Dell begins Ubuntu campaign
By Jonathan Schlaffer
Dell will be launching its Ubuntu campaign in a matter of minutes but I don’t really care. Sure, in this case Ubuntu will be installed and configured by Dell “Technicians” but that doesn’t mean I’m going to buy one and you know what, neither should you.
This doesn’t mean I’m in love with Microsoft, that’s hardly the case but based on my previous experiences with Linux and Ubuntu especially, has not been that great. The short story is that I ended up having to reinstall Vista (thanks to Ubuntu) and installing Ubuntu was a much greater pain than I should have put up with.
My primary issue is with GRUB and the partition utilities in Ubuntu, both lack much to be desired and are pretty stupid and need far too much handholding.
Still, I doubt very much anyone buying an Ubuntu system from Dell will ever need to worry about such things, we’re talking about people who for the most part couldn’t even restore their system from a Vista or XP restore disc, I wouldn’t trust them with a Linux restore even if my life depended on it.
Is putting Ubuntu in the hands of these people, the right thing to do? Well, at least they won’t have to deal with Viruses, malware or spyware but doesn’t another OS have those features as well, it does, its name is Mac OSX and you can get it right here.
I got tired of putting up with some of the things Windows does, Vista finally pushed me over the edge at least laptop wise, Linux ruined my life and here’s hoping OSX brings some joy back into it.
Something is really very wrong with those of you that think Linux is easy to use but look at the stuff and hoops it made me jump through, I won’t be doing so again, EVER so don’t even try. Mac OSX will save me, I don’t Linux because as I’ve said before it lacks polish, its programs lack polish and it almost gave me an aneurysm from frustration.
The story ends with a happy note, I bought a Mac which sould be in my hands next week.
Related:
Entry was posted
on Thursday, May 24th, 2007 at 9:19 am
under
Read more entries by Jonathan Schlaffer.
Stumble It!
May 24th, 2007
What problems did you have and what version did you use?
May 24th, 2007
Well, besides the partitioning problems… it was a X.org error related to my ATi graphics card which I did not realize at the time that Ubuntu does not like…
But it still managed to really mess up my bootloader, either it did or Vista did but I’m not sure which one is responsible for that…
Graphic safe mode worked during the install but not when I tried to boot it… I saw some weird command line stuff as a workaround but things being what they were, I had had enough of that.
May 24th, 2007
It was Ubuntu 7.04.
May 24th, 2007
lol. That sucks. Mine’s been working well for me. I installed 6.06 at first and decided to upgrade to 7.04 for the beautiful eye-candy. Who knows, maybe it’s because I’ve got a nvidia card.
Mac’s a great choice. If they’d be better at making things more compatable I’d buy one. I made several DVDs using iDVD and they just dont work! Pissed me off man. I do like how open they are to developers though.
May 24th, 2007
lol. That sucks. Mine’s been working well for me. I installed 6.06 at first and decided to upgrade to 7.04 for the beautiful eye-candy. Who knows, maybe it’s because I’ve got a nvidia card.
Mac’s a great choice. If they’d be better at making things more compatible I’d buy one. I made several DVDs using iDVD and they just dont work! Pissed me off man. I do like how open they are to developers though.
May 24th, 2007
wow…. double post.
May 24th, 2007
“Linux ruined my life” haha, you need to get a life you toilet, give ur head a wobble. It takes someone with more than one brain cell to run linux, something which you are obviously lacking. Complete newbies to linux never have the problems you say you have had. I think you are making this up. No doubt you will be back again crying that there is something wrong with the mac.
May 24th, 2007
Try looking up X.org error for ATi X1600 graphic cards, I promise you plenty of results… then look up GRUB error 17…
As for the bootloader going AWOL, who knows, I don’t.
May 24th, 2007
It was for a laptop so don’t suggest changing the graphics card.
May 24th, 2007
@Jonathan: when you install GNU/Linux on unsupported hardware you are asking for trouble. It’s exactly like trying to install Windows on a MacBook or MacOSX on normal PC. Sure it can be done but you don’t wanna do it. Of course Linux does much better than Windows or MacOSX in terms of supported hardware, but you still have to take care about it when purchasing it.
That’s why Dell’s offer is such an event — Ubuntu on Dell should have no hardware – compatibility problems.
