Joho the Blog
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If you need some help with it, my friend Simon has been called the Ubuntu Bug Czar ( http://lxer.com/module/newswire/view/64805/ )... he might have some advice. (Me, I don't even know what Ubuntu is...)

In the interest of paranoia and not randomly giving out email addresses, all his contact info is here: https://wiki.ubuntu.com/SimonLaw (plus a cute photo! he's such a sweetie!).

I rest my case. Thanks for saving me the trouble of installing it myself, David. It looks like more of the same from the Linux crowd. They've been saying for years that they have a desktop OS contender, but it never has turned out to be true.

I predict, as I said elsewhere, that it will happen. One day someone will make a Linux variant that's ready for primetime. But I also predict that it will be universally hated by the existing Linux community because it takes too many choices away from the user.

That's really too bad. I also installed 6.06 on a machine last night, as it happens, and it went off without a hitch.

In contrast, the copy of Windows 2000 I installed on the same machine last year took about 20 hours of effort: partitioning and formatting the disks, loading cd after cd of drivers for the motherboard, video card, sound card, network card, etc ad nauseam, only to find that I had to reinstall several of them in a specific order, after which I had to install Win2K SP4, which broke a bunch of things, which then had to be reinstalled and reconfigured. The last problem I had, and one of the reasons I was glad to get a working OS on the box, was a Dell monitor driver that refused to uninstall, although parts of the system told me that it was gone.

I know I'm going to sounds like a Linux haXor jerkoff for saying this - I'm not saying what happened to you last night didn't happen, and I know that you have hard evidence that Ubuntu isn't perfect - but in my experience, Ubuntu is WAY easier to use out-of-the-box than Windows. The only thing simpler is a manufacturer pre-install (of any OS) which is what most Mac and Windows users are used to. In that respect, it's true, Ubuntu has some catching up to do: but this is not a question of design, it's a question of politics.

Wireless is a serious stumblling block for Linux right now. Many, probably most, cards need closed source drivers that for ideological and other reasons may or may not be included in any given distribution.

I installed Ubuntu on a machine with only a wireless connection because I knew it supported the card in that machine out of the box. That's important because Ubuntu finishes an install by downloading great chunks of updated code. Looks like the folks who wrote that install routine assumed that network connection meant a wired connection.

The right thing to do is to check for a wireless connection early in the install. If Ubuntu can't work with it, warn the user and given him a chance to bail out.

Hi David, I installed Ubuntu at the beginning of the year and it took about 20-40 hours to get the video straight and about 10-20 hours to get the sound to work. The sound problem for me turned out to be a little thing turned off in the volume control which should be turned on.

Having just ten minutes ago fled from a rogue installation of Kubuntu that had taken my computer hostage for the past week, I can say decisively that Kubuntu, at least, is much less straightforward than Windows. I don't know how much Kubuntu strays from its Ubuntu origins, but in four days of suffering with it, I never actually succeeded in launching a single application I installed. Copious Googling for help yielded nothing, and clicking "Help" on the Adept Package Manager menu just brought faint little guffaws from deep inside my computer. Linux's fabled stability deserted me on multiple occasions, with Konqueror crashing mysteriously at the slightest provocation.

I have no aversion to RTFM-ing, but TFM was nowhere in sight. I had no idea where to begin looking to understand Kubuntu. I found myself typing in commands like "sudo grub-install dev/hda" with no understanding of what I was actually doing, and no way of achieving that understanding. All the technical advice I found on Google got way *too* technical, way too fast. I was desperately searching the boards at LinuxForums.org, posting questions, and getting little back.

I don't consider myself a stupid computer n00b. I have my beefs with Windows. The biggest was when I had to set up a server on it earlier this summer. But I ultimately succeeded. And it took me less time than I spent searching for how to launch the instance of Firefox that Kubuntu kept telling me I'd successfully installed.

Most of the advice given in this Ask MetaFilter thread about the benefits of Linux rings absolutely true with my experience. Like you, David, I'm happy it exists. But if I try it out again, it'll be with much more trepidation.

An update: I tried a different (third) wifi card, with no luck. But sound started working, at least somewhat: The test sounds plays but the sample ogg files in the media player do not (although the little oscilloscope widget in it indicates that the sound is being processed).

But, the system has gone all flibbertygibbet on me. E.g., once I tell the network pane in the system pref app that I am an admin and type in my pwd, it shows me the appropriate options for the network pane, but all the other panes (e.g., user config, etc.) go blank when I click on their "I'm an admin" buttons. I've also gotten a sigsev or two, although, it being linux, the system stayed up.

A small thing, but sign perhaps of a great instability: If I go into a terminal, su myself and run ifconfig, there's no response in the terminal and the terminal hangs.

The lack of wifi support is a killer for me, though. It looks like my wife is sticking with Windows at least for a while :(

Wow. There has to be a term for this - the phenomenon of two people having such consistently disjoint experiences, despite being otherwise similar, that their ability to communicate is limited.

