More dysfunctional Ubuntu-isms

Mon Nov 7 12:17:16 MST 2016

Sorry for the fire and forget, had to rebuild a data center for a 
customer over the weekend - I was just really hoping to have the darn 
box up before I left to work on it remote, such a simple feat normally, 
but I had no time for anyways.

Rest inline...

On 11/03/2016 03:54 AM, Steve Litt wrote:
> On Wed, 2 Nov 2016 18:38:24 -0700
> Michael Butash <mike at butash.net> wrote:
>
>> This is really why I have a hate/love relation with ubuntu, it never
>> fails to disappoint.  My road to 16.04 has been all upgrades so far,
>> this time I'm using 16.04.1 cd's from scratch.
> Curious: What do you love about it? You seem like the kind of person
> who could work with any distro.
Short answer, it usually works where others do not with my graphics, a 
6-head amd video card which until recently, I used all ports on.

Long story, probably tldr (you asked!), definitely love/hate...

After my last straw with windoze and making the decision to force myself 
to use linux to both learn and abandon m$ shitty ecosystem circa 2006, I 
tried a bit of everything disto-wise.  I always loathed redhat and rpm 
hell (no, yum didn't entirely fix this, and much later), I came from 
slackware/open|freebsd/solaris background having no desire to go back, 
and oddly landed on Mandrake for a bit.  Until I started hacking on it, 
and things came unglued.

I decided to try Ubuntu after reading about debian roots I've heard 
praised (tried for 2 seconds, got annoyed, don't remember now why), I 
think 6.04 at the time, and oddly it "just worked".

I didn't begin to have any real issues until 10.10 until the era of 
unity hell began, and they started trying to make Ubuntu install more 
idiot-proof for, well idiots.  Sadly it removed all the good features 
like complex raid, crypto, and lvm setup, making it about as stupid as 
possible, but there was always the alt installer and just simply not 
using unity, if I could just get the damn os on a system.  Thanks Canonical.

They then pissed on that, fiddling with (breaking) the alt installer 
removing fdisk (it's what I used for my raid+crypto+lvm setup), and 
ultimately doing away with the alt installer all together as insult to 
injury.  Again I worked around them in other ways, building my fs 
manually with an arch cd first learning how to build it all manually 
from busybox again, and trick the netboot installer into working over 
it.  Thanks again Canonoical.

Around 2014, I got really annoyed after dist-upgrade blew up my system 
that I decide to sojourn a bit and explore distros again with a new 
laptop I'd gotten.  I couldn't even get fedora's vaunted installer to 
reproduce my raid+crypt+lvm setup, and despised the notion of going back 
to it anyways, but at the request of a friend that for some reason likes 
it, tried.  Even tried Red Hat's official installer, more broken than 
fedora, scratch either/or.  Tried Arch too, got to a desktop, and found 
hell with the AMD drivers and graphics capabilities in general.

I settled on Mint Debian edition with Mate, as Cinnamon was all sorts of 
broken with compositing on even the most basic intel gpu, which seemed 
like instant fail.  Mate was great, and used that for a bit until with 
some new ssd's I'd begun to rebuild my desktop with mint de mate, and 
found ATI graphic hell in my desktop.  AMD only cares about 
fedora/ubuntu as a linux entity, knew it would likely work there, and 
again hacked ubuntu back onto my system.  It's the same install I'm 
using today, and eventually moved my laptop back to ubuntu.

What I really can't fathom is how Canonical can keep breaking their 
installers in such new and creative ways each time, and only I seem to 
notice, but then again, I expect linux features most people don't know 
even exist or care about like raid, crypto, or volume management.

If BTRFS or ZFS supported better encryption, I'd love to use one native 
fs to do all the raid/crypto/lvm in it.  I think as of this year, 
either/both might, so worth exploring, but I bet ubuntu's installers 
will still suck in dealing with them.

