Thursday, April 30, 2009

Review of Ubuntu 9.04 on a low resource system

The test system is an antique HP Vectra running a PII-450 with only 256MB of physical system memory. The hard drive is a little more modern 7200rpm 40GB drive.

To be honest, Ubuntu blew it. What sounded like a great new release has left me scratching my head. To start with, I new that Ubuntu would have a lot of problems getting into the Live CD mode. Thats a given considering the severly low memory. I began the installation by choosing the Install Ubuntu option. I turned off all of the f6 options. Selected f4 and chose OEM Install. While the installer was booting, I noticed that yet again Ubuntu has chosen to go with a heavily memory intensive Xorg + installer configuration. I haven't understood this for a while, as Ubuntu is based on Debian Linux. Debian developed a very elegant graphical installer based on gtk-directfb. No xserver! Debian graphical installer runs very well on low resource systems. Why oh why won't the Ubuntu devs wake up to a better way of life. The work has been done for them!

Installation was a bit unresponsive on this system. But I got through it slowly. Remove the cd and reboot. Everything is going great, got through the core boot process very quickly, I'm impressed. But Xorg didn't want to start. After Xorg restarted it's self three times Ubuntu handed me a screen saying that it was running in a low video mode. Ok, no biggie, just go on and start. So I clicked OK. Then I am handed a screen asking me what I want to do about it. So with a very poorly implemented series of troubleshooting screens and about 20 minutes I am dumped out on the command line. Come on, every major distro I have installed on this system has been able to detect this nearly 10 year old video crad. The card is a Matrox MGA G200.

So, now I'm at the command line. Try to run a few major text editors, the only thing I could find was Vi. Thats not good. Many noob's can't even figure out how to exit Vi, much less get a file open with it. Why not something clean like MCEdit or ee? So I open the xorg.conf thinking surely it's just a lil tweak and we will be rolling - then I can file a bug report and be on my way. Xorg.conf was an empty shell. All of the sections were there, but they were empty. What??? Do I have to write this thing from scratch?

I finally found a way to get into a desktop and ran dpkg-reconfigure xserver-xorg. Only changes it made were to the keyboard setup. Checked out the xorg.conf again. Now the keyboard setup is fleshed out but still no real setting in the device section. I added a line specifying the vesa driver instead of mga. Reboot and viola, boot's up now. This whole mga thing is gonna haunt me tho.

Nice log in screen. I run an old RealTek rtl8185 wireless network card in this test machine. Linux has always had issues with this card, it's a 50/50 shot of the native rtl8180 driver locking up the system. Thats the only thing I have ever seen that could repeatedly lock up a Linux box. During initial installation the rtl8185 did lock up Ubuntu. So on first boot I blacklisted the rtl8180 module and shutdown the system. Reinstall the card and turn it back on. Ndiswrapper has always been able to run the WinXP driver for this card. So the system is rebooted. I copied the relative windows driver files into my home directory. I looked around for maybe ten minutes trying to find some gui that could easily handle installing the ndis drivers for my rtl8185. No luck, so I drop to the command line to run 'sudo ndiswrapper -i net8185.inf'. program not installed - run apt-get install ndiswrapper-common to install it.

Okay, I give up. Ubuntu - I haven't worked this hard to get one Linux box up and running since RedHat 4.01. You guys need to download VectorLinux 6.0 Gold Standard and find out what a real Linux looks like.

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