4by12

Ubuntu Installation Update

July 14, 2006 – 3:12 pm

I finished installing Ubuntu on my ThinkPad, and I’ve been working with it for a couple of weeks now. Here are my thoughts so far.

The Bad

My first installation attempt was a disaster. First thing I did was create restoration CDs for my ThinkPad, allowing me to completely restore my machine to its factory configuration. Annoyingly, Lenovo don’t supply these CDs with the machine, and you have to burn them from a BIOS utility. All nine of them. The data itself is present in a separate partition on the hard drive, but that of course won’t help you if your hard drive dies.

Next, I downloaded the Ubuntu live installation CD and started installing. I was presented with an option to resize the existing NTFS partition — the first time I’ve seen such an option in a Linux installation. I was a bit suspicious, but I went ahead and used it to shrink the parition and make room for Ubuntu. After that, the machine failed to boot. Ubuntu had destroyed the machine’s partition table.

Looking up this problem on the Ubuntu forums, I found out that the Live CD had a buggy old version of the partitioner which caused this problem. I also learned that the Live CD install was new and not very stable. That’s not an excuse for destroying my hard drive, but whatever. Folks on the forums recommended using the Alternate Installation CD instead of the LiveCD.

Grudgingly, I restored my machine to its original state using the CDs I burned earlier, and started from scratch. This was a very major fuck up that caused me to rethink the whole Ubuntu thing. Eventually I decided to go ahead with it anyway, and luckily from this point on everything went smoothly.

The Good

I used my trusty PartitionMagic to shrink the NTFS partition and make room for Linux. I then installed Ubuntu using the Alternate Installer — that’s the previous, text-based, stable version of their installation CD.

The installation went off without a hitch. As is common with Linux installations, all the choices you need to make are concentrated at the beginning of the installation. So once you hit ‘Install’ you can go away and come back to a fully installed and configured machine. Also, the entire installation required only one or too reboots. What is special about Ubuntu is that it doesn’t ask you what to install. It installs reasonable default packages, and you can install everything else later using Synaptic or apt-get. I like this approach.

Having done a couple of Linux laptop installations in the past, I was expecting a week or so of post-installation tweaking to get everything working. When the machine first booted, I was pleasently surprised to find almost everything working out of the box. This included wireless networking, sleep, hibernation, battery monitor, SpeedStep, subpixel rendering, and the mouse’s scroll wheel, not to mention graphics and USB support.

I almost fell off my chair when I found that all the ThinkPad-specific keys were also working: Volume control, brightness control, wireless on/off, hibernate button, and sleep button. Even the key that controls the keyboard light at the top of the monitor worked! To me, everything-just-works is the most important feature a distribution can have. Ubuntu has mastered this, and it positions Ubuntu as the most user-friendly distrib around.

The Tweaking

Ah, the tweaking. My favorite part of every Linux installation. First thing I did was to upgrade the kernel to a 686-compiled version (Ubuntu comes with a 386 version by default, which doesn’t use newer processor features). To get wireless to work after that, I also had to install the restricted-modules package, because the driver for my wireless card is closed-source. I’m used to compiling custom kernels for my Linux laptops to get everything to work. With Ubuntu, that wasn’t necessary.

Next, I installed Windows fonts (I love Tahoma) and added hebrew support. I used OpenOffice to edit Word documents and Excel spreadsheets, and view PowerPoint presentations. All these documents were in hebrew. Everything worked, except for some minor PowerPoint presentation glitches. I also used OpenOffice to convert an HTML document to PDF, which also worked. OpenOffice has made tremendous progress since the last time I tried it. I think a vast majority of users can already use it as an Office replacement.

I also installed the ProggySquare font which I use for shell and programming. The Gnome terminal had trouble showing the TrueType version, so I switched to Konsole.

When I tried to print something, my printer was recognized correctly but didn’t work. This is a well known problem with Canon printers, which require special drivers to work. I just let it go for now, and printed from Windows.

Next thing I did was switch the graphics driver to the closed-source ATI FireGL driver to get 3D acceleration working. Replacing the driver also greatly improved 2D performance, so it’s highly recommended if you have a recent ATI card.

Finally, I did all the fun desktop tweaks: Keyboard shortcuts, adding panel applets, transparent panels, choosing a theme, and choosing a wallpaper. My desktop now looks like this:

The Conclusion

Since the installation, I’ve only booted back into Windows twice, to use a web site that only works in IE, and to print a document. I think I’ll install VMWare on Linux to get rid of the web dependency, and I’m hopeful I’ll never have to leave Linux again.

I’ve used a variety of Linux distributions over the years, including Red Hat, Fedora, Mandrake, PLD, and a few others. I’m incredibly impressed with Ubuntu. It’s by far the best distribution I’ve ever used. It’s so good, I’d feel comfortable recommending it to a non-Linux-savvy user as a complete desktop environment.