Three Computers, Three Results, Three Very different problems.

A new year is about to begin and as with any TV channel around the world they all do a recap of the year just passed. After installing Ubuntu linux variations on three different computers, I have certainly have had three very different experiences and as it is also the end of the year, it is a good time to do a review.

The first time I installed Ubuntu was on my desktop computer, which most of my articles are based on and is the longest running Ubuntu linux machine i have. The machine itself is five years old with a Pentium 4 processorm an ATI 9600 graphics card and on board Realtek sound card. I'm not sure who produced the motherboard as it came with the case from Shuttle. First installation candidate on the machine was Ubuntu hardy 7.10 LTS and the initial installation was anything but smooth. The two contributing problems were my out of date knowledge of nix systems and a very young Ubuntu distribution. I had tried Suse, Red Hat (before Fedora), Slackware and other distros before hand but couldn't stay with them. There were too many options and too many decisions to make. The beauty of Ubuntu is the decisions are pre-made and works very well out of the box.

Moving on, Ubuntu at the time was still very young. Gnome didn't work out very well for me at the time and I had consistent problems with the graphics card, webcam, virtualisation and NTFS. Some of these problems were solved over time, while others never were. Most problems were resolved and I was happily running Hardy with KDE3.5 for quite some time. Problems started when I saw all the new stuff coming out which I couldn't use on Hardy. That made me want to upgrade to the new Karmic.  Now the machine is on Ubuntu 8.10 Karmic and in hindsight I should have stayed on Hardy. Karmic has brought more problems than solving the old ones. Hopefully the next version will resolve many of the problems I am currently experiencing. As far as my desktop experience goes, I am not very happy with Karmic.

Next is my Asus eee pc 701. Xandros was getting to old and there just did not seem to be a straight forward way to upgrade the installation. Personally it is a shame Xandros made it so difficult as I actually like the Xandros distro. It was fast and I thought very practical. As it got so old, I was lucky to have discovered Ubuntu Netbook Release. There is very little I don't like about UNR. Installation was easy and there were very little problems. Main problem was the wireless with regards to hidden SSID. Luckily there is a work around and I learned how to connect to a wireless network via the terminal. Beside hibernating still not working (I'm beginning to suspect it's a space issue), everything works fine which impressed me.

The last system which I've only recently installed it on is my Toshiba notebook. This is a Toshiba Satellite A100 and is primarily my Windows machine. I am not prepared to go full Linux on it, but then I heard about Wubi on FLOSS Weekly, which I thought i would give it a try especially as it leaves my current Windows installation alone. Too my surprise this has so far worked completely flawlessly. Graphics, hibernating, standby, audio, touchpad, keyboard, everything that comes with notebook worked completely flawlessly with Ubuntu Karmic. So far I have found nothing to be a problem. I have yet to test the microphone and the multi card reader, but my impression so far has been very positive.

Ubuntu and linux has certainly come a long way in the past few years and despite all the problems on the way, I have been pretty impressed. The biggest dissappointment has been with my desktop computer which is also the oldest PC still running. I expected the support to be better than some of my newer machine do to its age, but I'm finding the newer machines tend to be better supported. This is a strange turn of events as traditionally linux has always run better on old machines than new.