Borys
May 24th, 2007
Hmmm… it sounds to me like you shouldn’t even be allowed to handle a computer at all. Linux didn’t give you grief. Your incompetence did. The Ubuntu computers WILL sell. You know why? Everyone on the Dell forums requested it. You can sit and sulk in your self-pity and negative experiences all you want. Don’t take your anger out on everyone else.
May 24th, 2007
So it would have been logical for me to assume that Ubuntu wouldn’t have supported my graphics card… yeah… that makes sense. Should I have looked this up before I installed it… maybe… but shouldn’t an operating system support a somewhat commom video card, yes it damn well should.
That STILL doesn’t explain the GRUB error though.
May 25th, 2007
So, Linux isn’t perfect. We already knew that. Why are you telling that the rest of the world should avoid it?
May 25th, 2007
“Still, I doubt very much anyone buying an Ubuntu system from Dell will ever need to worry about such things, we’re talking about people who for the most part couldn’t even restore their system from a Vista or XP restore disc, I wouldn’t trust them with a Linux restore even if my life depended on it.”
Oh, the irony of someone that could have fixed the boot sector with the Vista dvd in minutes, but spent hours reinstalling , denigrading other peoples computer skills.
“Something is really very wrong with those of you that think Linux is easy to use but look at the stuff and hoops it made me jump through, I won’t be doing so again, EVER so don’t even try.”
Yup, millions of folks are wrong and delusional. Only you have the truth. Does this mean you will stop writing about Linux and your lack of computer skills?
May 25th, 2007
“Still, I doubt very much anyone buying an Ubuntu system from Dell will ever need to worry about such things, we’re talking about people who for the most part couldn’t even restore their system from a Vista or XP restore disc, I wouldn’t trust them with a Linux restore even if my life depended on it.”
Oh, the irony of someone that could have fixed the boot sector with the Vista dvd in minutes, but spent hours reinstalling , denigrading other peoples computer skills.
“Something is really very wrong with those of you that think Linux is easy to use but look at the stuff and hoops it made me jump through, I won’t be doing so again, EVER so don’t even try.”
Yup, millions of folks are wrong and delusional. Only you have the truth. Does this mean you will stop writing about Linux and your lack of computer skills?
Linux didn’t support your video because ATI refuses to release the information needed for a open source driver. You can get a proprietary Linux driver from the ATI website. The Grub error is due to Vista’s screwed up MBR implementation. There lot of folks that lost access to XP in a dual boot with Vista.
May 25th, 2007
Oh yeah, like I DIDN’T try the Vista DVD repair… guess what, it didn’t work so we’re back to the extra hours of work that I HAD NO CHOICE to do but to get everything back.
Could have gotten a Linux driver, had I been able to access the installation in the first place. Why not just read my previous article, it will explain a lot about what happened to my laptop.
I don’t care what ATi does or does not do but the driver should be included, Open Source or no… the point is common hardware should work.
Lots of people have ATi cards…
May 26th, 2007
But Ken is right. You didn’t just express your discontent with the ATI situation. You went a step further and insulted the entire Linux community and assumed that every new user would suffer the same nightmare you did. Not only are you wrong, but it also proves that you are approaching this standpoint from a strictly emotional point of view.
May 26th, 2007
I did read your previous two blog entries.
As far as everything needing to be included in the OS, I’ll give you that point as soon as Window machines stop coming with driver disks.
Here’s a link from Microsoft’s Technet site where everyone was bitching about the X1600 not working when they upgraded to Vista:
http://forums.microsoft.com/TechNet/ShowPost.aspx?PostID=511421&SiteID=17
I’m sure you’re a good guy and I’m sure you went through an extremely frustrating experience. However, you went into this with bad expectations. If you honestly reread the two previous blog entries, unless everything went perfectly, Linux sucks. I really hope this is the last time you write about Linux. If you feel the need to denigrade it, please use a system where it is properly installed by someone first (like Windows on your laptop).
May 26th, 2007
Dell is using ATi on at least some of their Ubuntu enabled laptops, I have no doubt they will function out of the box but what’s going to happen when the user has to restore the system… for any reason.
Did I ever say everyone is going to have the same problem? No. I had the problem and it serves as a warning, nothing more. Use it if you want but you might have this problem with ATi…
Emotional… well… when your work depends on you having a working laptop that is out of service for the better part of a day, see how emotional you get.
