Ubuntu Bashing Continued

It has been a while since I upgraded and subsequently wrote about my experience of upgrading Ubuntu 7.04 to Ubuntu 7.10. I gave Ubuntu 7.10 the good old college try, but have to report that I am now back to my FreeBSD Laptop.

The primary issues that I had with Ubuntu 7.10 had to deal with wireless networking. The connection speed would never exceed 23mbps and even when the driver stated that it was connected at 23mbps I could not achieve throughput of more than 5mbps, even with the laptop sitting 5' from the AP. The second, and most irritating, issue with the wireless networking setup of Ubuntu 7.10 was the consistent disconnects and intermittent reconnects. Often it would not reconnect and I would have to reboot and piss with it for 30 minutes before it would inexplicably reconnect. Of course this started to remind me of M$ reboots and I had to immediately remediate the situation with ufs and FreeBSD!


At first I thought that this was potentially related to the Broadcom 43XX chipset in the test laptop. I then tested with different Intel (non proprietary) wireless cards and different APs. An additional reason that I tested with different access points was due to the range limitation that I was experiencing with Ubuntu 7.10. I was only able to get to roughly 30' from the AP before I would lose signal.

The combination of these three wireless issues, in addition to the upgrade pain, led me to flatten the system and slap FreeBSD 6.2 REL onto it. That said, I am now back into my comfort zone of *BSD. I will also say that I have loaded the Broadcom 43xx windows driver using ndis and that I now have full 54mbps connectivity and a range of greater than 50' from the same APs that I had less than 30' with Ubuntu 7.10.

So, to conclude and finish this mild rant, I think that the new Ubuntu 7.10 is a decent distro overall "for the click brigade" but I also think that more time should have been put into the guts as opposed to the shininess of the whole thing. Of course, if you read some of my previous postings about the shininess setup issues that I experienced out of the box with Ubuntu 7.10....then perhaps they should have put more time into that as well.

Previous articles:
Ubuntu 7.04 to 7.10 Upgrade Notes Pt. 1
Ubuntu Upgrade to 7.10 Strike 2
Ubuntu Upgrade....or not (with compiz)

Cheers,
JJC

Ubuntu Upgrade...or not (with compiz)

Perhaps it was a lack of patience on my part, or poor forward planning on Ubuntu's part, but I could no longer continue to attempt upgrading after what was likely the 30th failed attempt. As a result of this upgrade attempt outcome I decided to backup the /home/* directories and perform a clean install.

As one would expect the standard install succeeded with no problem. The expected options were available from custom partitioning to setting initial user and permissions during the installation. The only real issue that I had was with the "seamless" compiz implementation that I had heard so much about.

For this installation I used an HP laptop that I have, this laptop contains an ATI X series video card and therefore supports 3D acceleration. I was disappointed that the compiz (3D) desktop acceleration did not work out of the box, so here is what I did to make it work: Initially I simply tried to enable Extra effects after enabling the proprietary video card. This only produced the error "Composite extension not found"...after enabling in xorg.conf (as described below) I received the fairly generic error "Unable to enable visual effects" or similar... So here are my steps to enable compiz on Ubuntu 7.10 with ATI drivers (what worked for me)

• Enable all of the repos that have proprietary software and the like System -> Administration -> Software Sources.
• Enable the proprietary video card driver from the Restricted Drivers Manager.
• Make sure composite extensions are enabled : vi /etc/X11/xorg.conf

Section "Extensions"
Option "Composite" "1"
EndSection

• Install xserver-xgl "sudo apt-get install xserver-xgl
• Install compizconfig-settings-manager "sudo apt-get install compizconfig-settings-manager" *this is not a requirement but gives you a level of customization that is nice.
• Restart X
• Try it out System -> Preferences -> Appearance -> Visual Affects (select what you want here...I used Extra then Custom from the last apt-get install)

Everything else worked nicely, enabled the proprietary fwcutter for my wireless card and it worked, no more mucking with it as in previous versions, very nice!

All in all, I give this version a Thumbs Up despite the upgrade mess, seems more stable so far and clean.

Hope this helps someone out :-)

Cheers,
JJC