Well, crap. The official Ubuntu 10.04 release didn't play nice with the Nvidia onboard video on my 2006 vintage HP a1483w. Booting led to a screen that was black. my monitor didn't detect a signal, and went dormant. What made me crazy was that I had run into similar issues before, and was able to boot into runlevel three (no GUI) and work on the /etc/X11/xorg.conf file to at least get ugly video back, so that I could have the GUI running to experiment on.
In the Redhat world, hitting escape when the grub menu pops up allows you to edit the command line. Adding a '3' to the end of the string that calls the Linux kernel overrides /etc/inittab and sends you straight to runlevel 3.
Well, I was quite perturbed to discover that the boot string editing trick no worky with Ubuntu. Adding a 3 to the boot string had no effect at all. Ctrl+alt+f1 didn't work, either, no alternative login screen.
What's even weirder is that there is NO /etc/inittab file to dictate system runlevel.
In short, I simply could not boot into anything but a broken GUI, i.e. a black screen.
Time to fall back on an old friend.
Enter CentOS 5.
My first forays into Linux were with Fedora 3 back in 2004. I spent many hours at work learning how to install/tweak the system, compile from scratch, and play around with system settings via the .conf files.
I ended up putting some old hardware, i.e. out-of-warranty Windows dekstop machines, back into service as webterms with a locked-down KDE desktop. KDE has a kiosk mode tool that lets you lock everything down quite tightly.
Anyhow, I got used to halting boot and sending the machine into different runlevels, hitting alt+f2 to get into an alternate text login screen, and basically making those old Dell GX-150's do whatever I wanted them to do.
It helped immensely when my employer sent me to a RHEL Certified Technician class, and I learned much more. I was extremely impressed that you could FIX Linux, whereas when Windows broke, it was usually a corrupted registry, overwritten DLL's, or simply untrackable problems that *always* required a system reinstall.
When Linux broke, you went in via runlevel 1 or 3 and fixed it.
I continued to build Fedora webterms, and eventually put CentOS 4 to work as the server hosting the LAMP intranet I administer. But I was decidedly unimpressed with the Redhat desktop, and continued to run XP on my main work desktop.
Late in 2004, a coworker showed me the Ubuntu Feisty Fawn system he had installed. It looked slick, was very intuitive, and blew me away with its Synaptics Package Manager. Installing apps was as simple as picking them from a list, the apt-get process in the background would take care of the rest!
Within a month, I was dual-booting Windows and Feisty on all of my machines at work. I installed it on my Dell laptop and took advantage of the excellent network troubleshooting/monitoring tools available. It was the beginning of a beautiful friendship.
Canonical has been on a mission to make Linux simpler and simpler for the average user, a move I applaud. Many a newb has been happy with the Ubuntu I installed on their system.
However, messing with the basic structure of Linux is too much for me personally. If I can't do a ctrl+alt+f1 to get a text login, I'm not happy. If I can't tell the system to boot into a different runlevel, same story. If the X process is rewritten so that xorg.conf doesn't exist any more, I have no file to reset back to dumb video mode, just in case.
So, I downloaded the latest CentOS: version 5.
It's very unfancy. The stock gnome desktop is quite plain-Jane. Its launcher panel is lacking a slew of applets that Ubuntu has. And worst of all, no Synaptic.
I found a package called Yum Extender that does a serviceable job of giving me a friendly app install program. I have also gotten much more proficient in my use of yum, especially the search function that lets you find packages whose names you're not sure of.
The other new thing to get used to is the way a stabilized release works. The newest versions of apps simply aren't automatically available.
For example, upgrading from Firefox 3 to 3.6 involved me downloading and unzipping a bz2 file. Then, as root, I moved the /usr/lib/firefox-3.0.18 to /usr/lib/firefox-3.0.18.old, then moved the firefox folder that was zipped into the bz2 to /usr/lib, THEN renaming it to firefox-3.0.18. This was the lazy man's way to do it, to be sure, but keeping the same directory structure kept any launchers and/or associations from breaking.
Alsa didn't configure itself to work properly with dmixer, thus only one application at a time could use sound. Any others opened up would give an error saying no sound available. The detailed fix can be found here.
I installed compiz, and was able to get the neat desktop effects I learned to love with Ubuntu. However, doing so removed the ability to drag and drop windows! Probably something to do with the Nvidia driver that is stable, but aged.
But on the other hand, I have a rock-steady system that will happily chug along until I finally buy myself a new smart box. No more six-month upheavals. No more structural changes discovered at the worst possible time, i.e. when the system is broken. And I'm back to doing business with the Redhat folks. That all feels good :-)