I've never tried Kubuntu, so maybe that's the stumbling block. But the four Ubuntu installs I've done - two on laptops, two on desktops - all went off much more painlessly than any Windows install I've ever done. I am not a linux hacker. I've USED linux and various unixes, but I was always a Windows guy. And I really found Ubuntu to be easier to get working - and overwhelmingly easier to KEEP working - than Windows.

It's true that my laptop's wireless was wonky on Hoary, but a little tweaking took care of it. Breezy handled it effortlessly from the install.

I highly recommend this book, which is a great manual and resource for Ubuntu, written for a new linux user.

I actually recommend the Xandros distribution for painfree installation. I was amazed at how well if found all my DOS & NTFS partitions, as well as dropping right into my Windows network without a hitch. Myself, I'm more of a FreeBSD fan, but I think that is even farther from the realm of popular computing than Linux. Although my PC-BSD installation found the paritions and network without a hitch too.

1) Last night I semi-succeeded in installing (or perhaps I succeeded in semi-installing) Ubuntu 6.06.1 onto my wife's computer.

**I hope you repartitioned your other OS I didn't and wound up re-installing my old OS just to dual-boot. My first installation with Ubuntu Edgy hung but it was a burn error on the CD.**

2) I played around with the Ubuntu KDE user interface and included software. It's a really spiffy combination of the best of the Mac and Windows. Superficially — I only spent a couple of hours with it — the Ubuntu UI is appealing, engaging, productive and fun.

**That was my first impression, too. WTF was funny about it? :) I tried all three flavours eventually settling with KDE and dual-boot.**

3) But: Ubuntu is not yet ready to compete with the Mac and Windows for the gazillion of desktops out there. Close, but close in the way that taking a 3 meter leap across a 3.2 meter gap is close. Too bad, because I really want it to succeed.

**I may agree with you because I prefer Kubuntu -- however my Linux kernel has never crashed and I can mount USB devices from the shell to backup my data in case the X-Window crashes. Some other operating systems link the shell and the windows so that when one crashes the whole computer is out. KDE runs perfectly on top of the latest Ubuntu kernel for me.**

4) The night before, the installation process froze as Ubuntu tried to install hardware drivers. The problem turned out to be that my wifi card uses the RTL8185 chipset, which the installation disk doesn't support. That's fine. Ubuntu will support it at some point or I could get another card. (In fact, I had a spare Linksys card on hand.) What's not fine is that the installation hung without telling me why or what to do about it.

**Although my installation freezes occurred from burn errors on the CD, it did take me a few days or so to learn more about Linux computing. Finally after searching with Google I learned how to activate my BCM43xx card. A firmware program was needed but existed on the card itself. Fortunately, owners of BCM43xx-based cards can download a firmware ripper from the repositories.**

5) Once I (randomly) took the wifi card out and Ubuntu successfully installed itself—six questions and you're done—I had three problems, none of which I would expect to have with Windows or the Mac: I couldn't get it to enable the Linksys card I'd installed, I couldn't get it to mount the system's second hard drive (although it showed up in the list of drives), and I couldn't get the motherboard's sound system to work.

**I'm not sure how low-end or high-end your hardware is, but it is my understanding that Linux specifically Kubuntu only now became main-stream -- Dell computer only recently announced they would offer Ubuntu flavours installed. However, I have yet to see on Dell's website these units for sale. I have a medium-grade Dell Inspiron 1200 PC. To activate the MIDI subsystem you have to find a wiki on UbuntuForums with a shell script. To activate the on-board sound another wiki is there describing how to use JACK with the Fluidsynth -- you will probably want Fluidsynth if you want to use sound fonts with your MIDI files.**

6) These are not insuperable problems. But they're stoppers. And Ubuntu throws me straight into the bony arms of Linux to solve them. For example, it tells me that I can't mount the second hard drive because it's not listed in /etc/fstab. I shouldn't have to know how to edit fstab to get my hard drive working. On the other hand, it gives me no help or hints about how to get wifi working. "Linux hacking or nothing!" is not the right battle cry for tech support.

**I agree with you on one hand because the average computer user expects a 100% GUI. Shell and command prompts are for nerds. My mother was screaming at me how she didn't want to learn anything new. I installed Kubuntu/XP for her so she feels better knowing she boot her old friend. I put links on her desktop for My Computer, My Documents, Web Browser, OpenOffice ... I made sure her partitions were auto-mounted and linked. I checked all her Medibuntu codecs (Xine and Gstreamer) to make sure Mom could download and view W32 media attachments. It has taken me six week but my computer works better than it did with my old operating system which was not a Mac.**

7) I don't mean to sound whiny and demanding. Linux is a gift. Thank you! And Ubuntu and KDE seem to have gotten the installation and desktop stuff right, which is no small feat. But I'm desperate for breaking up the OS duopoly. Until Ubuntu handles its inevitable errors and failures as well as Windows and the Mac do, users won't get far enough to fall in love with it. Which is a shame. [Tags: ubuntu linux windows open_source]

**I'm glad that you have some ubuntu for Ubuntu, but next time try a dual-boot. Spend some time with Kubuntu. I think you'll like it better.**