Gutsy Gibbon, Ubuntu 7.10, appears to finally be stable on my computer. The desktop box in question is not cutting edge, but surely must be somewhere in the middle of the technological continuum of computers running this newest incarnation of Ubuntu Linux. A computer with an Athlon 64, Nvidia GeForce FX5500, 160 gb hard drive, with 512 mb of ram installed should not be obsolete, but was made to seem so. Just as I thought Ubuntu was getting too easy, Gutsy came along and shattered that notion
For those of you hoping that Linux could surge into the vacuum created by the shortcomings of Microsoft Vista, don’t hold your breath. Your lungs will implode. Although Ubuntu is oft touted as the easiest Linux, it’s far from perfect. Ubuntu again requires a skilled technician to diagnose and stabilize a problematic installation. The previous version, 7.04, seemed to be more stable and easier to diagnose. There were few fixes this time around.
First of all, the upgrade from Feisty Fawn, 7.04, did not go as planned. It should have gone without a hitch, but Update Manager hung at the point of re-writing the boot sectors for GRUB, the boot manager, to find the new installation, or the old one for that matter. I was left with an unbootable hard disk. Hopefully this has been addressed, but I cannot guarantee that it has. Just make sure any data you want saved has been backed up somewhere before trying to update from Feisty. My solution to the problem was a freshly installing from the Gutsy Live CD, which necessitated re-formatting the boot hard disk.
My second problem is with Gutsy installing Compiz Fusion as part of the default GUI. This is where my Linux box began to look like it wasn’t up to the task of running Ubuntu 7.10. The first thing I noticed is that any games using Open GL wouldn’t work at all. Open GL was non-existent apparently, because the Open GL screensavers installed by default only would give me a blank screen. Ultimately this was resolved by removing Compiz and using the unrestricted driver for the Nvidia graphics card. Unfortunately, advanced features of Compiz Fusion require the use of the restricted drivers. If you haven’t tried to use those features yet, then your workload is cut in half. But revamping of the user interface to adjust the desktop appearance has made turning on those features practically irresistible. It was only after the restricted driver was installed that I learned that my video card still wouldn’t support these so-called advanced features, even after switching out the old Geforce 2 MX 400 and putting in the FX 5500 I had laying around. To say the least, Canonical did not use a user-friendly approach. It was only after several months of trial and error and a multitude of application crashes (everything crashed) that I discerned that going back to the unrestricted video driver was the solution for stability.
So now I have a stable Ubuntu installation. I hope Canonical improves its approach in the future. This release was somewhat delayed as it was, but that seems to be the norm these days. I was considering evaluating a home network server based upon Linux, but the release of Gutsy set my projects back a bit. I’m also recovering from another surgery that restricted my ability to type, but I’m on the mend.
Next time, instead of upgrading Ubuntu, I think I’ll give Debian Etch a try on this dedicated Linux box. I already have it running in MS Virtual PC under Windows XP on my other computer. Stay tuned for details.
Posted by d.j. 