I’ve been running Linux since 1993 (kernel 0.99-pl13 if I remember correctly) on most of my workstations and servers. I’ve had my idiot-zealot phase (“nothing but Linux is good enough”), but fortunately have left that far behind me. Now I like teasing idiot-zealots with comments about that shareware Loonix thing.
So for the past few laptops, I’ve been running Windows XP, mostly because this Just Works(tm) on modern laptop hardware. Linux really didn’t cut it when compared to XP: yes, you could install it without too much trouble, but getting 100% out of your laptop (suspend/resume, good power management, full support for modern GPUs, etc) is a different story.
Because XP is getting more scary by the day (WGA things, licensing issues) and Vista promises to be even more scary (binding itself to your motherboard) and because I’ve been hearing many good things about Ubuntu Feisty (the soon-to-be-released 7.04), I decided to give this a shot on my HP NC8430 laptop (Core Duo 2GHz, ATI X1600, 2G RAM, etc.). Initially I was determined to do this like a “normal” user, i.e. no tweaking config files and especially no script writing. I wanted to see how far your average user could get with a state of the art Linux installation on a laptop.
Installation
This was quite impressive: I defragmented my NTFS filesystem, booted from the Ubuntu Feisty live CD and did the install. Without getting all cocky about it, the installer resized my NTFS partition, created a new EXT3 partition and installed itself. Colour me impressed.
General configuration
After the first boot, I was greeted with a VESA-driven x.org and an incorrect resolution. My laptop screen supports 1680 x 1050. The Gnome Preferences | Screen Resolution applet couldn’t go higher than 1280 x 1024. I had to break my first rule and edit the x.org configuration file to add the higher resolution. Why is this still necessary? A novice user shouldn’t need to have to do this!
I also installed the Ubuntu packaged fglrx ATI drivers with the Synaptic package management software, as I depend on good 3D graphics support for my work. The new Restricted Driver Manager helps one to complete this configuration in a user-friendly fashion.
By running “aticonfig –set-powerstate 1″, the GPU can be set to a lower-power mode, leading to a cooler-running laptop, meaning the fans don’t spin up as often. This command can be added to the gnome startup by adding it to System | Preferences | Sessions. With “aticonfig –lsp” one can query the available powerstates. One can only change the powerstate if a single display is active.
I removed “quiet” (but left “splash”) from the GRUB config for the default kernel in order to be able to see boot-up messages. These are helpful, especially when things take longer than they should.
Wireless networking support
This is the part that really impressed me: With Ubuntu 6.10 (Edgy Eft), I had to jump through all kinds of very user-unfriendly hoops to connect to my WPA wireless network. Feisty Beta simply popped up a pretty dialog box showing me the detected wireless networks and prompted me for the network key when I selected my WPA access point. I was online… colour me even more impressed!
Power management
This is when my jaw dropped ever so slightly (I’ll get to the “critical” part of this look a bit later): I selected suspend to RAM, which the laptop promptly did. When I pressed the power button to resume, I expected the typical black-screen-crashed-laptop syndrome. Instead, my desktop came back and I could continue working. This is a quantum leap in user-friendly Linux!
However, I soon saw that at every third resume (on average) all my keyboards would be dead.
It turns out something similar to this bug applies to my laptop. By adding the necessary suspend/resume hooks as documented in the bug report (so that the i8042 module is removed before suspend and re-installed after resume), the problem seems to have been solved.
Often after resume, my laptop gets stuck in the text console. I have to switch manually to X with Alt-F7. Another suspend/resume glitch is that the CPU Frequency Scaling Monitor gnome applet is stuck on 2GHz for my second core, although the core is running at half that most of the time. In general, things get a bit flaky after resume; often I need to restart X to get back to normal. I could potentially deal with this.
Another disappointing issue is the terrible battery life under Ubuntu Feisty. On Windows, I get more than 4 hours of battery life with average use (wireless network, web browsing, text editing). With Feisty, even after enabling LAPTOP_MODE in /etc/default/acpi-support and putting the GPU in low-power mode as explained above, I get only 2 hours and 40 minutes. This is almost a show stopper.
Out of the box ACPI monitoring support is well-done. With just a few clicks, I could various temperatures and fan speeds on my panel. See the panel at the top of the screen in the screenshot below:
This also shows the Deskbar applet in action.
Dynamic multi-monitor support SUCKS
My laptop has a docking station with an external LCD monitor, resolution 1280 x 1024. The laptop is 1680 x 1050, as I’ve mentioned. With Windows, (hot) docking / undocking always Just Works. It automatically activates the correct resolution without me having to configure anything. So whenever I resume, I have a working display.
