Ubuntu 9.04 Continued

Writing from Work
The install did not go as smoothly as I would have liked. It actually took three tries to get everything up and running, and two and a half hours later (when I finally gave up and went to bed) it still hadn't gotten exactly what I was hoping for.

What went wrong.
Well, the first two installs both bombed out at different places. Truth told, the first try I was actually expecting to fail exactly where it did... It got all the way through the install process, then crashed and burned on the reboot. Same spot that it did when I first switched over: the error messages were a little more helpful this time around, but it seems that the old Presario does not like to boot Linux when the BIOS's default video adapter is set to PCI instead of the on-board. All sorts of low-end memory conflicts. The prescribed fix -- to disable the motherboard video completely -- is not available with my particular BIOS. I've ran into this problem and enabled my video card before, so I know how (lspci to find the address of the video card, then adding the card's address and driver - ati - to the /etc/X11/xorg.conf file), but even if they knew what was causing it, a novice wouldn't know the fix without hitting the support channels.

Instead of fixing, I purposefully went the n00b route and tried the install disc again. This time was a little different... the fail was actually unexpected. GRUB failed to install. So I tried the LILO bootloader. It ran, but apparently didn't actually take, because I was given a "Welcome to GRUB" message on restart. I had also played with the install options, and apparently messed up X enough that it wouldn't redisplay the log-in screen.

Third time, I thought, I'll just let it do its thing. So I leave the preseed ubuntu-desktop. I hit the noapic, nolapic, acpi=off options, but not the expert. I answer the setup questions (Language, Keyboard, Time Zone) and let it do it's thing.

So What's Missing
Whenever there is an 'alternative', there are going to be differences. Aside from the obvious (and changable) things -- font differences, menu and quick-launch bars at the top of the screen, color palette -- there are some working differences - or at least inconveniences - out of the box.
The most noticible of them are the multimedia codecs: wmv, mov, and mp3 all require codecs that aren't among the initial install. Flash and Java get the short shrift as well. All are easy to get running, most with one or two clicks and a password. iPods are more of a problem - or so I understand... I don't have one[1].
Really, that's it. Silverlight would be a problem, but there really isn't that many websites using it, and the Moonlight replacement works nicely.

After I quit jerking around and actually let the installer do the work, it was a breeze, took maybe 40 minutes. Most of that was waiting on the mirror; not a big surprise within the first week of a release. Local install and DVD options are available that would have eliminated that.

Not the best experience in the world, I will admit; but even with the two false starts, it still took me less time than the last non-recovery install of Windows did.


[1] My wife does, but it's synced to her computer, not mine.