Why Ubuntu STILL sucks (Part 2): A tale of relentless #FAIL.
The first part of this post can be found here.
With the hardware part of my new/old desktop tower running I went to Ubuntu.com and downloaded the disc image for Ubuntu 10.04 LTS. Once the 700ish MB download was done was I proceeded to try and burn the disc image to a 1 GB USB drive I had lying around and this is where I ran into my first problem. I tried about 5 different ways to do this on a Mac without any success and finally I gave up and read the instructions on the Ubuntu site that said that this was not a ‘recommended’ method of installation. Windows apparently, was needed to create the USB installer. So a few days later I got hold of a Windows laptop and created a bootable USB drive from the image.
At this point I should clarify that in all fairness my inability to create a bootable disc from the image was due the fact that I use Mac OS X and there is apparently NO way to do this on a Mac except for some weird terminal commands that did not work for me. Also, I could have easily avoided the trouble I had with the disc image by just burning it to a CD but if you read the first part of this post you will have noticed I had a CD-Writer that I doubted was still working. Long story short, it wasn’t and I didn’t want to buy another drive for what I thought would be a one time use only.
Here I shall digress and say that I wound up buying a DVD-Writer anyways a few weeks later, after I gave up on Ubuntu and thought I would make the box a Hackintosh. I tried everything from cloning and patching my own Snow Leopard install disc to downloading various prepackaged Hackintosh distros including Leo4All, SnowLeo, Kallaway Leopard and various bootloaders like Chameleon and some others who’s names elude me right now. Due to the pretty short list of hardware that these OSX86 distros work on and the fact that I am rocking an AMD Sempron processor with a weird Gigabyte motherboard with an ancient Nvidia Northbridge I encountered #FAIL after #FAIL. Anyone who can help me to get any version of OS X running on this system will get as much beer and pizza as they can consume in one sitting, so mail me if you think you have ‘L33T Hackintosh SkillZ‘ and you think you can ‘pwn’ this system.
So I installed Ubuntu from the bootable USB install drive I created on a Windows machine. The score so far is Microsot Windows XP: 1, Mac OS X Snow Leopard: 0. The install was super quick since it wasn’t from a DVD and at first boot everything looked great. The default colour scheme of aubergine/brown may not be to everyone’s liking but you couldn’t deny that it looked smart and cohesive and was a far cry from the eye-searing fugliness of Windows. Score a point for Ubuntu then. All my hardware, new and old, was correctly detected and the appropriate drivers installed. So far so good then! But as I soon realised, Ubuntu still has some pretty serious issues, even for the basic user who does not have the esoteric requirements that I do.
Ubuntu does not automatically mount any secondary partitions on hard disks. Yes, you read correctly. If your hard disk is partitioned into two or more partitions you are shit-outta-luck. Prepare to spend a lot of time in Ubuntu forums, copy-pasting command line gibberish into the terminal to get some basic functionality that has been in pretty much every OS that I know of since about nineteen ninety five or so. It was at this point that I realised (after I did a face-palm) that maybe I was lucky my mom had insisted on having Windows XP preinstalled on the Asus EeePC netbook I bought her a month or so back. I had been rooting for Ubuntu quite strongly, tempting her with promises of a secure, virus free and anti-virus free computing experience but she had refused. I looked over at the German Shepherd curled up at my feet and said out loud ” I guess we dodged a bullet there huh?” As a reply he rolled over, scratched his ear and went right back to sleep. My dog it would seem, is OS agnostic.
I fixed the problem with a few hours of effing around in the terminal, typing commands that started with the word SUDO and then proceeded to configure the services I wanted on the tower, Apple file sharing with Time Machine Backup support and an iTunes Server. A few Google searches later I realised that the NetaTalk software that shipped with the OS did not support encryption (which is needed by Macs to do file sharing and Time Machine backups) I would need to uninstall the default installation of NetaTalk and download, configure, install and configure again a custom version of the package. Could I just go into the system preferences or control panel and tick a check box that said “Enable encryption” or something to that effect? No? Fucking brilliant.
At this point my visions of Ubuntu being a free, secure mainstream OS had already been smashed to bits by the disk auto-mount debacle and the command line dicking around in the terminal so I decided to try again. It took me about a week to finally figure out how to get file sharing working properly and I also had to download, configure, install and configure again a custom version of another piece of software called Avahi, which is a Bonjour type service that advertises the machine on your local network so that other machines can see it without knowing it’s IP address. FUN!
