The state of Ubuntu

Canonical has been a constantly rising star on the free software scene. I have been a large fan of Debian for a long time and fairly recently decided to switch to Ubuntu on my laptop. Now I would like to give a few reflections on the state of GNU/Linux in general and Ubuntu in particular and how the distribution works on a Fujitsu Siemens Lifebook laptop. In this blog Ubuntu 8.10 will be considered.

Booting from the CD works. The installation procedure works fine until GRUB is supposed to be installed. This step fails without and explanation. After reboot the system is not bootable. GRUB gives error 15: file not found. When looking in /boot it turns out there is no /boot/grub, and of course also none of the required files for grub. These can be created manually, there are several posts about this on the web. However for someone not experienced with fiddling with the computer, this will immediately halt them.

After installing GRUB manually the system boots up fine. Aptitude and friends are of course wonderful to work with and everything runs like a charm, so installing software is done in a kick.

There are however a number of programs/projects that does not work completely well. Not surprisingly it is the desktop that shows the largest problems. Red Hat and Novells NetworkManager (NM) unfortunately leaves some aspects to wish for. If one compares to state of the art in this respects, Mac OS X, NM needs to improve. When my laptop is moved between places NM becomes confused and does not understand that there are new networks available. It also does not remember which network it should connect to but this have to be done manually.

Next up is Evolution. This is truly a great mail suit, but there is definitely room for improvement. First of all the calendar connection to Google does not work. I can not change a calendar entry form within Evolution. If I do, the change is switched back at the next Evolution update of the calendar. When logging in to Google on the web the change was never committed.

Further there are small details like if I receive a calendar file in a mail, iCal say, I cannot right-click and choose import into some of the calendars, but I must first save the file and the import it. This seems unnecessary.

I would also like to talk a little about X.org. The new x-server from X.org is wonderful compared to xFree86. It is however still not entirely satisfying. There is a misconfiguration in that when extended desktop is installed (to connect to an external monitor) the OpenGL rendering (and hence the fancy desktop effects) can not be used. This is a well known problem and have been resolved with guides on how to fix it e.g. here. It is however a miss-configuration that should probably be fixed in future releases.

Another issue with Ubuntu is the login screen. When resuming my laptop from a suspension there is a flicker on the screen that makes it possible to see what the screen contains before the login screen appears. This might be considered a small issue, but I would say it is a security miss. It also indicates that it might be a vulnerability to explore further to also gain login access.

In connection to the login screen I would also like to take the opportunity to discuss the suspension feature. As stated above the laptop I use to run Ubunutu on is a Fujitsu-Siemens Lifebook. On this machine it is not possible to just fold down the lid, but the computer have to be manually suspended from the System menu (Gnome).

Finally, as I have spoken about in a previous blog, I am a proud owner of a Sony DR-BT50 bluetooth headset which is quite nice. I have however not managed to connect these to the laptop to use sound for playback. This is probably possible, but presently to difficult to achieve for the non-export.

To finalise this blog post it should be pointed that Ubunutu is a really nice distribution and OS, but with some beauty faults that hopefully will to addressed in the near future.