Feisty does not quite get this yet. In fact, Feisty needs some serious clue-bat-based attention… When I dock or undock and then resume, I have no display, and no way of getting my display back, besides power-cycling the laptop at every dock / undock. I ended up writing this Python script and binding it to Alt-F5 (for example) so that I would always have a way of activating the next display in the list of connected displays. Oh jeez, even assigning an arbitrary shell command to a global hot key in Gnome is not straight-forward. You have to use gconf as explained on this page. You can query connected and enabled displays with “aticonfig –query-monitor” and activate any subset with “aticonfig –enable-monitor=name1,name2,…,nameN”.
Desktop effects with XGL and Beryl
Wobbly Windows, you know, these are immensely useful and result in a more productive computing experience. NOT!
They are really very nice though. Most of the desktop effects are more nice to look at than actually useful, except for one: The Exposé-like functionality, called “Scale” by Beryl, scales and fits all windows on the current screen so that one can select the window that one wants to select easily.
Because fglrx doesn’t support the XComposite extension, I could not install AIGLX (Ubuntu default) and had to go for XGL and Beryl. After following this guide and making sure to use the external Beryl package repository as explained here (the Ubuntu packages won’t work in this case, they don’t have XGL support), I got the whole shebang to work. MAN this is pretty! Check out the screenshot below for Scale in action (there are non-desktop-effect ways of doing this, e.g. kompose or skippy, but none of them are as slick as the desktop effects version):
As with most other things in Ubuntu, this functionality is not without its caveats. This is even more flaky with suspending and resuming: after resuming, logging out and in will give you a garbled display. I have to restart X at the GDM login screen to get XGL to work again. There are also some focus issues, especially with the Gnome Deskbar (very useful utility, by the way): pressing the hotkey activates the deskbar, but you can’t begin to type, as the current window still has the focus. I managed to fix this by setting the Beryl “Level of Focus Stealing Prevention” (under general settings) to None. Changing to a higher resolution with the “Display Resolution” applet whilst running XGL+Beryl, results in only part of the screen being usable.
Miscellaneous issues
- Palm Pilot synchronisation seems to work out of the box with my Tungsten C, but hangs forever on ToDo synchronisation. Seems it’s due to this bug.
- The built-in Texas Instruments SD card reader works out of the box, but does not automount like other removable media. This is either due to the fact that it’s not seen as removable, or that the driver forgets to assign its parent bus. See this mail thread. I ended up applying this workaround, involving adding rules to the udev system to pmount the SD card.
- Gimp doesn’t understand SMB: URIs, whereas the Gnome Image Viewer does, and gthumb pretends to but doesn’t.
Conclusion
All in all, I’m positive but not quite convinced yet. The Ubuntu people have done a marvellous job, but Feisty Beta (up to date as of 2007-04-10) doesn’t quite Just Work(tm) on the HP NC8430. I had to break my rule of editing config files or writing scripts more than once to get it to work to my satisfaction, and still there are problems that would make it difficult to work in Ubuntu full-time: the miserable battery life, the flaky suspend/resume and the really bad dynamic multi-monitor support. That being said, things like the user-friendly WPA support and the flawless install on an NTFS partition are going in the right direction.
Updates
- This post has been linked by OSNews! You can also follow some of the discussion over there.
- It’s also on digg (should I say that it’s been dugg?). See here.
- Fixed aticonfig lsp/lsb typo, thanks lampshade!
- My domain has been migrated to a more stable server, some comments may have been lost in the process. If your comment has not appeared yet, please re-submit it.
PS
Please comment away, but keep it civilised. I’ll update the post as we go along, and give credit where credit’s due.
Related posts:
@tatadeluxe:
Passing the buck of Linux driver development to the manufacturers may be the fair thing to do, but isn’t going to help one bit. The hardware manufacturers won’t bite, as the linux community is just too small.
Until the Linux community reaches critical mass, GNU/Linux simply has no choice but to work on its own hardware support.
@Patric Conant:
Good point, but as I’ve said before: Ubuntu (and other advanced distributions) will initially probably support more components out of the box, but generally reaches its plateau faster with laptops. With Windows you eventually end up with a fully supported system.
@Michael:
Give the livecd a shot. The nice thing is, you can try out much of Ubuntu without touching your hard drive.
@Haim Roitgrund:
Relax dude, I appreciate the blossom, it’s just taking it’s frikking time to come to bloom. :)
It would be nice if Linux could appeal to *both* the tinkerers, and to people who just want to get a job done. Ubuntu (and many other distributions) have indicated that they really want this second group of users as well.
@CC_machine and @Niko:
AIGLX does NOT work on the fglrx drivers, and the open source Radeon driver does NOT support my ATI X1600, so I *have* to use Xgl if I want those nice desktop effects. :)
@lexan:
I’ve done my fair share of contributing to Linux on laptops. :) I implemented the first hibernation support for ATI Radeons back in 2003 and this is still being used in all XFree86 code and x.org code. See http://cpbotha.net/software/dri_resume for example.
My post is not about blaming anyone for anything, it’s about identifying issues that need work in Ubuntu specifically and in Linux in general.
As I don’t find it easy to contribute code, I buy some of the ‘free’ software I use.
