Hello,

I have read a lot about Ubuntu and decided to give it a whirl. I previously installed Mandriva using KDE, which went alright, but had some annoying issues.

(I went ahead and bolded the pros and cons/issues to make reading a little quicker/easier)

So I proceeded to my laptop test, to check it out first. (my HP Omnibook xe2, DLink G650 Wireless)

The installation was pretty simple (I don't think you could mess it up). the only issue I ran into was it would not detect and setup DHCP with my wireless card, but setting it up statically worked fine. It took probably about 50 minutes or so, and I was up and running. I was extremely impressed to find that it setup the wireless atheros drivers flawlessly and upon boot, I immediately had internet access, which I have never been able to do before on my laptop.

It would have been nice to give at least the option of packages to install (at least basic options, like development, games, etc), or maybe I missed that one.

Everything seemed in order, so I went ahead and wiped my main PC, and installed. Since it is not my slow @$$ laptop, it was finished in about 20 mins. Awesome.

There was a couple of packages that I knew I needed so I proceed to the package manager Synaptic, which I had not used before. Worked great! Why is this not commonplace nowadays? Good lord, package management is a million times worse than dll hell. This is exactly what is needed to make things easy on the user.

Now to my problems.

I started out messing around with the configurations... themes, menus, remote desktop, etc.. Immediately, 2 different configuration programs cause a crash: vino-preferenecs has quit unexpectedly when trying to change options for remote desktop i.e. vnc). this also occurs when trying to changes menus and toolbar options.

Next, I have 2 Windows drives in the machine that I need access to. I could not find any utility to allow me to mount these drives (Mandriva automatically mounted both drives at startup, which was nice). I am fairly new to linux, but know enough to get around, so I got the mounts setup in my fstab and we were good to go. In my opinion, other drives should have been setup at least as readonly mounted drives.

Now that I got my drives mounted, I wanted to play some music, so I tried to start it, and.. WHAT THE HELL??? No decoder for MP3!!! Is this standard for the install?? If so, it needs to change. It tries to start in Totem (video player) which I thought was strange, but I also tried in Rythymbox. I am certain I can find the packages needed or what have you to get this to work, but that is just bizarre to me.

I also need to get VMWare installed, which requires a kernel module update, but on to another problem, I can't get the kernel source installed easily. I'm working on this one now.

I have noticed a few other odd things, and have a few irritations as well.

Sometimes it appears that the 'loading' icon sticks, and you have to resize the window for it to go away.

I noticed after awhile of trying you need to use the middle mouse button to create links. This of course was after I started copying huge files by left clicking and dragging. I am sure this is just a setting that can be changed. (hopefully)

Installing or access to root folders seems a bit annoying. I still need to chown or chmod files from terminal to make changes. From what I had gathered, root wasn't a standard, or regularly used thing in Ubuntu, and that the first user is a 'system admin' of sorts. Apparently, this is not the case.


Phew. All in all, so far it seems like a nice system, but I was a bit dissapointed after hearing about how supposedly 'polished' or 'stable' it would be.

Feel free to comment, or if you would like, post solutions, but I just generally wanted to rant and give some output on my experience of first use.

LiQuid8d

With the vino-preferences thing - couldn't that just be a bug in vino-preferences or something? You may want to consider stating what you did in it, take a screenshot, and send it in to the vino developers. They may have some more info! I've personally never used it, but the program may have a bug, as I mentioned before, or (slightly more unlikely) you may have a faulty sector in your RAM?

As for the Windows thing, I'm not sure why it doesn't mount other partitions automatically. I don't think it did that for my friend either, and we had to edit the fstab for it to mount the Windows partition. Oh well, no distro is perfect, is it? Anyway it makes up for that by automatically adding your Windows partition (if you have one) to GRUB so that you can dual-boot without needing to edit the grub.conf

Yup, I was also quite shocked when I couldn't play MP3s out of the box! All I needed to do though was to go to Ubuntuguide.org, add the extra repositories, and install the multimedia codecs, and I was ready to go!

By the way, the reason that you didn't get a package choice during the installation was on account of the fact that Ubuntu is a 1-CD-install, therefore not bringing a huge number of packages. Ubuntu only brings the packages that the developers think that the average user would find neccessary - and as the installation isn't that huge, why bother? Except, I'm not sure if I remember having a choice between a standard or stripped-down version of Ubuntu during the installation...

The loading icon has never stuck with me! Oh, and the middle-mouse-button thingy, thanks! I usually tend to make links via the terminal....could you please tell me whether the middle MB makes soft links or hard links? Thanks!

Instead of using a root account, Ubuntu uses "sudo". This temporarily gives a standard user root privileges, so that he/she may edit system files and the like without allowing the vulnerability of being the root user. You may not like sudo, but it is currently considered more secure than "su" (by various top organizations), because you can't just remain in root and do whatever you want. I agree, sometimes it is a pain in the 455, but don't you think it's better in the long run? The first user isn't a sys admin, no: he has the same permissions as any other normal user. You can find the sudo man page here.

J_K9

P.S I love Ubuntu!