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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