I ‘bought’ ubuntu on a laptop pre-installed by someone at http://www.linuxemporium.co.uk and it all ‘Just Works(tm)’. They must have put some time and effort into into getting everything working.
My last not-so-good laptop had WinXP pre-installed and that worked as well. They must have paid some Engineers (hopefully) to getting everything working.
That’s what you expect when the OS is pre-installed.
Buying a system with Linux already on it should be the ‘normal’ way for a Linux user to buy a system, not ‘do-it-yourself’ (no matter how much fun you have) or XP.
If all the Linux users did it, maybe we would see the ‘big players’ offering us the choice.
Regarding Dynamic multi-monitor support:
As I understand correctly, somebody is working on it:
http://code.google.com/soc/gnome/appinfo.html?csaid=F9CE6F874146B221
(thanks to Google for sponsoring it)
Who is this ‘average user’? I’d like to meet him. I bet he’s as dumb as a box of rocks the way people recount how he doesn’t know what to do after hitting the power button, assuming he finds it.
I echo the comment that those folks wouldn’t be installing an OS anyway. In my experience, the dumb user who needs to install any version of windows from scratch has as many issues as today’s linux user would have on a fresh install.
It’s all about hardware support. Not linux’s support of hardware but manufacture’s support of linux. On machines where the hw is 100% supported a fresh linux install is usually faster and easier than the same on a windows box.
I just bought a laptop with Vista already installed. It still took 1.5 hours to ‘finishing installing’. I’m curious how long it took to install vista counting the pre-install.
Installed ubuntu on the laptop. Took less than an hour in total. Resume and hibernate work great. The only things that don’t work are the embedded camera and the the headset jack. But that’s an issue of the hw manufacturer not supporting linux. But there is someone from the linux community working to build a drive just for me! And everyone else.
Know what usually happens in the windows world when I have hw that isn’t supported? Not much. So far I’ve never had any hardware that wasn’t suppported in windows that the community created drivers for.
By the way, the issue I have with the resume/hibernate thing is on an xp laptop. When you hibernate and try to resume, it no worky.
Interesting thoughts all round. I have been using Ubuntu for a couple of years and must say 7.04 is quite good. I would say nicer than Vista in many ways. There will often be problems with hibernate, suspend, battery life etc, but believe me XP on some of the older laptops and desktops is no walk in the park.
I am using 7.04 now for internet cafe machines and must say it is working very well. No serious problems of any sort save a little messing around to stop the PC going into suspend. In time past I used Windows and had to spend hours of my time locking it down so the users were unable to mess it up. Ubuntu installs with only 20 mins of my time. Configures in another 20 minutes and its ready to go. It is a good experience for the user and easy for the host to look after. e.g. turn the power on in te morning and off at night.
So far we have not required a reload due to customer caused glitches. Linux in general is a good and stable OS, Ubuntu is fast becoming one of the best (IMO) distributions with competent driver support and quite easy installation.
One criticism I have for linux is the file sharing. Samba takes a little fussing to get configured.
I am using the same laptop nc8430 and the battery backup of 3hrs appx. in both windows and ubuntu. I dont know how you are getting 4hrs backup. Do I need to configure windows to get 4hrs backup?
My friend also has nc6400 which gives around 4hrs backup in both windows and linux.
@Michael
You can try livecd and test out everything. I have seend the specs and everything should possibly work out of the box. I think you can even install xp on the system, but you have to hunt for drivers from the manufacturer’s website.
HI
Interesting stuff. Don’t forget that it is still beta. I have an Lenovo laptop and Feisty is working fine.
The big problems for me are: S-Video, card readers, video cam, and suspend options.
I think that the life battery must be improved.
Do you could setup S-Video on Intel chipset?
I agree with several other posters. Ubuntu is a great community distro, but, just in my opinion, the fit and finish is not quite there out of the box. I have a Dell D620, ran my own tests on Ubuntu, OpenSuse, Mandriva and PCLinuxOS beta. I had similar problems with docking and resolution and battery life config on Ubuntu.
I am running PCLinuxOS because,
1) docking to undocked operation is flawless. My laptop is 1440X900 (915Resolution patch installed automagically) and my external monitor is 1600X1200.
2) ACPI and battery control. Undocked, my XP colleagues (corporate laptop) get around 4 hours. I have tweaked ACPI so that I get around 5.5 hours. On demand CPU, etc. I was really impressed.
3) Built in NetApp, wireless/wired control does not get any easier. Easier than Windows.
My focus, entirely is ease of use and fit and finish. I can, literally, use any distro, but I OEM and support over 30 friends and family members with Linux (I refuse to support Windows) and therefore, it all has to work with GUI controls, and be very easy to use.
I’d give PCLinuxOS beta a spin (based on Mandriva).
Simply put, Synaptic + PCLinuxOS/Mandriva Control Center are hard to beat.
