instead of pulling a Vista (though truth be told the non-Aero UI in Vista is still nicer than the default Ubuntu settings). That’s a smart choice, but a boring one.

Well thanks to several readers who pointed out that unlike Windows, I didn’t have to live with the standard look and feel of the OS if I didn’t want to - I started to tweak things a bit. Everyone told me to check out Beryl and hold onto my socks. Well I did, and I held and well, I couldn’t understand what the fuss was about. Nothing looked any prettier. There was no cool themes I could switch to, the icons still sucked. (Note: I have switched to compiz-fusion and do like it better)

That’s when my friend Anna laughed at me. That kind of condescending, you are so stupid old man kind of laugh. She told me how to tweak things like transparency, and transition effects. She game me the link to find better themes and icons. Then, after another fit of teasing me, helped guide me to configuring things more to my liking. Very cool. I was especially tickled when I downloaded a sweet set of OSXish icons for my system. The tweakability factor is about 10!

However, that’s a blessing and a curse. For a guy like me who likes to play around with stuff, it’s a cool feature. For someone like my wife, it’s something that is NEVER going to be used. She would never spend the time it takes to move beyond the default look. Being able to tweak and configure to your hearts content is one thing - NEEDING to do it to get a nice looking desktop is different. Heck even with 2 weeks of fooling around, I still can’t get the opacity quite the way I like it.

One major complaint that I have about Ubuntu (and possibly all Linux distros, I don’t know) is the font rendering. It sucks. There I said it - let the hate mail commence. The fonts are not nearly as nice as Windows. They may seem like a minor thing, but if you spend 10 hours a day in front of a screen, bad font rendering is an issue. I’ve done several things to try to fix the problem, with some limited success, but it still isn’t great. I changed the FONT settings to use subpixel smoothing for LCD screens, I added the Microsoft TTF font pack. Heck I even switched all my fonts to Tahoma (the XP font) in order to improve the look. It still isn’t right.

Granted, I understand the Microsoft probably spends more on fonts than some third world countries do on healthcare, so I’m willing to cut some slack here. I just hope it gets better in the future because my eyes just aren’t as young as they used to be.

The last thing I want to mention about the look and feel is a really small thing, but something that tickled me to no end. I was adding a few short cuts (or whatever you want to call them) to my top panel. I clicked in the middle of the panel and the icon was added there. At first I was a bit annoyed that it didn’t line up nice and neat like it would have with XP. Then it dawned on me - the icon was exactly where I had placed it. It hadn’t “snapped” into some arbitrary place, it stayed where I put it. I realized that I had complete control! It may not sound like much, but to me it clarified exactly what was so cool about the whole Linux movement.

2. Hardware Compatibility.

This was a major stumbling block for me in the past when trying various Linux flavours. Compared to Windows, hardware support (especially drivers from vendors) was lacking.I don’t care if that’s a fault with the manufacturers “ignoring” Linux (or as it should be put, wanting to maximize their ROI). I’m an end user and I want my hardware to work. If it doesn’t the OS is of little use to me. Thankfully, as I reported two weeks ago, I have been impressed with the hardware support under Ubuntu 7.04. It picked up my wireless card on the first try. It detected my video card (a NVIDA Quatro - thanks Dell$#@@) and suggested a restricted driver that worked (mostly). I’ve even been able to get my video camera, digital camera USB drivers etc. to all work.

Other hardware has been a little hit or miss. At work it seems to find my Microsoft wireless keyboard and mouse when booting up with no problem. At home it does not (same model too). While both the keyboard and mouse work fine once Ubuntu starts, the lack of detection means that I can’t change into Vista if I need to. Of course, if a Microsoft OS did the same thing I’d hear howls of protest - imagine “MS keeps users from choosing Ubuntu” :) Anyhow the USB detection at boot is a pain, not a killer.

A bigger issue to me is the video driver. This is complete newbiness on my part, I admit, but it’s a pain in the rump none the less. I want to switch to the latest NVIDIA driver for my card but can’t seem to figure out how to do it. I found the driver on the NVIDIA site. I downloaded and tried to follow their instructions. I keep getting an error that says I need to exit X before I can install the driver. The problem is, I couldn’t figure out how to do that. I tried CTRL+ALT+Backspace but that just logged me out. I tried CTRL+ALT+F1 but that didn’t seem to do the trick. I know there is just something I’m missing, but compared to launching an .exe file and having a program install the driver for me, it’s harder.

I need to figure it out too, because of a very irritating video problem that I am having. I tend to have a lot of windows open at once. Often under Ubuntu windows tend to go “black” on me if I have several opened at once. I have to minimize them all before I can read the one I want. It is a major pain in the ass. I’ve been told that it is a problem with the NVIDIA driver (this maybe BS, but it’s the best lead I have). Until I can get the new driver installed, I can’t test to see if it fixes the issue. If anyone out there has a solution, let me know.

