I’m technically supposed to hate ubuntu with white hot loathing. Being a debian veteran, I was using it for nearly three months before I gave it up as a lot of things fell apart and I just wanted to be comforted by windows. So six months of windows later, I give Ubuntu a shot. I’ll be documenting my difficulties and impressions about a supposedly much more polished OS.
Installation:
I found the installation as easy as pie. I’ve installed every distro out there and this was among the most plesant installations. Also it detected my audio card and loaded glx drivers for my graphics driver on the first go. I’m seriously rooting for ubuntu right now. After installation, I set up my network and hardware and I was ready to go.
First Impressions:
The first thing I did was turn on the legendary restricted drivers I’d heard about. In debian, we had to go to a safe mode an execute an sh file and change your xorg.conf to make it work right. Not any more apparently. And IT AUTOMOUNTED my other partitions. This is awesome.
Just go and install it in one click. Real neat stuff actually. Also the artwork is decent. I make a note to change the eye candy later. I find the orange a little depressing.
First Hurdle
I pull up the pretty terminal(how I missed it) and use the holy grail of all debian commands, apt-get update. And what used to take 2 seconds took a whole 14 minutes to complete. I got utterly impatient because just to download the ruddy filelist it takes so long(why do they have 5 mb filelists anyways) but I finally manage to get automatix installed. And even after installing the codecs and mplayer in automatix, the system didn’t feel like home. I tried watching a movie or so, and it worked allright. I was used to middleclick in windows, I guess I’ll have to cut off my middle finger so I don’t instinctively click on it. Then again, if I use that finger very very often for almost everything.
Beryl
Got beryl working with minimal effort. Thank you ubuntuguide.org. It was as pretty as ever, and with metacity and crystal working, the desktop looked great. Also tweaked fonts and things look smooth. Am not gonna do any more tweaking.
End of Day 1:
Time spent: 1 hour. Satisfaction: Satisfied Cons: Large Package Sizes Pros: Absolutely Zero hardware issues, Automounting. Endnote: They’ve made the system progressively easier to use, and to switch to for windows users, but it wasn’t as gratifying to use FOSS as I thought it’d be. Maybe in a few days I’ll feel better about this.
i cant remember those bibical sudo get -apt commands. ;/ eventually i will
and isn’t auto matrix damned by the community? i installed a new version of gaim on ubuntu once, and couldn’t figure something out, checked into #ubuntu-india and got chided was refused any sort of help for bringing automatrix into the picture but of course friends like you (another named ankit, gave me that one line solution to linux problem i was facing) recommend it. so whats the deal, who to listen to ?
and since i lately applied clear type on xp, i love it. i wonder if there is anything like it on linux?
i find the screen resolution too small, ive to always squint while looking at gmail in firefox.
isn’t there a solution besides the ctrl + and ctrl alt + ?