TripleII
nice review.. i dint read all the coments so i dont know if they public something similar… but im agred whit almost everthing… is for sure that ubuntu is making the best efort to compite whit windows actually is the most friendly knowing SO that people use or use to ry at full course for a change of windows…. but i most say that almost those problem u said only are in laptops. well nost of the time.. is a great review. but should make one on a desktop.. good review very obj….
Forgot to add. Power on to log in is 20 seconds (you can auto login if you want). Power button to actually powered off is 11 seconds. I don’t even bother with resume and suspend, but did play, it works.
TripleII
Good review,
I agree there is still some work to do for Ubuntu to be as user-friendly as Windows. But they will get there.
I’m using edgy on a 1 GHZ laptop and there is some issues, mainly related to performance (using too much swap) when firefox and/or open office are running. I’ll probably switch to Xubuntu.
Excellent and honest review! Ubuntu is an OVERRATED distro!
UNuserfriendly! People are praising this distro because it is just FREE! There is NO way that it can match Windows, even Windows 95!
Make up your mind! Don’t fool yourselves!!!
Thanks for the review.
I agree and disagree with lots of post here, but I’d just like to say that with the last 3 laptops I have bought (all IBM T series) the first thing I do is nuke the preinstalled windows installation (which has been xp each time).
I think the review is pretty “fair” despite your arguments. I appreciate that ubuntu attempts to configure everything out of the box (works pretty nicely too on an old T40 I tried it on) but saying that laptops with preinstalled copies of windows with all the settings(?) and drivers installed is a bit pointless in my opinion. First of all, virtually everything does work pretty flawlessly out of the box with windows (yes,(much?)better than ubuntu imo). Installing one or two driver sets off a manufacturers website is no effort, you’re comparing this to a linux install…
Check your installed applications when it comes to battery life. If you have Beagle installed it keeps indexing forever and you can never put your laptop to sleep. I wouldn’t have Beagle on a laptop. I’m sure there are others (like Gmail/Yahoo email checkers that ping a server every x minutes.) Maybe tweaking these apps or eliminating them will help battery life.
Very good review. Objectivity (and not a zealot bias) should be nurtured by anyone interested in helping Linux (and Ubuntu in particular) to mature and spread all over.
The TI SD reader bug is https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/ source/linux-source-2.6.20/ bug/53923 there. For the first few builds of Feisty’s 2.6.20 kernel, it was a broken udev. That was fixed the same day 2.6.20-12 was released. Unfortunately, 2.6.20-13 includes an “updated” driver for it, which rebroke it. There are instructions on the bug page to compile the proper driver, but it’s marked for being fixed by release day, so this is just part of the beta-testing phase, and shouldn’t be an issue on the final release.
Regarding suspend/resume: that’s an issue on Windows too. I think Mac OS is the only one without that issue, and that’s because they have complete control over the hardware in the machine. When suspend/resume are broken, it’s a good idea to assume it’s a driver’s fault, and try setting different ones to unload/load on suspend/resume until you know which one it is. Mine works fine.
Battery life: was that WITH Beryl running? Because disabling Beryl should get you longer battery life.
@Mackenzie:
I tested with and without Beryl/XGL. Actually there was not much difference, mostly because I wasn’t dragging windows around (or spinning the cube) all that much.
@cpbotha
Can you confirm ones more for battery. Are u shure there is shorter battery age with UBUNTU then with Microsoft Vista?
@Michael:
I tested with XP, not with Vista. I checked and double-checked: for normal use (browsing the web on wireless, doing some text editing, etc) battery life under XP is *significantly* better than that under Linux.
I am a novice linux user who recently dual-booted my hd with xp and linux ubuntu. I have a problem though. Whenever i boot up ubuntu, it hangs up at this wierd grapical splash screen and stays there. Every time i boot it up, it happens. I also tried insalling debian, fedora, and mandriva; the same thing happend with all of them. I now hypothesize that the problem is not with linux. I think the problem is with my nvidia geforce go 6150 graphics card. Iam using an hp pavillion dv6140us notebook pc and it has an amd dual core cpu and 2 gigis of ram. I dont see why it has a problem but i am kindly asking for some assistance regarding this issue. If anyone has a fix for this issue, you can contact me at my e-mail address, which is tkmstr1009@gmail.com.
Thank you in advance for your kindness.
Jonathan
LOL!!! you did not emphasized that feisty is still in its beta stage!!! and you’re expecting it to be flawless…
@rigo:
LOLOLOLOLOL ROFLMAO LOLOLOL
Did you see the “beta” in large black letters at the very beginning of my post? LOLOLOL
OMG ponies!
;)
On a more serious note: I did not expect it to be perfect. I’ve been using (and making) software for long enough that I understand perfectly well what one could and should expect of a beta.
Last week one of my colleagues undocked his Dell laptop running xp to bring into a meeting to show us something, but the thing he wanted to show us was stuck trying to diplay on the monitor he was no longer connected to. Its BS to compare Linux to Windows saying Windows “Just Works(tm)”.
