Ubuntu Laptop Flop
About once a year I try Linux on one of my workstations to see if it’s a viable alternative to Windows as my primary Operating System. Like many people, I can’t get completely away from Windows simply because the rest of the world uses it and Microsoft’s Office applications. Not only do I need convenient interoperability but I also need to test the software I write on that platform since my software constituency uses it almost exclusively.
So last week I gave the recently released Ubuntu 8.04 (Hardy Heron) a try. I use Ubuntu on a number of servers and have found it to be easy to manage, well supported and stable. My plan was, should things work out, to create a VMware image of my Windows installation using VMware Converter and run it under Ubuntu. My preference for Ubuntu as a host OS is based on the fact that you can install and manage VMware Server using package manager, which very works well.
Because my workstation is a laptop (Dell Latitude D820) I wanted to test out all of the laptop type functionality: docking, wireless, power management, etc. So in order to to a quick test without having to make changes to disk partitions, I chose the Ubuntu install option that allows it to run from an NT File System partition. The installation when swimmingly and upon rebooting I had an option to boot Ubuntu which I chose.
This is where I hit my first issue.
My laptop is docked most of the time and so it was when I rebooted. The problem was that the X server didn’t work properly, leaving the screen black and without the ability to switch to another virtual terminal. The latter issue was particularly frustrating since that’s the first thing you do when dealing with an X server issue, in my experience. So I couldn’t even view the logs without undocking the laptop. So I undocked and rebooted the system.
Undocked, the X server started up and all the various input devices were recognized and functional. I looked through the logs but didn’t see any error messages indicative of a problem: it started, found devices but just didn’t work. I decided to ask Google about it
This is where I hit my second issue.
In the connected world in which I operate, a laptop without wireless connectivity is a huge problem. And part of the reason for trying Ubuntu were the reports from folks I know that wireless just worked. Not so in my case. The operating system did recognize that there was a wireless adapter and which one it was. It even informed me of some non-open source software to help make it work (and which I installed). However, I could not get it to work. At all. I used the setup control panel, I tweaked the wpa_supplicant.conf, installed the firmware. Nothing. In fact in a couple of cases, the network panel applet just disappeared and couldn’t be restarted.
Anyway at that point I had spent a couple of hours on it which within my time constraints is a lot so I decided to punt. I’ll leave the installation there for now in case I have the time and inclination after Hardy has been out in the wild for a while and updates have been developed but once again a simple transition to Linux hasn’t worked.
