Oooooobuntoooooo

My endless fight with linux. Now, as mentioned before, I really like linux. As much prehaps for what it stands for as for the OS itself, but I still really like it. However, I have had a really difficult time getting my two everyday computers up and running. Well, I actually have them up and running, and have got them working in various ways, but not like my old laptop.

I put mandrake 10.1 on my laptop over a year ago now and have had it running smoothly and able to do everything i want without hassle. So a year later I thought linux would have moved on and I be even easier to configure and get running now. Thought wrong I fear. Its not that I can't get Linux running on the machines. I can. I just can't get it running the way I want. AS of now I have Ubuntu with KDE on the work laptop and Kanoix on my desktop at home.

Ubuntu came out a year ago and has been the “hot” distro for a while. Obviously I have been keen to get into it and find out what the buzz is all about. So what do I think of it so far....................

My OOOOOOO KOOO buntooooooooo review

Ok, first out i had a try with the live CD.Thats a Cd you stick in the Cd and switch on the computer and it all runs off the CD, nothing to install. It worked ok, but my goodness was it slow. Ran like windows XP............on a 486. Anyway, been a KDE fan i thought i would try Kubuntu first. It installed fine except the I installed it without a network, and then when I wanted to go online with it it simply would not work. Might have been a bit of a router issue, but i doubt it. Configuring the network for DHCP simply didn't work. Who knows why, but i could not get online. So I reinstalled while online and got it up and working. All was looking good. Then i tried to play an mp3.

Well, that didn't work, and a look online revealed that this was how things were supposed to be. So I followed the instructions exactly to get the system multimedia ready. There is good documentation, I can't complain. Only thing is it recommends using gstreamer for getting various codecs running. Now I have had some real issues with gstreamer a while back trying to get amarok installed and running in earlier versions. So I was rather happy to have the apt package manager to get the packages correctly and dependency nightmare free.

Or so I thought. While I was doing some apt getting I thought I might as well get gnucash and digikam as well as xmms, all of which are lacking in the standard kubuntu distro. Well, turns out I was in for a surprise. gstreamer is still a nightmare and the instructions so carefully laid out led to some sort of circular dependency or something, because it never finished installing, then once the other programs had been installed I discovered that I could now log into gnome. So I gave that a try and low and behold, gnome was broken too.
I think installing gnucash put in enough of gnome to get it to run, just not enough to run it properly. Even worst when I rebooted later, the X would not start due to kdm no longer been the windows manager. So I went from having a working but not very useful operating system to a non working more useful system. At this point i thought it was time to give up on the Ku and go for the Oooooooo. So i put in Ubuntu and then apt got kubuntu desktop. I gave up on gstreamer, so for now video's don't work, although at least xmms can play mp3's. digikam sort of works and gnucash is installed. So I have a sort of useful operating system and it kinda works. But compared to the windows XP I still have on the system, it actually comes in second. Which is not only sad, but actually amazes me. I was so used to Mandrake and had it running so smoothly on the old laptop, I never ever booted windows. Now I boot to windows by default. Is this all Ubuntu's fault, well, not really. To be honest Ubuntu does run well, but it has nothing of what i need. All the linux software I have grown to depend on is missing or doesn't run on 5.10 yet. For example mplayer does not run on 5.10 yet. Mplayer has been my standard video player for a couple of years now and totem or kaffiene just don't cut it.