Yes, AMD is a root evil for linux graphics and at times the kernels, but 
nvidia to this day still has not put out a 6-head video card like AMD 
that I actually use all 6 ports of.  Now I have 3x montiors (well, 
tv's), so this new one has a nice new 1070 card in it.  Which thanks to 
their crappy business practices too of not releasing firmware 
immediately (that amd would decompile), I know nouveau has issues with, 
and the binary drive is necessary.  I'm handy with cli here, not too 
worried, more that their drivers suck too these days.
>> I really don't want to have to make a circle of distro's to end up
>> back here again, but ubuntu is always so basically dysfunctional
>> these days with the most basic things, it's hard to want to care.
>>
>> I wonder how much others have seen this.  This is with legacy boot in
>> bios, no uefi crap, and just a basic d-i based ubuntu server install,
>> and/or kubuntu.
> I used Ubuntu for several years because it "just works." The trouble
> was, as I got more sophisticated, Ubuntu's seatbelts and airbags and
> danger sensing devices and training wheels and all that other stuff so
> necessary to the newbie badly got in my way.
I agree, it feels almost childish to still use Ubuntu at this stage, but 
nothing else has worked suitably, and I'm somewhat tired of 
trying+disappointment when history has proven most others to be 
inadequate or worse.
> So I ditched Ubuntu for Debian, and that was great, but then Debian
> went systemd so I switched to Void Linux, and after a rocky 5 weeks of
> Void newbie-ism, Void has turned out to be the most useful, maleable
> and stable distro I've ever used. I've used Void for over a year now.
That's why I tried Mint Debian Edition - figured deb it might suck less 
and just wanted a modern ui, but found that their driver support for 
AMD, or rather a support for modern versions thereof for graphics were 
fairly lacking, and no one from a major org cares enough to fix it.  I 
simply could not get their kernel to take the amd driver, which was a 
non-starter.  It's actually what drove me finally back to Ubuntu 
natively just for a working video solution, and at times keeps me bound.
> I think you've probably outgrown Ubuntu.
See above.  It tends to work great as long as I don't have to 1) install 
it via "normal" means or 2) upgrade it, both often suck these days.  
Both have simply continued to get worse and worse, and I only encounter 
them every few years out of necessity of they are also both my primary 
means of working as my own business.  Once I hit 14.04 stable, I 
upgraded only upon absolute necessity core functions like kernel or 
desktop libs, and only essential apps that require them (browsers 
really), but otherwise didn't upgrade core until 16.04 when it 
released.  That's been a current longer evolutionary story I'll get to 
eventually.
> BUT, as far as your current no-booting installer problem, I wonder if
> your media are bad. Just for fun, boot System Rescue CD and have a look
> around the system to verify no disk or RAM problems, and that the
> processor is what you think it is. If you can't boot System Rescue CD
> either, that points an accusing finger at your DVD drive.
This is something I'd seen before actually, I'd mentioned another time 
about arch and disk-label usage.  I don't think it's media, but who 
knows.  My 10 year old spindle of dvd-r's might be breaking down by now, 
but first time I've seen this with a anything, why I tried both the 
built-in, and a usb, of which I've used hundreds of times to boot 
things, almost always said linux boxes over the past 10 years, another 
not long ago.
> Also, try burning your disks with cdrecord (or wodim) instead of a gui.
> I use a command something like this:
>
> cdrecord dev=/dev/sr0 padsize=63s driveropts=burnfree \
> -pad -dao -v -eject myimage.iso
>
> The padsize=63s and -pad help with the Linux readahead bug. Burnfree
> means you don't unknowingly make coasters or bad discs if your computer
> can't deliver the data fast enough.
>
> If you perform the burn like I mentioned above, you *should* be able to
> md5 check the disc to the same md5sum as the iso file by following
> directions here:
>
> http://www.troubleshooters.com/linux/coasterless.htm
Interesting - I've not had to adjust a cd like that using k3b on linux 
ever or nero in win since doing so for pirated drm games. Only time 
seeing something like that is using unetbootin to make the usb where it 
doesn't know the iso expects a certain disk label to exist.  This seemed 
more a sloppy iso build in the few hours I had with the system and ample 
frustration to write that.

Thank you for that tidbit, I'll try it after I fiddle with the bios more 
on this.  I'm going to try a kde neon build (really what I'm interested 
in more here), I just didn't have the time as it showed up 5 hours 
before I had to pack, sleep, and hop on a plane (sad, I know).  It's a 
t7910 precision dell, more a server board than desktop, so I'd really 
expect better behaviour here on either pc or ubuntu.

I'll update when I get to it tonight hopefully.
> HTH,
>
> SteveT
>
> Steve Litt
> November 2016 featured book: Quit Joblessness: Start Your Own Business
> http://www.troubleshooters.com/startbiz
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