I’m not entirely wrong and I’m not the only one that had this problem with ATi. I may well be the only one to have experienced the GRUB and other bootloader issues which is my main issue, the ATi problem was the least of my worries after all that stuff got messed up.
May 26th, 2007
Most of their issues seem to be related to Beta versions of Vista or their BIOS settings are wrong… a fairly modern BIOS does not have these problems, not once have I had a Vista installation fail due to a graphics driver problem nor have I had problems installing the proper driver from ATi or nvidia. Ever.
Word to the wise, don’t use Beta software… and avoid Beta drivers when possible BUT that’s all nvidia had when Vista released. They worked… just not as good.
May 26th, 2007
“Dell is using ATi on at least some of their Ubuntu enabled laptops, I have no doubt they will function out of the box but what’s going to happen when the user has to restore the system… for any reason.”
Umm… the same thing that happens on a windows restore?
“nor have I had problems installing the proper driver from ATi or nvidia. Ever.”
“I don’t care what ATi does or does not do but the driver should be included”
Like in an OEM Windows disk? At any rate this is past pointless. You’ve kept your preconceived conclusions intact. You will never touch Linux again ever. Nontechnical people will never be able to use it. Millions of users are delusional, evangelical idiots that use inelegant and primitive software that require great quantities of time at the command prompt. You had definite, extremely frustrating problems made worse by refusing to attempt to solve the initial video problem (I only troubleshoot if I’m paid.)
You hosed the essential tool for your work because you had no idea of what you were doing, you didn’t have a good backup DVD image, and are pissed because Linux is not Windows or OSX.
No one is disputing Linux is not perfect. You had problems, no doubt about it. It’s your crappy, smug, uneducated, inexperienced and condescending, judgmental conclusions. Since it didn’t work for you, it must be crap. Since you couldn’t make it work with your superior technical knowledge, Joe Sixpack will be lost in Linux hell forever. I could go on, however knowing you will be in the bosom of the Cult of Mac (Great hardware and software) and will hopefully stop writing about Linux forever, is enough.
May 26th, 2007
How can this possibly be called a “Tech” site when the bozo’s can’t even install Ubuntu? LOL. You apparently have never worked with DOS 1.0 back in the day: setting up printers, installing software apps, hardware modems, etc. You haven’t even taken the challenge yet, and Ubuntu sent you over the cliff. LOL. Ha ha ha ha ha. Puleeezzzz…can someone get real techs on this site to write articles? You know…”informed people”.
May 27th, 2007
TECH.BLORGE’s mission: “Our mission is to provide gutsy, honest and informed coverage and comment on key technology news and issues, without fear or favor.”
Is this article gutsy? Yeah, taking a stab at the entire Linux community is definitely gutsy.
Is this article honest? Yeah… a little too honest. You became emotional about the issue in a completely incorrect context. Do I understand you correctly in that you experimented with Ubuntu on a laptop that you needed to be functioning ASAP? That’s not emotion. That is stupidity.
Is this article informed? No way. Your experience definitely serves as a warning. The warning states that readers should not listen to a thing you say, Jonathan. As for Linux, as Ken already mentioned, you are a disgrace of a computer scientist.
Is this article without fear or favor? Well, I don’t sense much fear, but there is much favor… just not in Linux’s favor.
May 27th, 2007
DOS 1.0 was WAY before my time near a computer, I never used DOS 1.0. Though my dad did have this old Commodore that I played a few games on but I never had to configure anything on it. We’re talking age 4/5 here.
I don’t remember much about the DOS versions I did use but again, I never had to install anything… someone was around to do it for me… we’re still talking young here.
Windows 3.1… that’s what I remember but I only installed programs on that… never had to install drivers or anything…
I really started with Windows 95, if the GUI won’t do it then chances are I’m not going to bother. The only commands I know in Windows are of the ipconfig and dir (but dir is useless, it’s too hard to visualize the structure) variety.
You’re probably right, I’ll probably never touch Linux again and it’s for the best, for me because I won’t have to deal with its inane pointless errors and you won’t ever have to hear me complain about it again… unless they go and do something pointless again or I determine their move to be pointless.
July 5th, 2007
This article is terrible. Five stars down. Become articulate please – you sound like a whiny baby who doesn’t know what’s wrong.
July 9th, 2007
The only thing that I thought was wrong was when you said “but that doesn’t mean I’m going to buy one and you know what, neither should you.”
