nerdnet

I'm a huge fan of all things Linux / open-source. I've been a Linux user for over 10 years now, and I have to say I am very impressed at how much it has improved in usability and reliability. I was very excited to try out Ubuntu 7.10 after enjoying the earlier versions so much. I decided to try it on my laptop and on my work PC. I won't go into all the details of installing it, running it, etc. I just wanted to point out a few issues I've noticed using it. Overall, I think its a great distro and its very polished, but its not quite perfect.

First off, there seems to be a problem with the Intel 3945ABG wireless chipset in this release. It worked fine in 7.04, but now it appears broken (at least where connecting it to a WPA2 protected wifi network is concerned.) Other people are experiencing problems with this as well, so hopefully the fine folks at Ubuntu will release some fixes soon. I can see that there have been improvements made to the networking administration system which makes it a bit easier to set up your network interfaces.

Secondly, on my Toshiba Satellite A105 laptop, there is a weird problem with certain fonts in Ubuntu 7.10. The GDM login screen and the title bar of most apps show up with giant text which really makes things look ugly. Restarting X with a CTRL-ALT-BACKSPACE sometimes fixes it. I've tried to fix it manually and am at a loss as to where or why its happening. The problem also existed in the RC1 release. I may have to file a bug report on that one, its quite annoying.

Third, and this gripe is for Ubuntu and a lot of other Linux distros: dependency hell. When I try to install something in either Synaptic, or with apt-get, or with anything else under Ubuntu, most things just outright fail because certain dependencies aren't satisfied. This forces me to have to go find all the packages manually and install them one by one until the system is satisfied and I can finally install the package I originally wanted. This is nuts, and its something I don't recall running into in other distros or even in other versions of Ubuntu. When I am installing something, and a dependency isn't met, then the installer should install the missing package for me, or at least give me the option to tell it to do that. Maybe I'm missing it in Ubuntu, but I know in SuSE 10.2/10.3, for example, I can install just about anything and it will take care of the dependency problems for anything I want. Also, I installed Ubuntu 7.10 on a dual core AMD 64 box at work, and because its an AMD 64 processor, it requires the 'amd64' based packages. For some reason 90% of the things I try to install fail outright because the system tells me that the package doesn't exist or is not installable for my hardware. If I go check out the package repository on Ubuntu's website, I can find them all in 'amd64' versions and they install just fine. The installer should find it if its not local, or ask me where to look for it. There are plenty of repositories out there and the default ones should work just fine (all I have been trying to install are things that show up in Add / Remove or Synaptic anyway.) I'll be looking into this a bit more but for hells sakes, it should be a lot smarter than it is... I spent 2 hours installing everything by hand I needed just to do some Java development and testing, when in theory, I should have just been able to tell Synaptic to install the JRE and have it find and install all the other things the system needed for it... Not impressed!

Overall, I think Ubuntu is doing a great job. I keep trying to use only Linux at work, but I keep finding little things that make it hard for me to stay in Linux 100% of the time. We use SuSE 10.2 at work (we need the Novell stuff) and I find that to be a very good distro as well. Good job Ubuntu team, looking forward to making you my daily OS.