The well traveled Penguin

[ixmatus]

!Warning! Lengthy post ahead

In January of 2007 I made the leap from Windows to Ubuntu on a five year old Compaq W6000 Dual Xeon workstation. My intention in switching was not only for the valuable learning experience, but also for the breath of fresh air I was promised from open source.

What a wonder it was. Xorg.conf files that had to be edited, the open source crusade against Nvidia for open source drivers (their proprietary linux binaries aren't bad though) and the ultimate holy grail of plug-n-play wireless cards without the ndiswrapper (which isn't bad at all either, and actually has pretty snappy bandwidth)... To have this sort of control over my computer, its settings, and the applications was exhilarating; despite the rather large learning curve required for command line use, package dependencies, and correctly configured software.

I soon decided to phase out my desktop for a new laptop. Installing FreeBSD on the workstation; configuring it for use as a web/ftp/NFS server was fun and yet another learning experience (FreeBSD is awesome). But the laptop is an entirely different story.

Note: never buy a cheap laptop for use with Linux - the components are crappy and are rarely open source. (exception being older used laptops which work extremely well)

The laptop cost around $500, a Compaq Presario F500. Looked like a pretty good deal, it contained an Nvidia Geforce Go in it and a Broadcom wireless chipset (which isn't opensource, but they have released closed source firmware slices for it, so I thought I was safe) an AMD Sempron and other minor components (wireless, sound, and video are the major problem children for linux installs).

With much optimism, I quickly set out to install Ubuntu on my new laptop. First roadblock I ran into: the X11 server didn't like my card nor my display and was displaying a fading, zigzagging, and high-contrast strange thing to me instead of the LiveCD desktop. Digging around with Google, the solution turned out to be simple; I added the 'vga=792' argument to the boot param string (/boot/grub/menu.lst) and the X11 server started behaving favorably.

Installation proceded well and I had a new Ubuntu install that looked pretty.

Sadly, I could not get the Nvidia drivers to work period with the laptop, and I remember spending a number of hours messing with modelines to get the correct display resolution (which is an odd 1280x800). I ended up with a correct resolution and the default VESA driver instead of Nvidia; it was snappy and pretty so I put the Nvidia issue to rest.

Then came the wireless card. A four hour marathon of endless troubles with the bcm43xx firmware slice until I broke down and tried Ndiswrapper for the windows driver (which took another two hours, but magically started working somehow).

All was well for a time. I forgot to mention that I am a computer industry professional at the time of this writing, primarily in the field of programming and web-development (don't ask why it took all these years for me to get into Linux, somehow I survived without it).

I had been the owner of this laptop for approximately five months now and the time came for a distrobution update. I expected it to be as simple and painless as all the other smaller updates had been; this one was just bigger. It took three hours to complete and I ended up with a computer that wouldn't boot past the Boot Manager (GRUB), couldn't get into a commandline, nothing.

I ended up spending two days trying to fix it, to no avail. Breaking down I decided to escape from my computers and relax (I had that really gummy lethargic feeling in my face). I chose to try an install of FreeBSD on my laptop and configure everything from the ground up; installing using pkgs and ports (I learned to never attempt X.org server/client installs from ports!). Everything went mildly well, but I had major issues with my display and wireless card.

I tried Zenwalk (a very slick linux distro) which installed well but wouldn't recognize my ethernet, wireless or videocard!

I tried Fedora 7 which kept freezing half way through the install process (it wouldn't complete the disc check either).

Finally, I tried Xubuntu, which installed well, but basically the same problems - no wireless and it wouldn't work with the display correctly, I tried the same modelines from before with no success.

These different install attempts turned into a frustrating week instead of just a weekend. One in which I am left with the desire for a laptop that won't take me an entire week to get working properly.

So, what am I trying to conclude from this post? That if you are ever going to purchase a laptop to use with a Linux distrobution check to see if someone else got it to work and ensure the components are high quality and have open source drivers (Ralink chipset for wireless and ATI for video cards).

I love open source so much, you are completely free (unless you are a masochist and enjoy an entire week of endless config files with anal vendor components) to do whatever it is you want with your computer. That said and with my experience, I now dub it the wild west of the digital landscape.

So, what's next? I believe I am in the market for a MacBook now. With my laptop inoperable, my time, projects, and money dependent on an operational and stable computer I will be demoting my current laptop to hobby project status. Why MacBook? Mostly because it isn't Windows, secondly because OS X uses a BSD kernel, thirdly because everyone I know seems to have pretty positive stable experiences with it, and fourthly because it will be a new experience.

Linux is awesome (Zenwalk is my favorite), FreeBSD is awesome (only for use as a server), and if your purchase is intelligent you will have a great experience with running Linux. During my travels through *nix land though, I did notice a number of things that irk me: X is way too heavy, and the system is far too inefficient. Mac OS X isn't any better because it uses a modified version of X; I would love to see the opensource community come up with a lighter, faster, more focused windowing system to build GUI's ontop of - this, in combination with future vendors embracing open source, would put them far ahead of Windows and OS X.

For now wish me luck and I will post about my Mac experiences in this thread...

[Minsc]

Originally Posted by ixmatus

I expected it to be as simple and painless as all the other smaller updates had been; this one was just bigger. It took three hours to complete and I ended up with a computer that wouldn't boot past the Boot Manager (GRUB), couldn't get into a commandline, nothing.

Assuming you could edit the grub command(it's an option in the config file, I think), you could've tried adding "init=/bin/bash" to the kernel to have it skip the normal init and just boot into bash instead.

If you do that, your root filesystem would be mounted read-only and you'd have to do a "mount -o remount,rw /" or something like that to get write support.

Then you might want to update mtab to see if it's OK(if you have stuff from your last boot in there then mount won't try to mount the partition even though it's not really mounted), and do a "mount -a" to get the rest of your partitions.

Then look around in /etc/init.d/ and start up whatever services you need... You'll be logged in as root without actually logging in. The only things you really need for this to work is for your kernel, bash, and some libraries to be OK.

[ixmatus]

Thank you for the reply, but I already had someone give me that advice - that wasn't the most major of the issues, what did bug me was the Wifi card and the video card...

[Lil Chris]

I was just recently looking into Ubuntu or any open source OS... Being that I have never ventured into using different OS's... Could you explain what some benefits of doing this may be...? Thanks.

[ixmatus]

I love open source, I highly recommend it.

Be sure you do plenty of research on your hardware compatibility though! That was something I did not do thoroughly and have paid for it (initial post).

I personally like Zenwalk more than any of the *buntus (Ubuntu, Kubuntu, Xubuntu, etc...) for the reason that it is lighter, faster, and is better optimized for the desktop. Only issues though, were my hardware compatibility.

For a very easy install I suggest installing Xubuntu because it is faster than Ubuntu (Xubuntu uses Xfce whereas Ubuntu uses Gnome, latter being much heavier).

My experience with linux on a desktop workstation is extremely positive, it worked with all of my hardware and worked well. Laptops can be an issue though, like I said check out your hardware compatibility. If you are buying a new one, buy from a Linux laptop distributor (System76, some others, but can't remember).


What are the benefits? First and foremost, you learn alot about using the command line and about how things work. Open source applications and file formats beat anything proprietary by a long shot - the idea is you can use what you want to use without restriction. It is generally a fun community too, just be sure to RTFM before posting a silly question because the majority of help is definitely in the manual on setting things up properly; google is extremely useful too in being able to find an error that other users got and solved.