Ubuntu 9.04 is very cool. With Compiz Fusion installed, the desktop experience is down right amazing.
Yet, to get there, I have to spend a lot of time installing things and tweaking my system and at the end of the day, a lot of what I consider essential applications are still not working.
To be fair, a lot of my problems are not Linux's fault. Usually, it is an application or a piece of hardware that does not have native Linux support by their vendor. There is very little the Linux developers can do about it.
However, whether the problem is a geniune Linux problem or a vendor problem is beside the point. For most users, they are not going to distinguish the differences. What counts is the total experience, and if my experience with desktop Linux is typical, I am afraid that desktop Linux is never going to be mainstream.
This is the first part of a 3 part series documenting my installation of Ubuntu 9.04 as my desktop OS.
I am quite familiar with Linux, using it mostly for small server setups. Recently I decided to give Ubuntu 9.04 a try as an desktop OS because I want to look at some available desktop OS options before upgrading to Windows 7 (my current desktop is XP).
My first trouble was Grub, the boot manager of choice of Ubuntu. Because I wanted a dual boot system, so I created a partition in my hard drive and installed Ubuntu 9.04 on it, keeping my Windows installation in another partition. After the installation, I restarted my computer. To my surprise, I was still booting into Windows. After some googling, I found that I had installed Grub in the wrong hard drive. Once I installed Grub on the correct drive, I could boot into Ubuntu, but then Grub failed to boot into Windows.
I suspect most casual users who want to give desktop Linux a try would simply give up at this point.
Apparently, the automatically generated Grub script was pointing into the wrong partition where Windows was located. I had to modify the Grub script to correct that. By the time Grub worked, 30 minutes of my life was gone.
The next challenge was my wireless network card. I had a Trendnet card. I am familiar with this card enough that I know there is no native Linux driver. So I used ndiswrapper (driver wrapper that lets Linux uses Windows networking driver) as a substitute. In the process, I have to look up the wireless chipset, find the right driver and install the driver with ndiswrapper with command lines. This time I had it easy, I am comfortable with Unix command lines, but I can imagine someone who is not will be quite turn off.
The next challenge setting up Chinese input methods. Setting up SCIM for multi-language input itself is easy enough, but the availability and quality of input methods are rather poor compared to Windows. I have no formal training in Chinese input method and relies on an rather obscure method I learned on Windows for inputting Chinese. Unfortunately, the equivalent method on Linux sucks badly. If you are not familiar with inputting with a non-Roman alphabet language, you probably have no idea what I am talking about, but take my words for it, it is so bad to a point I am in the process of modifying a Chinese input method to suit my need, and it is not a one day job.
(to be continue...)
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
No comments:
Post a Comment