I’ve used linux for awhile and love it.
Other than that thanks for sharing your experience.
July 9th, 2007
Jonathan, if you didn’t have a wonderful time on Ubuntu, I’m truly sorry. It really is a great, easy-to-use, up-to-date linux distro; a LOT of users couldn’t be wrong. It’s a shame you couldn’t have played around with a superior piece of software.
I recently noticed a friend of mine (at an engineering school, she’s not very technical, though) was running Ubuntu. If she can do it, a lot of people could (and evidently do).
First of all, you committed a mortal sin right off the bat: you didn’t backup your stuff (MBR, Documents and Settings, registry, etc). You are (as far as I can tell) a Windows power user, every geek worth his/her bits knows to always backup all your data, especially since you needed it. Second, your tone of voice (your a writer, you should know what I’m talking about) was what I would call “whiny”. You do not chronicle what steps you took to solve the problem (learning bash commands, linux filestructure, etc). Ubuntuforums.org is an excellent resource to peruse other user’s problems, and ask your own. The IRC channel #ubuntu is also an excellent resource for live help (although the forums are well-perused). However, in your favor, it appears that you did use Google, albeit not much. The GRUB error is well documented on the web and in the U forums.
To close, a lot of Linux problems are difficult to diagnose. Remember, the Linux devs are essentially reverse-engineering everything from the rest of the industry, with little help from the corporations. Also, ATi and nVidia both refuse to disclose any specifications of their video cards, leaving Linux devs to reverse engineer their own (nv and ati drivers) or trust that nVidia and ATi release up-to-date and stable drivers for Linux (hasn’t had a great history).
Did you have a great time with Ubuntu? No, once again, I am truly sorry. But, at least divulge the steps you did (or did not) take while installing it.
I sincerely hope you at least try the LiveCD again on your Mac.
July 12th, 2007
If I were to walk into a NAACP meeting wearing the uniform of a klansman, i might know how you feel right now. Don’t knock the community, especially since we weren’t clicking your mouse. I just bought an Ubuntu loaded 1420 three days ago and I’m pleased as punch with the system. Not only that, but the fact of the matter is I’ve been riding the Hoary Hedgehog on my Latitude 110l for about a year now with nothing but good times behind the keyboard. Son, please, let someone else configure a box for you and give the alliterative menagerie yet another go-around, you might not be as disappointed.
Peace
August 3rd, 2007
Yes, no matter how good you think vista is, it still has its problems, just like linux. In a very routine dual boot, which shouldn’t have cause any problems at all Vista effectively killed my xp partition, along with everything I had on it. Now I am happy with vista, but I am unhappy about losing all my documents and music. By the way I’m 17, and Linux, namely Ubuntu, is not any harder to figure out than windows. You are just used to the way windows works. A mac will not be any different for you, I’m assuming.
August 31st, 2007
Johnny, you truly are a tard. ANY OS is dependent on the hard ware your running. If you think that windows supports hardware out of the box, then why do I have a disk of drivers that came with my laptop? I need no such disk with ubuntu. In fact, ubuntu is the only distro on the 2.6.2 kernel that works with MY laptop out of the box. don’t be such a tool
September 23rd, 2007
hey john. i would love to see how somebody could prove that you are truly some microsoft employee just trying to earn some extra cash spitting about ubuntu like this :D. and probably later on this post will score high pageranks on microsoft live search and comparable search sites. really, you have got to be some clueless dude. if you try it for a small time, you will find that ubuntu and gnome in many aspects work in a manner far superior over win xp/vista.
January 13th, 2008
so you went from a unix spinoff (sys v) to a unix spinoff (bsd) because unix sucks. oh god, i can’t stop laughing…and you paid an extra grand for it. please stop. it hurts, it hurts
March 6th, 2008
My experience…Ubuntu was better than vista in every way, but as I develop on a windows platform and I have relatives that will only use MSN Messenger, I had to unfortunately re-install Windows XP…as XP is still currently a better OS than Vista.
I had the opposite experience to you, my Vista installation failed, why…well although it detected that I had 2 SATA HDDs and I could format both of them in the initial installation screen I could not install to them (the error was something like no valid partitions found), I followed all of the technet article on my exact error (implying I am not the only one) I went through all 8 steps that were on there and the article stated that one of which would fix my problem.