I finally got it working in about ten days through sheer perseverance and the aforementioned employment (or lack thereof) situation. I whooped with joy and my dog gave me a dirty look, he seemed annoyed at being woken up from his post breakfast nap. I disconnect the display, keyboard and mouse and hooked them up to the Mac to enjoy the fruits of my labour. ( I know, I know. I am waaaay too heavily invested in backups and file transfers. You would be too if you lost a year’s worth of college work in the great hard disk crash of 2006)
Aaaaand nothing. I could not see the Ubuntu Box on the network.
FUCK. ME.
I disconnected the display, keyboard and mouse form the MacBook Pro and reconnected them to the Ubuntu Box after shutting it down. On rebooting it booted perfectly, all services running, I could see it from the Mac, transfer files to it, backup to it via Time Machine. All good. Shutdown the system, disconnect the keyboard, display, mouse and reboot. Same shit. This time I reconnected the peripherals to the Ubuntu Box without bothering to shut it down and was greeted with a black screen and a blinking prompt. I Googled the symptoms and realised that when booted without a display attached like I wanted to do, Ubuntu booted in headless mode and did not start a GUI which meant that all the services that I had painfully installed and configured did not run.
More effing around in the terminal ended up with me totally hosing the entire installation and having to do a clean install. This time the configuration of services I wanted went a little bit easier because I remembered the vital pieces of instruction that EVERY guide on the internet had failed to mentioned and that I had figured out the hard way the first time around. I got it all configured and fixed the headless server issues only to find out that every now and then the services would stop running and I would have to learn how to SSH into the system and restart them. I then realised that I would have to learn how to configure and use my torrent client of choice, Transmission over SSH. At this point I gave up. I am about as geeky as anyone and had learnt to use the SUDO command like nobody’s business but I drew the line here. I bit the bullet, wiped the drive clean and installed Windows XP SP3 with Avast, iTunes, Transmission and TightVNC on top of it.
I now have to use SMB instead of AFP for file sharing and I can’t do Time Machine backups but I have a stable reliable box that starts-up automatically and shuts down gracefully when power on the attached APC UPS is runing low. It torrents and downloads podcasts and shares these over my home network without any hassles.
Now I am sure Ubuntu can do all this and more without worrying about viruses, hacks and zero-day exploits but I couldn’t get it to work in a hassle-free manner and not for any lack of trying. So I will no longer recommend that people who can’t afford the ridiculous cost of Apple hardware and are tired of using Windows should give Ubuntu a try.
Don’t.
Ubuntu. It blows.
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- Why Ubuntu STILL sucks: Part 1.
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Ha Ha! Full points for stupidity!! If you didn’t install Ubuntu properly, is it Ubuntu’s fault? The Hard Disk pations are always listed on the Places menu. Maybe you didnt check. Next UBuntu is FOSS software, while Apple is more closed than an Egyptian vault. So if Apple’s CLOSED SOURCE software didn’t work with Ubuntu, whoz fault is it? And you could’ve still used backup over SSH. But probably that didnt occur to you? Maybe also the fact that SSH has industry strength encryption? As you might have guessed, I use Ubuntu. I installed it off the Hard Drive. (vmlinuz.gz file) So Ubuntu +100 Apple -100 and User No marks given for hes too stupid to understand scores!!
@Ubuntu Fam
Hi Ubuntu FAM (or did you mean fan?)
Thanks for your comments. I’m afraid I did not understand much of what you said. No, backup over SSH did not occur to me and I have finally managed to get OS X running on the machine after switching to an Atom platform so that is the end of my dalliance with Ubuntu. For now at least. So in my book its Apple:1 Ubuntu:0
Your mileage of course, may vary:)
I switched to Ubuntu last year and still have XP on the flip-side of my laptop, but I have not booted into it but once since April of 2010. My wife is on an iMac and we have had no problems with the two working together. Admittedly, it takes patience to get Ubuntu up and running the way you stated you want.
Good luck and I hope you do not give up.
Perhaps you should write up the technicals you use if you get it running so the next guy has a better starting place,
@FDB
Networking disparate OSes these days is no problem whatsoever. Try getting the iMac to back up to your Ubuntu Machine via Time Machine or try to set up AFP shares on the Ubuntu Box and you will quickly wind up in deep water. Ubuntu on a netbook still may be a viable option to XP but definitely NOT for Joe-Schmoe or 95% of the market. Sad because there really ought to be more competition for Windows. I am not angry at Ubuntu, just disappointed in it
I have finally swapped the AMD parts in the box for an Intel Atom Mobo and have managed to get Leopard up and running on it. Once again this project took me 3 or 4 days of trying and is not for the faint of heart. But as soon as I booted Leopard it took me about 5 minutes to configure AFP shares, Time Machine Support and the works.
I will write about that soon. Currently I’m a bit (pleasantly) snowed under with work.
