I love Ubuntu. However, I'm not nuts about the six month rewrites.
So, I decided to try a couple of less-often-rewritten distros on a Dell GX 755.
A month later, I'm back to Ubuntu. Here's why:
The machine in question had an Nvidia card which supported dual monitors. Unfortunately, I don't know the exact model. I'm not at that machine as I pen this. But it's a problematic piece of hardware for most distributions.
The first I tried was PCLinuxOS. I've heard great things about it, and it was a quick, easy install. However, to get dual monitors, I had to download and install Nvidia's proprietary Linux driver.
It worked okay, but I couldn't get it to recognize a separate partition as /home. When I booted up the system, my former home directory was browseable, but it wasn't ~.
So, I gave Mepis a try.
It, too, was a quick, easy install. ~ was right where I expected it to be. But once again, I had to install that proprietary Linux Nvidia driver to get dual monitors.
I felt like I had a winner. Until the first reboot.
My video was black. I restored my /etc/X11/xorg.conf file to a previous version and rebooted, and got basic X. But no amount of uninstalling/reinstalling that proprietary driver would give me anything but a blank screen upon subsequent reboots.
I figured I must have fubarred something, so I started over.
After a day's work, making the subtle connections to the AD world that a corporate user of Linux must endure, a reboot gave me the exact same results.
I was suddenly very homesick for Ubuntu.
I'm back with the big U on my business machine. It plays ball with my Nvidia card out of the chute, and dual monitors are a breeze. X always works after reboots, too.
However, this 50-year-old-geek is probably going to start picking and choosing which Ubuntu rewrites to actually install.
Comments (3)
I feel your pain. I started using the Ubuntu Long Term Support (LTS) releases, designed to encourage enterprise use of Ubuntu. They're stable, but slightly less cutting-edge than the latest and greatest, and supported for a number of years. The current LTS is supported through 2013, I think. If it's the complete fresh install that bothers you, just do a dist-upgrade with apt-get, which will upgrade your current install to the latest install in-place, without overwriting your config files or user files. As I recall, it needs to be done in three steps:
apt-get update
apt-get upgrade
apt-get dist-upgrade
Posted by Steve | September 26, 2009 7:06 AM
Posted on September 26, 2009 07:06
Steve, Linux has come a long, long way. But dist-upgrade can often go wrong. Example: I just upgraded to 9.10, and I get an occasional X crash, never, ever happened with 9.04.
Posted by Ron | December 8, 2009 2:10 PM
Posted on December 8, 2009 14:10
Ubuntu. It Just Does Not Work.
Surprise! Variable hardware support is what happens when an operating system has an unstable ABI.
Posted by The WHAM Burglar | March 15, 2010 6:27 PM
Posted on March 15, 2010 18:27