The type of user who does not want to know anything more about their OS than how it meets their immediate needs (e.g., access to an app) wouldn’t take the time to bother with xorg.conf …and likely also has a Windows machine that’s riddled with spyware, viruses and the like, and is working on a ticking timebomb. Its a matter of time before s/he realizes that the time it takes for a complete reinstall is worthwhile when considering lost productivity.
Most Windows users I know are running 24/7 with Admin privs visiting all kinds of websites with IE. You know who I am talking about. They want to show you something but when you stop by to see it, they click on a link, IE hangs, the HD light seems to be permanently flickering. It “Just Works(tm)” like crap if you don’t know what you’re doing.
The icing on the Linux cake will get sweeter, in the meantime its a superior architecture under the hood. If you want both intelligent architecture and a highly polished UI & easy on the user experience, its OS X baby!
@d00d:
That’s a good point. Windows doesn’t Just Work(tm), unless it’s been integrated by the manufacturer, or unless a knowledgable user takes the time to make it work. OS X is by definition integrated by the manufacturer, so the same rule applies.
However, in the knowledgable user case, you need MUCH more knowledge and expertise (and patience) to get Linux working as well as Windows on the same *modern* laptop hardware.
Code and patches that I wrote have been integrated in the Linux kernel, I’ve written several Linux kernel drivers (years and years ago), I developed an embedded Linux OS distribution (4MB disk-on-chip total), I used to be a Debian Developer, and some of my code can also be found in XFree86 and X.Org. I consider myself at the very least a power user, yet I can’t get Ubuntu to support my laptop hardware 100%.
With the same amount of effort, or person-hours, I can usually get XP to support everything fully (and yes, I do install the necessary anti-malware crap) on the same laptop hardware.
When we compare linux (ubuntu, debian , …) to Xp, specially on laptop, we have first to keep in mind that:
firstly, you buy your laptop, and of course you pay license, somebody else has installed everything for you. This “somebody” is the constructor, who built your, laptop, which created the hard chip itself. In fact all these contructor works for MicroSoft, because microsoft didn’t write theses drivers!!!!
So XP in not superior to linux, the inverse is true!!!!
secondly, If we use our laptop for developpment (using, programming languages,…) , teaching, servers and so one, there is no comparaison at all, everything is available on linux ( just on debian you can oevr 20 000 softwares!!!! without any charge!!,) but you have to buy all on Microsoft!!!
thirdly, we can continue in this way, to list different advantage on linux environnement, the control of the machine, the planning task, the possibility to use terminal etc…, but perhaps the more visible is the virus all time , all day
I began to use linux in 90′s and still continue to do it; On my laptop, although XP is install ( i get like this) I don’t use it at all!!!
best regards
bela
Very nice review, thank you! It’s detailed, and shows the improvements and the problems with the new Ubuntu distribution. It was really helpful to convince me to give it a try.
However I think Windows Just Doesn’t Work(tm). The laptops are functionning only because they are configured at the factory.
When I bought my Fujitsu laptop, I installed the 64 bit Windows XP and the OpenSuSE 10.2. Out of the box the Linux worked much better and it was easier to make it work 100% than the Windows (where I couldn’t find the 64 bit drivers on the manufacturer website)… And I still have some annoyances with resume under Windows (the sound driver), while under Linux it works without problems.
I’m an average user, too, and I have more experience in Windows than in Linux.
Your review seemed very well considered and “expertly” argued, but your experiences do not match mine, thankfully. I tend to agree with Love Calculator, who said “You seem to have quite a few geeky needs and can’t really expect to satisfy them without doing geeky stuffâ€.
I am a definite “noob†to Linux and have no clue as to how to even find the command line, let alone use it and I have no idea what most of the terms you used in your write up mean, i.e. I am as green as it gets.
I discovered Ubuntu after spending nearly five days trying to re-install Windows “an OS I know very well†on a new hard drive on my Dell Inspiron Laptop (a machine designed for Windows). The sound card would not install and nothing would work. After several attempts at an install, I gave up (so much for “just worksâ€) and decided to look at the idea of another OS and found Ubuntu.
I downloaded it and burned it to a CD. The install was quick and easy and I was up and running in no time. I put my Netgear Wifi card in and it just worked without needing anything … wow ! To get wifi access I needed to install a bit of software, which was on the install software, list, which made connecting very easy (I am told I will not even need to do this with 7.04!). I installed my printer in about 50 seconds; it was on the list of printers in the software … another Wow.
Next was looking for other software that I use on Windows. Skype was an easy install as was dictionary and translation software (I paid for Windows, this was free).
I am a very happy Ubuntu user who is very green and I have found that Ubuntu “Just Worksâ€! Ubuntu … wave of the future !! I look forward to my next computer purchase being a Ubuntu Linux Dell.
I have been using XP since it was released and last week decided to give Ubuntu a try.