Ubuntu is definitely not for someone who is afraid or dislikes to use the terminal, that’s for sure. When I first started using it 3 years ago, after being fed up with Windows, I dual-booted, and Ubuntu had some serious problems with hardware (especially on my laptop…getting the wifi to work was like having a root canal). But the thing is, I had tried Red Hat a few years before, and Ubuntu was about 1,000,000 times better than that.
Well, I’ve stuck with Ubuntu, and now it’s the ONLY OS on my laptop, but it’s not the base install…it’s a lightweight install designed to increase boot times and reduce memory usage, as my poor laptop has a hard time swallowing all of GNOME. With openbox and fbpanel, though, it runs pretty snappily.
I’ve never gotten intimate with Macs or Apples. The only use I’ve seen of them was back in high school in the physics lab, where they had old Macs with one-button mice. They’re quite popular with students at my university, as are iPhones. However, I’m poor, and have no interest in either.
The thing about Ubuntu is that 10.04 is several orders of magnitude better than 7.04 3 years ago. It used to be that every time I’d update the distribution, stuff would break, and I’d have to fiddle around fixing it (which I didn’t mind). The last two updates, nothing broke, amazingly. It automatically detected all my hardware on my desktop and some other laptops I’ve used it on with no trouble at all. I’m dual-booting with XP (on my desktop) for games, and I’ve installed hardware that works out of the box on Ubuntu with full features that I’ve had to download and install drivers in XP ’cause the ones on the disk caused crashes, then had to reboot about 5 times (windows loves making me reboot anytime I sneeze, or more).
It sounds like you don’t like messing with the terminal, or typing in commands that being with “sudo.” I got my start on DOS, so a command-line interface is something I don’t mind, and actually appreciate. The power it gives is immense in Ubuntu compared to the neutered version of the CLI they’ve had in Windows since switching to the NT platform.
If you don’t like terminal commands, and have no intention of getting to like them, then Ubuntu is definitely not for you. It’s not an out-of-the-box OS, though it’s better than it used to be, and remember this: it’s free. Yes, it takes tinkering to work, but I don’t have to $400 to buy Windows 7 for my machine, and I can’t afford Apple’s products (nor do I want something so proprietary and inflexible), nor do I want to learn how to use them. This doesn’t mean that “Windows 7 sucks” or that “Mac OS X sucks,” it just means they’re not for me. I don’t like the interface in most Microsoft products at all, but that just means they’re not for me. Red Hat Linux certainly wasn’t for me when I tried it a decade ago, but Ubuntu has slowly grown on me. And it’s free, open-source, and I love it. That doesn’t mean I expect you to love it, too. I just think it’s funny to say an OS sucks just because you don’t like it. Maybe it sucks for you, but it certainly doesn’t suck for everyone.
@Sudo Make Me A Sandwich
Wow. That was some response Sudo and big ups for the xkcd reference
You made much more sense than Ubuntu Fam but then I guess Apple is not the only OS that inspires douchebaggy troll defenders.
First of all I dont mind the terminal. With OS X just like any other OS you DO have to bring up a black screen with a blinky cursor to do some advanced commands and to get around the bugs in the OS. ( And boy are there some doozies, no matter what the fanbois tell you.) Almost every other day I have to do a SUDO KillAll Dock to get Exposé to start working again. I consider myself a geek so to say that I am afraid of the terminal is an insult and a damn lie sir! You take that back.
What I did mean is that I don’t want to have to use the terminal. It’s like changing the oil in a car. Can I do it? Yes and I have done before, I just would be quite happy if I never had to have warm goop dripping down my arms because I had a little bout of do-it-yourselfness ever again thankyouverymuch.
The same goes for PCs. Years back I scoffed at people who bought store owned computers (THE FOOLS!) and I built my own desktops and machines for all my friends as well. Nowadays I can’t be bothered, I want an appliance, I don’t want to think about it, I just want it to get out of my way and let me do what I need whether that is writing or editing video or sorting photographs or just typing long winded comments on this website.
I stand by my title. Ubuntu does suck for the average user, I would shoot myself before I put in on a netbook for say, my mom. Ask yourself, does Ubuntu pass the mom test?? I’m pretty sure you will agree. I think Ubuntu is coming along quite nicely but it has a way to go before it matches the usability of OS X or (Yes, I’m dying inside as I type this) even Windows.
Also, I’m Indian. I _LOVE_ free.
Finally ‘Ubuntu, A decent OS but not for me’ does not sound as good as ‘UBUNTU: It sucks!’
So yeah, thanks for reading and taking the time to comment.
wow more like you equal fail. your so fucking dumb man you should kill yourself because you suck so bad at life. have fun using mac because you want to be hip and cool and like dick in your ass you fag.
Ubuntu, the Obama OS.