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2009 -- going on 2004
Jun. 11th, 2009 03:41 pmI've been putting Ubuntu on a few PCs for people recently. Even with the rise of things like Mint, Ubuntu is ever-increasingly my default Linux. It Just Works™ to a degree that is almost Mac-like, and 9.04 adds much faster bootup and shutdown and snazzy on-screen notifications. (Actually, they're reminiscent of Growl on Mac OS X, another resemblance, but that's incidental.)
I took a client's last old Athlon box, from 1999, cleaned it up, stuck the Jaunty Jackalope CD in, and rebooted. Nuked everything, did a default install, and the machine goes like stink now. Everything worked out of the box, it boots in well under 30sec, and Firefox and OpenOffice are responsive and entirely usable - on an Athlon XP 750MHz with 384MB of RAM and a 10GB hard disk. Quite impressive.
I've also talked to a PC builder -- friend of a friend -- who'd never tried Linux before. He was dazzled at how quick and easy Ubuntu was to get working. No drivers to download and install, no applications, and it went like stink on a really low-end PC - an AMD Sempron 1250 with 512MB of RAM, about the cheapest, lowest-end desktop box he could build. He's a convert.
The only thing that's not worked for me is the RAID controller in my new server - a Dell PowerEdge 600SC with a Dell-badged LSI MegaRAID i4 card controlling half a dozen 80GB EIDE drives. I'm going to try a 3Ware card and see if that's any better.
But so easy is it that I thought I'd have a look at some other OSs on my main PC. I binned my two spare Linux installs (OpenSUSE and Mint) and reshuffled the partitions to make space for a couple of 16GB primaries.
First candidate: OpenSolaris, the brand-new 2009/06 edition that came out last week. The LiveCD booted, no problem - just v e r y s l o w l y. After 10min of searching, it found my hard disks; I picked a partition and told it to go. It took about 45min to install, and "rebooted" by reloading the OS from the new partition - so I couldn't log in, as my new user's credentials had not been picked up. And the login screen has no shutdown/reboot option.
I hit the power switch. It shut down cleanly -- took a couple of minutes -- and rebooted. It's configured GRUB for itself, but blithely ignored the existing Windows 2000, Windows 7 and Ubuntu systems - no trace of them left. Solaris booted quite happily, if a bit slowly, and let me log in as myself -- but it refused to let me use the root account, for no stated reason. Graphics worked, albeit only single-head, and so did sound, though at the same time as audio alerts, it beeps the system speaker, which on this machine drowned out the digital audio.
But neither network port works. Both need proprietary drivers, apparently, either for my nForce integrated or 3Com onboard Gigabit ports. And with no connectivity, I can't download 'em. Nor can I fetch a graphics driver.
OK, so, scratch Solaris for now. Next candidate: PC-BSD. Version 1 of this worked a treat on my old Thinkpad a couple of years back, so I thought it would be a breeze.
Nope. Boot process freezes after detecting the EIDE drives.
Finally, for a laugh, I thought I'd try a hacked copy of Mac OS X - OSX86, as it's sometimes called. I used a hacked DVD called Kalyway, widely available via Bittorrent. Nope - the Darwin bootloader says "this system is not supported." Alllll-righty then.
So I used an Ubuntu LiveCD to reinstate my GRUB bootloader and here I am back in trusty old Ubuntu. Where, to my delight, just yesterday, the alpha-test version of Google's Chromium browser suddenly started working - for the last month or two, it's refused to load up on my machine. So now, I have a lightning-fast browser to leave Gmail open in alongside Firefox for more mundane stuff.
It's interesting. Five years of Ubuntu, and still, the gap between it -- representing about as good as desktop Linux gets -- and the rivals isn't narrowing much...
I took a client's last old Athlon box, from 1999, cleaned it up, stuck the Jaunty Jackalope CD in, and rebooted. Nuked everything, did a default install, and the machine goes like stink now. Everything worked out of the box, it boots in well under 30sec, and Firefox and OpenOffice are responsive and entirely usable - on an Athlon XP 750MHz with 384MB of RAM and a 10GB hard disk. Quite impressive.
I've also talked to a PC builder -- friend of a friend -- who'd never tried Linux before. He was dazzled at how quick and easy Ubuntu was to get working. No drivers to download and install, no applications, and it went like stink on a really low-end PC - an AMD Sempron 1250 with 512MB of RAM, about the cheapest, lowest-end desktop box he could build. He's a convert.
The only thing that's not worked for me is the RAID controller in my new server - a Dell PowerEdge 600SC with a Dell-badged LSI MegaRAID i4 card controlling half a dozen 80GB EIDE drives. I'm going to try a 3Ware card and see if that's any better.
But so easy is it that I thought I'd have a look at some other OSs on my main PC. I binned my two spare Linux installs (OpenSUSE and Mint) and reshuffled the partitions to make space for a couple of 16GB primaries.
First candidate: OpenSolaris, the brand-new 2009/06 edition that came out last week. The LiveCD booted, no problem - just v e r y s l o w l y. After 10min of searching, it found my hard disks; I picked a partition and told it to go. It took about 45min to install, and "rebooted" by reloading the OS from the new partition - so I couldn't log in, as my new user's credentials had not been picked up. And the login screen has no shutdown/reboot option.
I hit the power switch. It shut down cleanly -- took a couple of minutes -- and rebooted. It's configured GRUB for itself, but blithely ignored the existing Windows 2000, Windows 7 and Ubuntu systems - no trace of them left. Solaris booted quite happily, if a bit slowly, and let me log in as myself -- but it refused to let me use the root account, for no stated reason. Graphics worked, albeit only single-head, and so did sound, though at the same time as audio alerts, it beeps the system speaker, which on this machine drowned out the digital audio.
But neither network port works. Both need proprietary drivers, apparently, either for my nForce integrated or 3Com onboard Gigabit ports. And with no connectivity, I can't download 'em. Nor can I fetch a graphics driver.
OK, so, scratch Solaris for now. Next candidate: PC-BSD. Version 1 of this worked a treat on my old Thinkpad a couple of years back, so I thought it would be a breeze.
Nope. Boot process freezes after detecting the EIDE drives.
Finally, for a laugh, I thought I'd try a hacked copy of Mac OS X - OSX86, as it's sometimes called. I used a hacked DVD called Kalyway, widely available via Bittorrent. Nope - the Darwin bootloader says "this system is not supported." Alllll-righty then.
So I used an Ubuntu LiveCD to reinstate my GRUB bootloader and here I am back in trusty old Ubuntu. Where, to my delight, just yesterday, the alpha-test version of Google's Chromium browser suddenly started working - for the last month or two, it's refused to load up on my machine. So now, I have a lightning-fast browser to leave Gmail open in alongside Firefox for more mundane stuff.
It's interesting. Five years of Ubuntu, and still, the gap between it -- representing about as good as desktop Linux gets -- and the rivals isn't narrowing much...