I have been using 6.10 for about a week now, and I do find it very hard after using XP for so long.
I found it quite frustrating that my wireless network didn’t work and it seemed so much effort to install drivers and get it working, that I still haven’t bothered and I am now using a wired network.
I also had tons of problems installing Beryl, having to edit the xorg.conf really messed it up, until I found out the GFX drivers were not installed correctly.
I have now installed the drivers and Beryl seems to be working, but my GFX are very, very slow… even scrolling down this page takes a very long time and I have still not been able to fix this.
However, I think it does look great, it feels smoother and more secure than XP.
I think as soon as Feisty is released I am going to reformat and install it. I am willing to give Ubuntu a good try before I give up.
I do find it a shame that I can’t play many of the games I can play on Windows (unless I pay for a program) so I am dual booting XP with Ubuntu.
All Clear » Read Today #4 // Apr 16, 2007 at 03:20
[...] cpbotha, a critical look at ubuntu feisty beta on an hp nc8430 laptop [...]
I think the point early on about comparing apples to apples: OEM installed Linux/Windows or user installed Linux/Windows is really bang on. I’ve installed both many times on major and minor OEM brands–Dells of various models and Acers mostly.
In my experience Ubuntu
This week I have installed various ‘buntus (xubuntu and linux mint) and re-installed windows xp on the same machine.
The windows setup was oem for this dell 510m laptop. The ‘buntus were downloaded and burned onto CD.
Once windows was installed, the graphics were all wrong, there was no sound and no wireless, no touchpad and no onboard modem. I then had to take the dell driver CD, extract and install the various drivers before I could detect and configure them. Then it worked fine.
The ‘buntus: Once installed, the only two things I had to “tweak” were wireless and power management. This amounted to clicking on the network manager, checking “enable” for wireless – and it was done. I had to use synaptic to install the power management – it was dead simple. Oops! I forgot – I had to download and install mplayer and various codecs to play .wmv files.
Before using the windows system further, I had to install office software. In the ‘buntu distros, that was installed with the OS.
As to comparing a beta download of ubuntu with windows xp, I really think you should compare it with a beta download of vista. Bet you it doesn’t just work!
All that said, I enjoyed the style of your review, it’s refreshing to read something from someone who is trying to see clearly rather than preach his own religion
Laptop battery life - LinLog // Apr 17, 2007 at 01:31
[...] never really worried about it, since I almost always use the laptop plugged in, but I read a blog post complaining about battery life under Ubuntu, so I figured I’d look into it.My Dell Inspiron B120 normally got about an hour an ten minutes on [...]
hello,
I didn’t go through all of the comments so I am not sure if similar points have been brought up. One comment I have is if you could include the exact commands that you ran for each function. I am a noob but I like tinkering around with Ubuntu. It is fun, more fun than installing XP drivers every time you do a fresh install. I like your review but I think you’re too harsh on Ubuntu. The project tries to ship all available drivers on one CD, companies still don’t work with Canonical on opening up their source code for better support. Try to install XP on a pc you built w/out inserting driver CDs, not even internet available on XP from the get go. With Ubuntu, it works from LIVE CD!!!!
Another comment I have is that Microsoft has been around for so long and has a huge financial backing. Ubuntu is sponsored mainly by Mark Shuttleworth himself. Canonical has only 65 employees, give them a break. We all want too much from a product that has been around for only four years. I think that even though Ubuntu is still not perfect, we have to look at its achievements in such a short period of time. Vista was just a copy of Server 2003 and it took five years to make, still not all drivers are working. Ubuntu is only four years old, c’mon. Instead of complaining how Ubuntu is not perfect, we should really get involved and get everyone you know envolved. My parents are trying to learn using a pc, I want to install Ubuntu on their pc so that they don’t get used to Windows because I know I won’t use it for long outside of work.
Thank you.
bored and blogging » Blog Archive » Links for April 17th, 2007 // Apr 18, 2007 at 14:30
[...] a critical look at ubuntu feisty beta on an hp nc8430 laptop | cpbotha.net – Charl P. Botha installs Feisty HP NC8430 laptop. Unlike a lot of the reviews, he gives his honest opinion: “The Ubuntu people have done a marvellous job, but Feisty Beta (up to date as of 2007-04-10) doesn?t quite Just Work(tm) on the HP NC8430.” – (tags: software ubuntu) [...]
Wow, great write-up, as a corporate user of NC84XX and NC82XX I’m thrilled to hear that driver support is so good (out of the box) for this notebook.
Nice article.
But!
As other people said: in windows you also have to take care of the drivers AND SOFTWARE! (xp comes with paint and notepad while Ubuntu comes with Gimp and OpenOffice, not to mention the rest).
So don’t forget you can run Ubuntu from cd and that it pretty much comes with all i need (blender, gimp, openoffice and so on) and above all: it’s free. So consider making donations in the linux world as if you had to buy software licences in the windows world.
