drm's tweakblog

Funny, I had the opposite experience a few days ago. I (graphically) installed Ubuntu 9.10 without any problems (no RAID though) and the installation was a breeze. The only issues I've run across so far is getting audio over HDMI to work and that I needed to disable desktop composition in order to prevent tearing with XBMC

I can imagine the graphical installer works well in 99% of all cases, and has user-experience benefits over starting in safe mode right away, which led to the decision to implement safe mode as an (easily selectable) option before running the installer. In case of a blank screen one would just reboot and select safe mode next time.

As for the RAID problem, that could have been better. But couldn't you pass boot options like hdX=none to prevent a raid setup? I agree it isn't the way it should be, though. You could report it as a bug to help prevent other users from having the same difficulties.

Both googling for ubuntu plus "Desktop effects can not be enabled" and "xdpyinfo not found" gave two clear solutions as the first result, of which the 2nd gave the solution you used, and the 1st might have worked as well.

I understand your installation didn't work like a charm, but the way you state it in your blog doesn't seem fair to me.

I'm sorry you had such a difficult time getting it to work properly. My recent experiences with the Ubuntu family of Linux distributions (mostly Kubuntu) have been very positive.

What you experienced did ring some bells to me, however. Back in 2005, I tried a large amount of Linux distributions, and with many I had similar experiences such as your recent Ubuntu experience. In the end, I decided Kubuntu was most suitable for me, and I've been dual booting ever since that massive distribution comparison.

As for the bottom line, maybe Ubuntu is just not for you. Besides, if you're already in bed with Debian, at least you have a proper fallback in place. In fact, the "parent" of Ubuntu, one might say, as I seem to recall Ubuntu is either based on Debian testing or unstable.

I do hope, however, that your issues will be sorted out in Lucid Lynx (10.04?). As you probably know, most Linux distributions are constantly being improved, in terms of hardware support, bug squashing and sporting new and improved features. And to the degree that problems still present themselves to the user, I fear that it may just be a current lack of sufficient developer resources, which is also improving all the time as far as I can tell.

To close, I wish you the best of luck with your future Ubuntu experiences. Let's hope your past experiences will prove to be less than representative of Ubuntu's true capabilities.

to me it really sounds all a bit strange, - i ran the karmic installer quite a few times on deferent hardware both intel and amd based and even a p3 with scsi- controler and disks (2 of them) and the part manager never asked me / forced me to install using raid ... However i allways do manual partitioning because i mount /home and /boot as partition witch most linux-distro's tend not to,...


about your grafics problem, whould you mind telling on what hardware, that would probably help things to get better...

[Comment edited on Thursday 28 January 2010 07:32]

I had to install 9.10, because the upgrade didn't work. If you look at the enormous size of the release notes (which most users don't read), you see what an enormous piece of crap the 9.10 Ubuntu release is. Of the four machines I have seen upgraded, only one of them did not require a reinstall.

I don't see how they manage to take something which is quite good (Debian) and make it in such a mess. Ubuntu is supposed to be a better Debian. Debian Unstable is more stable than Ubuntu and has never broken for me in the past.

Then in general the drivers for Linux are really bad for off-the-shelf laptop hardware. That's not something I blame Linux for, but it is a problem and in theory it could work just as well as the Windows drivers, but there simply is a lack of interest in making things work well as opposed to just barely.

Ubuntu is not for human beings. Ubuntu is for people with too much time on their hands.

I present unto you dudes : the evolution of an ubuntu user :

http://linuxhaters.blogspot.com/2008/06/evolution-of-ubuntu-user.html

the graphical installation has a simple solution for the harddisk partitioning prblem, called [Manual Mode], in this option the graphical installer is no more then a simple wrapper around the gparted utility, which makes creating, selection, resizing and all other options possible. Now if you experienced major breaks (like the x11-utils), I suggest you either install updates prior to installing additional software, or use software management from the administrative tools, instead of the new Add/Remove programs, which indeed is kinda buggy and experimental.

For desktop systems, ubuntu always gave the easiest option, but in stability, proven security and all other critical applications debian is still preferred. In the latest release ubuntu indeed took the "bleeding edge" route, and hopefully the 10.04 LTS will once again give a stable installation and system.

Roflol @ astrocore
I think I'm lost forever

Weird, I constantly hear people saying it crashes frequently, it's not as stable as 9.04, etc.
Am I the only one that doesn't have any problems at all with 9.10 ?

@astrocore: What if you're running Ubuntu on a Mac ?

[Comment edited on Thursday 28 January 2010 17:01]

Sorry you had a bad experience. In my case (and I installed Ubuntu on several machines) I had a VERY positive experience with Ubuntu 9.10. Just wanted to say it!

I'm not happy with 9.10 either. 9.04 ran rather well on my old laptop, but 9.10 is giving me headaches that 9.04 didn't. For example: video is messed up. On the same Radeon 7000 (mobile) that 9.04 had absolutely no issues with. I happened upon someone with the same problem that was nice enough to post a decent working xorg.conf, and all was well. Until a month or so ago, when the problem returned. I suspect that some update screwed things up but I'm getting rather tired of going through the innards of my installation to have it fixed. It's not a huge deal, it's annoying is what it is, and 10.04 is rearing its head by now so I can't be bothered at the moment. But I have to add to that the fact that I cannot simply update my installation anymore without it saying "hey I can't update the whole thing, how would you like a partial upgrade?", It even went as far as to call it a distro upgrade at one point, leaving me wondering what on earth I was going to end up with afterwards, seeing as how 9.04 was, and is, in fact, the latest release still. So the update mechanism is broken. Not the first time, but it'd been a while. Again, with 10.04 coming reasonably soon, I can't be bothered anymore. Fuck it.

Lately I've been thinking that maybe I should simply abandon Ubuntu. I'm getting so tired of the regressions, each and every version has different problems, most of which didn't exist in the prior version (I'll note that I've been using Ubuntu as my primary OS since I think somewhere in '06). When 10.04 is released, I will wait a few days and if all hell didn't break loose, I'll install it and give it one last try. Just one. Because if 10.04 will suck, that'll be the last Ubuntu I install for a while.

I hate to admit it, I really, genuinely, honestly hate it, but the blogposting astrocore linked to really hits home for me. Two years ago, heck, even one year ago, Ubuntu was it. It was awesome and the small annoyances it had, surely they would be a thing of the past come the next release. I have been disappointed and annoyed a bit too much now, and I absolutely have no intentions of hacking away at my Ubuntu installation. That's not what it was made for. If I want a Linuxinstallation that I'm going to dig through for configuration and all that, I'll install Slackware again. Slackware.. the other distribution I am a big fan of. And with Slackware, I know that I have to configure it by myself. And it was made just for that.

10.04 is going to have to be good. Not even great, just good. If it works good - and I'm a pretty tolerant guy who knows there's no such thing as perfection - I will once again love Ubuntu like I have. But if it sucks I'll give up hope.

[Comment edited on Thursday 28 January 2010 20:53]