Its interesting how the more you learn about something, the more you learn about all the problems and issues it has. Now that I have actually installed Ubuntu (Hardy) and using it as my primary O/S, I have started to discover all the little annoyances and problems it has. Now, not to be a hater [...]
ubuntu foot
Its interesting how the more you learn about something, the more you learn about all the problems and issues it has. Now that I have actually installed Ubuntu (Hardy) and using it as my primary O/S, I have started to discover all the little annoyances and problems it has. Now, not to be a hater though, for the price (FREE) it really is a great distro and it works really well. So here was my first real challenge with Ubuntu..
1. Too many updates.
I swear every other day i am downloading updates to some kernel or some package, and its getting a bit annoying. Even windows never had that many updates constantly being downloaded to the system. Although, i should add that the update process itself is fairly painless and I have yet to have encountered any problems with it. It just ends up being a pain when your broadband connection comes to a crawl because your downloading the latest kernel. Not fun.
2. My second issue is with a lot off the applications and capabilities built in they seem to be 90% to complete but just not quiet there.
An example. So i have a NAS Drive on my network, it has SAMBA running on it. I wanted to mount this drive to my Ubuntu machine so i can listen to music copy files over etc etc. So first off I try to use the Places -> Connect to Server application. This works wonderfully and creates a nice desktop icon for the windows share. Unfortunately, it doesn’t stick around after a reboot. Not sure why this is but there doesn’t seem to be a way to save this location anywhere. After struggling to figure out some way to make this work I decided to do some digging, hit the forums basically and found out that you can modify the /etc/fstab file and mnt the shared location using cifs or smbfs from there. I went ahead boldly and updated my fstab file only to find out that it failed generating some cryptic error. Some more digging revealed that I did not have smbfs installed on my machine. Fair enough, adding new packages into Linux is cake through the command line so typed in “sudo apt-get install smbfs” and wallah the package was installed. I remounted (sudo mount -a) and everything worked and I got my NAS drive mounted auto magically. Brilliant right.. Wrong, I decided to test out this change with a reboot. Well not quiet, as I was shutting down I saw some errors having to do with CIFS not being able to unmount the drives in my system. After this my PC permanently hung. Ok what to do, again more digging, found out there is a bug in Hardy that stops the network manager before unmounting the network drives. So again I had to go into the command line and change some symbolic links around in the /etc/rc6.d directory where all the kill scripts are kept and executed when the system is shut down. I had to modify the execution number on the unmount script so that it executed before the network manager kill script. Finally success..
So basically after a day and a half on tinkering off and on, I finally have a networked drive on ubuntu. How long did this exact thing take me on windows xp. About 2 minutes. Now, to be fair, Im new to Ubuntu and next time around I’ll know better.. but still even if I was a total idiot, and never touched windows before, i probably still would have had an easier time setting that up. Now, I have a completely different story when it came to installing apache, mysql and php on my machine. On windows, i had to edit config files. copy dll files from some directory to another. find mysql dll files to get php to properly talk to Mysql. I probably spent a good half a day trying to get all the configuration files figured out before it ran properly. On linux it was an absolute breeze. It was just a matter of installing all three components and done. Everything came up all configured, all working and with 0 headaches. So that flawless configuration is definitely possible in linux but there definitely are areas in the system that need some closer attention and some follow through. Linux seems to be able to do anything but it definitely tests your desire to want it.
