Ubuntu: the calm before the Gutsy

After months of intermittent use of Xubuntu on my less-capable converted thin client (I always liked Xubuntu, for the record), I decided to put the standard Ubuntu on my new, old $0 Laptop in anticipation of the 7.10 Gutsy release of the popular Linux distribution in, at this writing, three days.

It's pretty much a coincidence that an even more hotly anticipated operating-system release -- Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard -- will also debut this month. It's concidental because Canonical, the company behind Ubuntu and its brother/sister distros (Xubuntu, Kubuntu, Edbuntu) has committed to releasing an update of its Linux OS every six months. Yes, like clockwork.

There are also new releases from openSuse (out now) and Fedora (on the way), and the new Red Hat Global Desktop expected in November, so it's high season for Linux distribution releases.

I've written reams about Xubuntu, as well as Puppy Linux, Damn Small Linux, Slackware, Vector Linux, CentOS/Red Hat, Zenwalk and Debian over the past year, but I've only had the $0 Laptop -- a Gateway Solo 1450, circa 2002 or so, with a 1.3 GHz Celeron M processor and 256 MB RAM -- in working condition for a couple weeks.

But even though the $0 Laptop has specs that seem similar to the thin client (originally named the Thin Puppy due to its continuous month running Puppy Linux 2.14 without any storage except RAM), performance of the Gateway laptop has been much better, and I can run GNOME- and KDE-based distros with much more ease.

Actually, I've said for awhile that GNOME is much faster than many give it credit. And when it comes to KDE, there are fast (Slackware) and slow (SimplyMepis) implementations.

On slower PCs, you feel it enough that running Xfce and Fluxbox as the window managers in X really gives you an advantage in terms of application launch time.

One of my first "official" acts in Ubuntu 7.04 was to download Fluxbox, create a menu for it and see how well it runs. So far, there are problems. For one thing, the Nautilus file manager doesn't play well with Fluxbox. Once you load it, the screen background gets GNOME-ized -- colors change, the Fluxbox panel usually disappears and desktop icons from GNOME appear.

My solution: using ROX-filer instead of Nautilus. I learned to love ROX when using Puppy, and it works well in Ubuntu under Fluxbox.

Another problem I have had is that when doing a "save target as" for a Web link to a file, the display gets a bit hinky -- the "save as" box begins to flutter, and there's a usable "save as" box on the window below. It's a pain. It could be a quirk exclusive to my Gateway laptop, but I'll try the same thing soon in Debian to make sure.

That reminds me. I'm dual-booting Ubuntu 7.04 and Debian Etch 4.0r1 on this machine. I gave up using the same /home partition for both. Why? Because at one point, I already had Debian installed, and when I installed Ubuntu, half of the damn thing was broken due to conflicting config files in the /home partition. I couldn't get networking to work -- and couldn't even load Firefox. So I'm keeping separate /home directories for both Ubuntu and Debian in the same partition as the OSes themselves. I cleared out the former /home partition, which for now I'll use to backup /home files in case I need to do any reinstalls.

Ubuntu broke a couple of more times -- but it was all due to the dual-booting, I think. My sense of it is that if you are going to dual-boot Ubuntu with anything else, it's better to use the /boot/grub/menu.lst file in Ubuntu, as opposed to the one generated by, in my case, Debian, in order to keep both partitions bootable.

Cool thing: When I did a kernel upgrade for Debian (not my idea -- it was suggested by the Update Manager), it looks as if Debian found the menu.lst in the Ubuntu partition and updated it along with Debian's own menu.lst. A nice touch -- and yet another reason why Debian is as ready as just about any distro for duty on the average user's desktop.

As I say, I've been primarily a Xubuntu user due to my hardware circumstances, but now that I've got a laptop -- even though it's 5 years old -- that can "handle" GNOME really well, I'm enjoying being in that environment -- and running Ubuntu.

I like the way the type is rendered in Gedit, which I've been using heavily. And the Nautilus file manager (when used in GNOME) responds well and is pretty intuitive.

I've had a few glitches when changing network parameters. I have a DHCP connection at home and a static IP at the office, and sometimes when I change from one to the other, it doesn't work right away. I shouldn't have to quit Firefox, let alone reboot, to make networking work right after changing the configuration, but that's what I've had to do. It merits more testing, and now that I have both configurations saved (that feature didn't work on my previous Xubuntu 7.04 install), maybe it'll work better. I haven't had this problem in Debian, by the way.

I've said before that this Gateway Solo 1450 laptop seems to like the power management settings of both Ubuntu and Debian better than that of Slack-based distros. I also gave the CentOS 5.0 live CD a spin, and the laptop performed equally well. I just might add CentOS (or Fedora, for that matter) to the nearly empty former /home partition.

Back to power management. Suspend does work on the Gateway. To get out of suspend, however, you can't just hit the keyboard or mouse. Instead, you have to hit the power button. It's not as elegant of a solution, but the fact that suspend works at all is a huge deal, and I'll take it.

I also looked on the Ubuntu Web site for wireless adapters that work "out of the box" in Ubuntu. One of them is Netgear's WG111 USB 802.11g adapter-- some versions at least. Tiger Direct is selling refurbished models for $14.99 each. That's cheap enough to take a chance on. I've never been successful using ndiswrapper and pretty much hate the idea of having to kludge it like that, so I'd be happy to find an off-the-shelf USB adapter that "just works" with Linux.

I don't know enough about Linux kernels and what modules are loaded or not, but I'd be happy to roll specific modules that I needed into the kernel instead of having it packed with a bunch of junk that I'll never need. I know that Zenwalk has a nice GUI application that allows this to be done, and it also has a GUI for ndiswrapper. Even though they're GUIs, I don't think of screwing around with the kernel and ndiswrapper within the realm of the average user, but I feel that, in some way, it should be.

However it's accomplished, I think that every wireless adapter out there -- past, present and future -- should work (with working encryption) in Linux. And they should work without resorting to a bunch of command-line hacking, either. It's a total deal-breaker for users new and old, as far as I'm concerned.

And I'm not assuming that all wireless adapters work with all Windows -- or any Macintosh -- boxes, either. I've had plenty of wireless problems in Windows 98 and 2000, that's for sure. Linux needs to be better -- and better than Windows, that's all I'm saying.

I did manage to play an MP3 in Ubuntu. Why the Totem movie player is set as the default is something I don't understand -- it's a messy solution, as far as I'm concerned -- but it did work. When I tried to play the first MP3, a message popped up about codecs, along with the potential for illegality. I downloaded all of the codecs. I understand why Ubuntu doesn't ship with the ability to play every type of multimedia, but I'm glad it's easy to add the capability.

I'm not downloading Flash because I want to wait and see if the open-source Gnash works when Gutsy is released in this many days:

Am I using this countdown thing enough? Probably.

This time around I haven't added anything to Ubuntu. Since I've got acceptable speed with the standard GNOME tools, I didn't need Thunar or Mousepad. I still use AbiWord a lot, and I may throw that on here, but even the GIMP runs well enough that I won't need MtPaint.

So thus far I'm enjoying my time in Ubuntu 7.04. I hope the honeymoon isn't over when I do the Gutsy upgrade.