I ordered 10 disks from Ubuntu when they offered their free disk giveaway. I 
thought I'd pass them out to people, and try Gnome 2.8 for myself. They 
arrived yesterday, nicely packaged in pretty cardboard double sleeves. 
There's a Live-CD and an installation CD in each package.  I just spent an 
hour messing with the Live-CD, and I'm totally underwhelmed. 

It loads fast and has a nice layout of applications and system tools. Being 
largely a KDE user, I was impressed. Except it didn't have a driver for my 
very common Lexmark Z53 printer. Then I tried to go online and it all went 
downhill. 

After putting in my dialup information, everything died. No applications would 
load. Nautilus died. Couldn't even open a shell to see what happened. The 
modem would start, then die before dialing. Rebooted. Same. Rebooted again.

Entered my dialup info again. This time I didn't try to go online right away. 
Instead, I tried to view the /etc/ppp files through Nautilus, and none of 
them would open in a text editor. Couldn't even start a text editor. 

Did Ctrl+Alt+F2 to a terminal to configure /etc/ppp by hand with Vi. After 
entering data into /etc/ppp/peers/pap-secrets and provider, I got error 
messages that there was meta-data corruption or somesuch when looking up the 
provider file: Oops. Kernel problems. It listed modules affected and it 
looked like everything. 

Well, that's all the time I'm going to spend on Ubuntu. I'm not asking for 
help fixing it. A Live-CD shouldn't have to be fixed or heavily configured by 
hand; it should just work, IMO, especially for something as simple as a 
dialup connection. There's no way I'm going to install it to my harddrive for 
a run. 

If anyone wants these disks, they're yours, or they go into the trash.

Siri Amrit
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