linux-rulz ..
you certainly have your love for ubuntu and your are welcome to it.

Your point by point rebuttal is from passion rather than any facts. I grant you I was being jestful is some comments, but there is nothing to retract from the real technical problems with this distribution.

I am not the only one who experienced this behavior, I have read other posts and folks have had LiveCD die on them .. I had it worse because I was trying to install it on a hard disk.

It has nothing to do with S3 being a sucky card to support, Ubuntu went on to advise me to take CD out and REBOOT. It didn't boot so I looked at the partition,
NOTHING was written to it . no kernel nothing .. they just wrote the partition table and the MBR and didn't have the kernel ready to write. Anyone doing this kind of code should be careful and only write the MBR and partition table when they actually CAN use it. Actually a half way decent install should give you an option to install the MBR and grub or use existing one, but that's another matter, this is too simplistic an install to bother with such niceties.

If a distro doesn't support some hardware that's fine, but not supporting and crashing disks are NOT related, one is an result of NO programming and the other of the BAD programming.
BTW Libranet (debian based) had NO problem with this card ... nor did plain Debian ..
I don't care what your opinion is .. you just don't start doing three things simultaneously and mess up first if the second or third fail.
This is CARELESS programming and there is NO amount of MD5s and slow burns going to fix.
Your MD5 arguments are for birds, so are your comments about redownloading and burning at a slower speed. It just shows a lack of understainding of communication protocols and how things work .. it's the windows equivalent of let's reboot and the problem may go away.

Yes .. I probably am unnecessarily worried about Ubuntu folks on Debian .. but that was more in jest than as a real concerns, I don't think these guys are "that real" or that much of the core team for debian. Debian couldn't have come this far with this kind of programming.
I also fail to see the need of the members of the team to start another distro to bring Gnome 2.8 to the public. I presume you can get that from the Debian tree itself if you point your apt-sources to the unstable branch. So their claims are hyperbole at best.

Your argument that you have to "pay" for it to point that something is wrong is just not worth discussing.
These forums server the purpose of telling anyone who's interested what different folks have experienced, If one wants to limit "the criticism" to the paying folks only, may be one should ask for a different forum that caters to elite "paying" segment.

Enough said .. I am bunting the ubuntu and I don't think I will waste any more of my time or words on it.

Well, it actually had less to do with my understanding of internet protocols and more to do with your vague wording of the problem. You have to admit, the way you worded your initial post about the reboot thing made no sense. Use those same words when contacting Canonical and they are going to ask you what in the hell you are trying to say. And again, how did X fail to load during the installer?? Neither the Debian installer nor the Ubuntu installer try to load X at any point. In fact, the exact steps after you answer all the initial questions are, copy packages to disk, install some necessary packages and kernel, REBOOT, download security updates, install remaining packages and updates and then X attempts to load. So it is one or the other, either X failed to load or you could not reboot...not both. That is based on fact. You should know this as you have obviously used Debian and stated that Ubuntu's installer does not differ almost at all from Debian's.



Ummm...Ubuntu had Gnome 2.8 before any of Debian's branches did.



You missed my point entirely. I am saying that it takes a whole lot of nerve to not contribute with code, documentation or money and then to go ahead and launch personal attacks on the developers. Stating "Ubuntu is a bad distro, has little stability, and doesn't install properly" is completely proper, whether you contributed or not. What I quote from you below is not. I think it is just downright rude and ignorant. I wouldn't even say anything bad about MS's developers. Or Novell's. Or Red Hat's.


Actually, I retract my statement about money cause I agree it makes little sense. Whether you pay or not, it is downright rude and ignorant to launch personal attacks on developers who are trying their best. If their best isn't good enough for you, write a bad review, quit using the product and DONT insult the developers. That is all I am trying to say.

linux-rulz ..
long rants don't mean substance. You clearly know more about ubuntu process and how it was rushed.
Your explanations about MD5s/slow burning (now that's a doozie) .. or when does X start and when does one write
the kernel to the disk are entertaining but not meaningful. The fact is someone craps a disk and that's unforgivable.

Your Passion for this team probably has more than an casual observation or defense of decency, I have reread my original post to find the overly offensive language and I don't think anything I said was directed as you have made it to be. However I will take the opportunity to explain the issue one more time.

1. This is not personal attack as you point out, but it is criticism and it can't be thrown at the wind.
Just like if you see a bad movie, you don't say the movie doesn't appeal, you point out that the director, the actors or
the screen-writers didn't deliver .. so it is with programming.

You can't say the distro is bad because I feel it's bad, you have to have a concrete reason and the reason points to the
cause and I have done programming enough to say that this cause has little to do with "some hardware" but more to
basic understanding of how things SHOULD be done.

You can't make programmers out of non-programmers. Knowing a language doesn't make you one.


2. This sort of work is relying on everyone to help it make better, it should have enough to justify continuing effort by
unsuspecting "testers" to keep at it.

In my opinion, the distribution is so lacking in basic defensive programming that it shouldn't be tried. If I was to know
who these good folks are, I would quiet actively desist from using anything they write.

Look at slack, a single persona has carried the torch rather successfully and is very much respected for it, reverse
would be true if his output was buggy. (and there are other examples .. Gentoo/Mepis)
If he were to put his name on a piece of code, people will trust it .. reverse would also be true, and generally is.
I will repeat again, if I knew these good folks, I would never use their work again .. life is too short to play with fire.

You can't blame ether for bugs, these are created and fixed by real folks, if you do well people will regard you,
and if you don't people won't .. and IT IS PERSONAL.

When I spend time on something, if it's good to me I give it credit (may be not money .. don't have much to give),
and when it messes me up, I will blame it and warn others of the current and potentially future danger.

When you cook rice, you test one or two grains to see if it's done, you can't touch every grain or you will have a porridge on your hands .. so it's with programs, you judge by the kind of problem you face, I think the flaw is FUNDAMENTAL in their understanding programming, no amount of nice touchy feely will fix that.

I will repeat what I said before these good folks need some serious training before they can deliver "comparable" quality software. There is PLENTY of very good code available.