Sadly none of them did, I however discovered that I had to remove one of my HDDs to get vista to install and then plug the second in once it had finished! Ubuntu and XP did not have this problem.
BTW I installed on a new VISTA CERTIFIED motherboard so I would not want to blame the hardware.
Ubuntu(out of the box!) and XP both support my 3 year old canon scanner Vista does not…
My ATI graphics card worked fine in all three OSs.
Vista was significantly slower in all operations, especially file copying than Ubuntu(fastest) and XP, despite my AMD64X2 processor and 2GB RAM 2 SATA HDDs all certified vista hardware…
Vista made it very hard to reinstall XP, I had to use Ubuntus disk management to format the drives so that I could reinstall XP, XP could not format my drives until I had done so in Ubuntu.
OUT OF THE BOX on Ubuntu I could play every different type of video file XVID DIVX etc. Vista I had to play about with before discovering that there are 32bit and 64bit codecs and although windows media player was running in 32bit mode on the desktop in the media center it was running in 64bit mode….also obviously I had to download and manually install several codecs!
Unfortunately I had to go back to XP because of the software I need to run. Maybe when Vista SP1 or 2 are released I will consider it for my main system again.
March 6th, 2008
I would like to add a counter to this:
“Most of their issues seem to be related to Beta versions of Vista or their BIOS settings are wrong… a fairly modern BIOS does not have these problems, not once have I had a Vista installation fail due to a graphics driver problem nor have I had problems installing the proper driver from ATi or nvidia. Ever.”
I have a Vista machine (my secondary test machine) which has a intel core duo 2 processor and 2 gb ram, 8600GTS nvidia graphics card. I hope you will agree must have a modern bios and graphics card.
Now most of the time I display this out of a pioneer 7 series plasma TV, and occasionally in my free time I play games on a LCD monitor. Now the latest nvidia drivers work on an LCD monitor fine, but I need to use an older driver revision to display the screen on my 1 year old plasma tv, or half the screen is missing. The problem is the older drivers crash running most newish computer games namely UT3 and Supreme Commander. So everytime I want to play games on this machine I need to upgrade the drivers and everytime I want to play games and revert them back everytime I want watch stuff on my tv… So even when you have as standard a vista box as possible the drivers do not just work…plus it took me ages to get a workable solution to this problem…
May 27th, 2008
Fiesty (7.04) was my first encounter with Ubuntu, and yes, I had to jump through a few hoops to get everything to work but the OS costs nothing other than a few hours of research out on the Ubuntu forums. If you take notes while fixing problems then you never have to ask the same question twice.
Linux is open source’s answer to Unix, and neither are targetted for mass consumption by novice consumers. It takes some time, patience, and effort to get everything running on Linux. If you aren’t interested in or have the time to invest in learning how things work “under the hood” then Linux is not the OS for you.
One other consideration, blame the hardware manufacturers, the people who make wireless NICs, webcams, printers, etc., for the increased learning curve for getting hardware to work on Linux. Microsoft doesn’t write drivers, the hardware manufacturers do, and until they are pressured to start manufacturing Linux drivers along with their MS versions, getting their hardware to work on Linux will always require the user to jump through a few hoops.
I love linux, but I won’t bash MS; fixing broken Windows pays my mortgage and feeds my family :-)
February 10th, 2009
You are a moron, plain and simple. As a former Windows user, and a current Linux user, I currently enjoy being able to do whatever I damn well wish with my OS.
I don’t know how you had problems installing Ubuntu, there are seven clicks in the entire process. Also, it can read and mount your NTFS partition so you can get to your windows files from Ubuntu.
Oh, heres a thought, perhaps you burned the CD/DVD too fast and got an error on the disk? If you bothered to read up on something before using it, you would know that you burn slowly to avoid such problems.
As far as not supporting ATI cards, you would know this as well had you read up on it. They do support it, and if you downloaded the image, you could load your driver in it, recompile, and poof, a working graphics card.
Vista is the biggest joke of an operating system since OS/2. perhaps you should read a little and learn how to use a computer and an OS before you bash it, and perhaps you should read up on the shortcomings of Vista before you praise it.
Then again, I suppose when all you do is blog and play solitare, Vista works for you. When you get to doing real things like developing apps, running corporate servers, and actually USING a PC, I suggest you give Linux a second look.