Installing Ubuntu

So, I got around to installing Ubuntu on my box at work last week, starting with Warty Warthog (stable), and upgrading to Hoary Hedghog (unstable) shortly afterwords. While I had some issues with warty (mainly the fact that it didn’t use UTF-8), they’ve been mostly resoved by hoary — one problem I did run into in the original install of warty was that it didn’t seem to have a nice way to deal with multiple NICs. Specifically, it detected the (unused) eepro100 10/100BaseT chipset on the mainboard just fine, and configured the network to use it, but ignored the sk98lin 1GbE card, which is the one I actually use (and /home is on NFS). I had to play around with rmmod, modprobe, and /etc/modules to get it working, which isn’t really user-friendly at all. I should probably note that other than that installation snag, Ubuntu is exactly what I’d want out of a Linux distribution: 6-month release schedule, ease-of-use the primary concern, and it’s named after a philosophy created by Desmond Tutu. What’s not to love?

Oh… right. fglrx is what’s not to love. Sigh.

It’s not Ubuntu’s fault that it sucks, it’s ATI’s fault—and it’s propriatary so all the Ubuntu crew (or anyone else) can actually do is package it. Oh how I wish the fglrx driver didn’t suck. Let me count the ways, or at least count the number of people who feel the same way. That and not be stupid enough to buy another one until they support X.Org 6.8+, the Linux framebuffer, and fix the bug where switching between VTs takes out X, and the one where DRI only works for one session—after that I need to rmmod/modprobe fglrx. Ok, enough ranting… deep breath 😉