Yesterday I took the plunge and installed the Feisty Beta of Ubuntu on the laptop. It was a long, slow process — I installed via “update-manager -d” rather than from CD. What follows is a short analysis and rumination on the ordeal.
First, the good:
- The settings migration was excellent. The installer transferred all my settings like a charm. The only exception was the custom login screen and splash image. Not such a big deal, but worth noting.
- Also awesome, it saw that I had one of the Broadcom-based wireless cards and automatically ran the firmware cutter to install the Windows driver for the Linux kernel. That was sort of handy, I must say.
- Wireless configuration was way easier with fewer lags.
- Compiz worked out of the box with no messing with settings.
Now, the bad:
- Even though wireless was easily configured, it refused to work. I was never able to get the broadcom card to work with ndis nor the firmware cutter in the first place — at least not on networks requiring a WEP key. Furthermore, the USB wireless card I use instead requires a Realtek driver that is automatically blacklisted, due to hanging the kernel, apparently. So, no network for me. Wired works, but… meh, it’s a laptop you know?
- Beryl appeared to work, but there was some tweaking necessary. Supposedly there’s an xorg.conf trick one can do to make the non-refreshing windows (that I was experiencing) go away, but I never tried it.
- Even with a wired connection (which worked) I could not open an SSH network place in Nautilus to anywhere. It almost acted as if it were disabled.
So, I blew all that away and reinstalled Edgy. I know that works and I know I can get network/beryl running correctly under that. Really all I was interested in with 7.04 was the networking stuff and virtualization support. I didn’t try the latter, but the former kind of put a kabosh on the whole thing.
One thing that’s interesting to note: now that I have 6.10 reinstalled I’m noting some neat things. Everything is a lot zippier. Wireless works at my workplace for the first time. I consistenly had problems with mysql working, and now I don’t. It’s pretty awesome.
Anyway, I guess the message I’m taking away is that the Feisty beta really is beta software. I suppose I’ve had my view of “beta software” modified from companies like Google consistently releasing fully-functional beta code. This OS beta harkens back to the days when “beta” really meant something.
So take all that for what you will. My advice, though: wait until the April for the full release.