Also, consider helping out the Open Source Community! (don’t just complain about things and wait to get better)
Thanks for a good and balanced review.
I am a Windows man turning into a Ubuntu man soon I hope. Have been playing around with the Ubuntu’s for a few years now and I really love it. But, XP/Vista is easier to set up, there is no way one can argue otherwise. If Ubuntu cant figure out that my Laptop is using 1600×1200 and my Dell monitor hooked to the docking station something else, then the mainstream user will be lost. If it werent for the fact that I like poking around with stuff like this, doing all kinds of changes and learning while I’m at it, I would have dropped Ubuntu a long time ago. I have had lots of issues with my ATI card (none with my NVIDIA card) but finally got it to work. Even with Feisty I had to spend a lot of time getting my ATI card on my laptop to work propery. You know, these things gotta go if the Linux/Ubuntu world want to get their hands on regular Joe and his friends. Yeah, I know, I have had lots of different issues in Win XP also, but the primary stuff in XP/Vista just work. Security, virus and so on, I know, but when the Windows install is complete it is complete for most users. No need to fiddle around (most of us here like to fiddle around I guess, but for the average user I mean) in order to get things to work. Fix those things and Linux will be a serious threat…well, not realt, think about gaming….anyway, fix those things and maybe average Joe and his friends will at least consider install Linux next time…
Running Feisty from the LiveCD on a Compaq R4000. I tried the TI SD card reader and as you mentioned, it didn’t auto mount. BUT, I went to my existing Kubuntu partition and looked at the setpci commands setup in my init.d process and applied them manually and this enabled automounting without any other changes. here’s the list of setpci commands I used:
setpci -s 03:04.3 86.b=90
setpci -s 03:04.3 4c.b=02 # FlashMedia SD disable
setpci -s 03:04.3 04.b=06 # SDHCI Mem BusMaster
setpci -s 03:04.3 88.b=01 # SDHCI DMA enable
You’ll need to determine your PCI bus ID and change that setting but look at this thread to get the lowdown on the whole thing:
“Solution for Texas Instruments card reader”
http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?p=1614392#post1614392
FYI, while running the LiveCD, copying over the Broadcom firmware files to /lib/firmware/bcm43xx_* from my previous installation enabled the wireless device. Installation of the fglrx restricted driver enabled 3D without issue. Haven’t tried multi-head but looking at the driver version, it should work since that’s working with a manual ATI driver installation. Haven’t tested suspend but so far, thinks look pretty good for the released Feisty on the R4000.
Feisty review < rashundatramble.com // Apr 22, 2007 at 19:15
[...] Angela (thanks for the heads up!) here’s a review of Ubuntu Feisty over at [...]
It seems that there is plenty of Ubuntu experts here. I’m a noobie with Ubuntu. I have the hp nx6110 laptop, but it doesn’t shutdown from Ubuntu feisty. The only way to shut it down is to write in the terminal “sudo shutdown -P now”. How can set it up to shutdown/reboot from Ubuntu shutdown buttons?
Reading your review is good stuff – reading a lot of the replies is not.
simply speaking, I reckon you did a great review.
I have used linux off and on since picasso release (1995ish?)
I have tried redhat, slackware, suse, mandrake, ubuntu and a coupla others.
I use ubuntu and XP for the moment on a pc – for the same reasons everyone has mentioned. drivers. I am NOT a specialist and try to use it as a newbie. Linux is awesome, unfortunately there is a huge community out there (which ubuntu isnt part of) of ‘nix snobs and geeks who have the “if you dont know ‘nix – go to windows” attitude.
This attitude is a major part of the slow development of linux – like the UN, very self interested parties. The other big part is a lack of developers (lots of whingers tho).
Linux things I learnt many years ago
1. lookup the hardware info before buying anything and make sure
it’s supported or that you dont need it.
2. being free (for the most part) development is slow – better than
commercial setups – which just say it’s there or buzz off!
3. dual boot if you have the disk space. Have a fat32 partition and
put any shared data on it (if you aint super secretive).
4. it’s getting better.
5. There is no central authority nor real standards being pushed,
ergo – development, support and progress isnt organised. see pt2
6. Laptops – urghhh! as a computer support person for 20years, I have
been dealing with laptops (and pain). most people who buy a laptop
dont need one. how many people buy one and it sits on the desk
gathering dust – if you DONT need it – get a pc.
Drivers and setups for laptops are just plain trouble.
7. if you aint truly into ‘nix – try ubuntu, suse, redhat or
mandriva. Other distro’s might be as good but I havent tried them.
on the lighter note, considering that my pc installed from the ubuntu feisty cd (downloaded) and has everything running (except ipaq non-wince) it is great.
I havent found it yet but… perhaps there needs to be a beginners guide to these setups – e.g. here’s ubuntu – here’s the programs that are MS – equivalents. If you want this – use this app. etc.
many thanks for the blogg
glenby
@glenby:
All very valid comments, especially that concerning the community of ‘nix snobs… that really slows down the uptake of Linux amongst more balanced computer users.