Finally, if you are a laptop user like me, be warned that the Suspend function is broken, at least with my Dell Latitude 620. It DOES suspend the OS, but when I try to bring it back to life, the screen is black with a tiny little white square block in the middle. I have to reboot. I’ve read there are various attempts to fix this. Maybe now that Dell is selling machines with Ubuntu there is a fix already. Once again, if anyone knows how to correct the problem, let me know.

3. Ubuntu At Work

We have a windows network at work. Other than my laptop it is completely homogeneous. I was curious to see if I could use Ubuntu at work at do my day to day network admin tasks. By and large the answer is a resounding yes.

First, logging onto our Windows 2003 domain was a piece of cake. I could access all the network resources in our office. I was able to print to printers (your mileage may vary), connect to shares, surf the web through our firewall etc. I was even able to use the Terminal Service Client Applet to RDP into my servers and manage them. It was a little more complicated to setup than the MS RDP client, but not incredibly so. Frankly anyone needing to connect to my servers should be smart enough to figure it out.

I used the Evolution e-mail client to connect to Exchange 2003 and in a few minutes had access to my e-mail and calendar and contacts. Since it uses OWA to access my account, I was able to fire up the client at home and have the same nice UI that I used at work. It is a solid piece of software. It doesn’t replace Outlook 2003 or 2007 in my mind, but it may be the next best thing. It was much nicer than trying to use Firefox with OWA.

With the help of the community, I was able to get my PPTP VPN client working. OK here is a stupid user confession. I’m so used to right-clicking on an icon when I need to access the “context-sensitive” functions, that I thought the PPTP program that I installed wasn’t working. People kept telling me to click on the Network icon in the corner to launch my VPN connection and I didn’t see it. I didn’t realize you had to LEFT click in order to access the menus. DOH! Well lesson learned and VPN established. It works just as well and just as fast as the MS version too.

All in all there are few reasons that I couldn’t use Ubuntu at work to do my job. Sure I have to RDP into a server in order to run many of the server tools (is there an ADUC management tool for Linux? If so I’ll try it next), but I do that most of the time now because it’s faster than running the tools on my laptop. Depending on what you or your users need to do, you might be able to get away with Ubuntu instead of Windows. Application support is still the deciding factor there, but at least the gap has narrowed.

4. Misc Observations.

Windows needs a package manager. After using the Synaptic Package Manager for two weeks, I’m finding it to be a royal pain to have to Google for software in Windows. The Package Manager is a fantastic time saver. I’ve been able to install 90% of the stuff I needed without having to hunt for it on the Internet.

Deskbar (a little applet you can install) kicks ass as a search utility. It’s faster than the Vista search in my mind. it finds your files, allows you to launch programs etc..

Automatix is a godsend for Linux newcomers like me. I was able to install and configure the bulk of those “extra” programs that made the OS shine. It was a snap to install different IM clients, media players, codecs etc with just a few clicks. I was even able to install WINE and Crossover. If your new to Linux, check it out. It will make your life much easier.

The Linux Community: I’ve been active in the Windows community for a decade. There is fantastic support out there if you look. That said, I have never experienced the passion, dedication and willingness to help that I did in my first brush with the broader Linux community. Every problem that I ran into, I found someone willing (if not able) to help. While some people were real idiots (”Windo$e Sux man!” or “M$ users are stupid” demonstrate a level of ignorance that that defies explanation) most people were very nice. I hope as I delve deeper into Ubuntu and Linux in general that the same level of community and camardarie continues to exist.

In the end I’ve been very impressed with Ubuntu. After two weeks of banging under the hood and using it as often as I can, it has shown itself to be stable, fast and customizable. Hardware support is solid and application support is good. It is a tweakers paradise. I can work at work and and home. If I had to I could use it as my day-to-day system and not have many regrets. I’m still not as comfortable with it as I am in Windows, but I’m getting there. I may not be a convert yet, but I am a fan.

(PS Funny Note: The response to my original review was so overwhelming that our website crashed repeatedly. Like many hosting plans, our former host (Bluehost.com) just couldn’t keep up with the DIGG and Reddit effect. In a moment of drunken clarity, I decided to move BIO from a hosted solution to a self-managed virtual server with VPSlink.com. That’s right, two weeks after writing about Ubuntu Linux, I’ve managed to build and configure an Ubuntu server running Apache, MySQl etc. and port 14 blogs over. It was a real eye opening lesson. Being able to do that all remote, all from the command line, was sweet. I almost threw my laptop through the wall a few times when I screwed up and had to start over (firewall rules are fun when you are working remotely), but in the end I got it working. Thank you to all the people who put together the great walkthroughs on setting up Apache, MySql, Ubuntu and Webmin. )