@Sébastien Bergé isn’t Ubuntu Expert and oxymoron.
Worst software experience? Where you pays your $ and discover the publishers are using you to debug the blasted app. Oh – Ubuntu is free, so then that’s okay. Hah.
I’m feeling more hopeful about SuSE. Where $ is at stake, there’s a greater sense of responsibility and urgency – things get done or fixed more professionally and quickly.
I’ve only used SuSE, just ordered Ubuntu from CheapBytes, but am not hopeful after reading these and other comments. People with normal day jobs really can’t afford to enter into an intimate relationship with their computer operating system.
I think there’s a certain class of users who would be attracted to Loonix if it were done right: the kind of person who recognizes that mainline business computing hasn’t become more efficient since Windows 3.0, but has lost efficiency in “progressing” from WordStar through WordPerfect to Tur… uh, Word.
My equal beef with MS AND Linux developers is that none of them are truly concerned with helping people be productive and do things in cool ways. OpenOffice is just as bloated as – and vastly more difficult than – MS Office. It’s committee-ware. I designed a 300-page book in OO, and let me tell you, it was hell.
In short, it would take real huevos to develop a good text editor/word processor, but nobody cares. Cripes, is the only cool, efficient text editor for Windows/Linux really Vim – an app that doesn’t have wrap mode for word processing?
Why were computers so much more fun when you could do real work in text mode? Answer: control, control, control. Right now, Linux, to me, looks like Windows, only harder.
Ah, yes.. battery life. I recently purchased a new laptop and since it shipped with XP, I spent quite some time trying to figure out the difference in battery life. At first, I thought it was just inaccuracy of the windows or linux battery monitors, and I didn’t have much patience to actually run the battery out and time each config. But then I discovered “watch cat /proc/acpi/battery/BAT0/state” and I can actually see what the battery itself is reporting as its power drain. In XP, the ibm thinkpad tools also provide this information, and I’m reasonably confident that the numbers are accurate. Now in XP, the minimum power usage (wireless off, screen dimmed, disk spun down, etc) is about 1100 /-500 mW! In linux, (debian unstable) it is more like 25 W or so. After setting up laptop mode and cpu scaling (cpu scaling works fine on a core2 duo), I get it down to 18. I can save a watt here and there by unloading usb drivers, pcmcia, sound, etc, and scaling the GPU using fglrx and the ATI config tools, I was able to get the power usage down under 14 W, but that’s where I have bottomed out. I’m looking forward to tinkering with tickless kernels, but I’m surprised that linux is using so much more power. If anyone finds the culprit, I’d love to know. I’ve long outgrown my idiot/zealot stage, but it really bugs me that linux is so poor at power savings compared to XP. Still, it is pretty amazing that I’m running a dual core 2GHz laptop with less than 15W of power.
Nice review. I have nx8220 with following issues:
- hibernate works fine but it didn’t wake up from suspend to ram
- xinerama doesn’t work, only dual head (2 separated screen), using the same resolutions as you 1680×1024, 1280×1024
- AIGLX/Beryl works only with radeon driver
- I have “standard” Pentium M 2GHz, cpufreq works fine, battery life around 3 hours
Could you please publish your xorg.conf? I’d like to check your multihead configuration. Thanks.
1. Ubuntu vs Vista $0 vs $190
2. No license vs licensed version
3. All advantages vs WGA (Windows Genuine Advantage)
4. Intellectual rights allowed vs Protected Intellectual Rights
5. Open source code vs Closed Source
6. No criminal offense vs Probability of Criminal Offense (if not WGA)
7. Open Office included in $0 VS MSOffice buy separately
8. GIMP included vs BUY Adobe Photoshop
9. Bound to independent/Open Source community vs bound to MSFT money
.. and more
I keep seeing ppl using phrases like “they” when refering to the ppl who should fix linux bugs, scripts and programs. Linux is supposed to be a “WE” mentality. If “WE” find bugs and “WE” write good scripts and programs and “WE” send them to the code reviewers for “OUR” favorite distros then “WE” sill see a fast improving operating system that suits “OUR” liking.
Stop whining about the other guy coding in his spare time not having all the answers. “WE” need to have a good reliable os and “WE” need to participate.
romka@linux » Blog Archive » fan noise // May 28, 2007 at 09:11
[...] and 620 in performance (aticonfig –set-powerstate 3) but the laptop is silent!!! thanks to this review details in installation [...]
Whinge, whinge, whinge. So what if an ordinary user can’t make their external monitor work on Linux? The idea of the 3D desktop that they *could* have run if they knew vi and xor.conf files should keep them loyal. Seeing it in 640×480 should *inspire* them to learn more about Linux internals!
Anyway. they are wimps for not knowing how to do that. Newbs!!!
Roll on more 3D desktop development!!! Who needs working brakes and engines when you have a new paint job!!!