Venturing Out of The Wilderness
This post comes to you from the waiting room at Kingston Prestige Toyota, and it brought to you by Ubuntu. I know it may seem like almost a regression as a Linux user, but today marks Day One of my experiment with moving from Gentoo to Ubuntu, and I'm actually quite excited about it.
I call it a bit of a regression because Gentoo has that "close to the machine" feel, where things only happen when you tell them to and they happen exactly as you told them to happen, whether that's what you meant or not, whereas Ubuntu has a much more "oh hey look at what it just did" feel to it. It's almost like putting the training wheels on. Things happen for me, and I don't know what every single process in ps is, or if that's what my init process looked like last time. Hell, I don't even see the init process; I just get an orange progress bar and then a graphical -- graphical! -- login prompt. And, honestly, I kind of like it. It's almost like some forbidden pleasure. But more on that later. First, the real reason I'm trying this.
It basically comes down to two things: overcoming inertia, and reading the writing on the wall.
The inertia thing is a much bigger deal, especially for somebody like me. Everybody is uneasy with change; for me it's nearly a physical discomfort. So whenever anybody has told me I should check out some distro that wasn't Gentoo, the mere idea of having to figure out a different way to say, "I want eth0 to use dhcp," was enough to make me start shaking my head. Wondering how I would get along without Portage was the stuff of nightmares. I tried to install an rpm once. That was all the evidence I needed to know that I was exactly where I was supposed to be. But Ubuntu doesn't make you use the rpm command, and it doesn't wrap some stupid GUI around it that just presents cyclic dependencies in a configurable font. From what people were telling me, it basically just worked. You say, "I want pidgin," and a few keystrokes, maybe a mouse click or two, and you've got pidgin. It sounded tolerable. I watched it happen once, and it looked okay.
Then I read a Gentoo Weekly Newsletter posting about how the people put in charge of the Gentoo Foundation when the creator stepped aside had managed to let the charter for the 501(c) nonprofit lapse, and didn't get it re-instated for six weeks. I saw the founder offer to run things again and be turned down. IBM made an announcement that we would start officially supporting Lotus Notes 8 on Ubuntu. I know, I know, Notes basically blows, but we have to use the thing either way, and the idea of not having to run VMWare (I mean seriously, I work with Xen for a living) to get my corporate mail is appealing. Ubuntu has some serious momentum right now, while Gentoo is stalling. Note: I'm not saying it's falling apart or the quality has decreased. It's just that the project doesn't have the buzz it used to, and it definitely doesn't have the mainstream uptake that Ubuntu is getting.
Also, while the it's fun being able to say, "I pretty much know everything that goes on with my system, because I told it to happen," it's not that big a deal to me anymore, and at this point I'd honestly prefer to say, "All I know is that everything works." At work I write code; at home I play video games, watch movies, and futz around on the internet. Nowhere in there do I see a good reason to be a top-notch Linux sysadmin. At this point, I just want to use the thing.
Finally, if I'm ever going to convince Nina that using Linux might not be so bad, I'm going to need to try a different approach from Gentoo and Ion3.
So how's it going so far? Pretty good. It hasn't been this paradigm-shifting, quasi-religious, epiphany or anything, but it's been nice. Lots of little things that make me smile. Most of them are probably more an effect of running a well-configured Gnome environment than Ubuntu itself, but all I know is it works. (Tada!) For example, there's a little thing in the top corner that looks like it should relate to wireless. It does. In fact, when I turned on the computer in the waiting room here, I clicked on it, selected "PRESTIGE SERVICE" from the list, and starting using the internet. And if I understand correctly, that AP just got added to my list of "if I don't have a LAN connection and I can see this, I'll use it" stuff. So handy. Hibernate is another one. I was going over the backup checklist with Sean and when I mentioned the hibernate scripts, he interrupted and said, "You won't need those." I of course asked how I would hibernate, and he clicked this little green man in the top right corner of his workspace. A series of buttons appeared, one of which was labeled "Hibernate." In case you haven't figured out the theme, it just works.
One complaint. I did the LiveCD install without plugging into the wired network, rebooted, and plugged in my LAN connection. Nothing happened. A little diagnostic work and some frustration didn't get me much, so I left the LAN plugged in and rebooted. Tada, I'm on the internet, but stupid my LAN card is eth1, my wireless is eth0. Which is dumb. But it was fixed easily enough; I just found the udev rule file for persisting network card names and swapped the two cards, rebooted again, and it's been great ever since. So it was resolved quickly and I even got to get my hands a tad bit dirty; all good.
I think is what happened is the T60 put the nic to deep sleep because it wasn't plugged in, and so it failed to autodetect as even being present. There is a known problem on boot, where the nic will often go into deep sleep before the appropriate module is initialized, and so the EEPROM checksum fails and linux doesn't even think the card exists. I think a similar problem bit me on this one, so I'm willing to let it go. That kind of silliness is not something I expect such a hands-off install to be able to handle. Besides, I didn't have to tell it a single thing about the actual hardware. It detected and configured everything else correctly on the first try, even the oh-so-unfriendly Intel 3945 wireless chipset.
Another little thing was what happened when I thought I might have mercurial installed but wasn't sure. I ran 'hg' on the command line, which will dump a little help output if mercurial is there. I got this:
I thought that was a nice touch.
So bottom line? Too soon to tell, but I think I'm going to be pretty happy with it. And I would highly recommend it if you've thought about running Linux but don't want to have to figure out your wireless chipset or write your own xorg.conf. It is by far the fastest 0-60 I've ever had with a Linux install, Gentoo or otherwise.
I call it a bit of a regression because Gentoo has that "close to the machine" feel, where things only happen when you tell them to and they happen exactly as you told them to happen, whether that's what you meant or not, whereas Ubuntu has a much more "oh hey look at what it just did" feel to it. It's almost like putting the training wheels on. Things happen for me, and I don't know what every single process in ps is, or if that's what my init process looked like last time. Hell, I don't even see the init process; I just get an orange progress bar and then a graphical -- graphical! -- login prompt. And, honestly, I kind of like it. It's almost like some forbidden pleasure. But more on that later. First, the real reason I'm trying this.
It basically comes down to two things: overcoming inertia, and reading the writing on the wall.
The inertia thing is a much bigger deal, especially for somebody like me. Everybody is uneasy with change; for me it's nearly a physical discomfort. So whenever anybody has told me I should check out some distro that wasn't Gentoo, the mere idea of having to figure out a different way to say, "I want eth0 to use dhcp," was enough to make me start shaking my head. Wondering how I would get along without Portage was the stuff of nightmares. I tried to install an rpm once. That was all the evidence I needed to know that I was exactly where I was supposed to be. But Ubuntu doesn't make you use the rpm command, and it doesn't wrap some stupid GUI around it that just presents cyclic dependencies in a configurable font. From what people were telling me, it basically just worked. You say, "I want pidgin," and a few keystrokes, maybe a mouse click or two, and you've got pidgin. It sounded tolerable. I watched it happen once, and it looked okay.
Then I read a Gentoo Weekly Newsletter posting about how the people put in charge of the Gentoo Foundation when the creator stepped aside had managed to let the charter for the 501(c) nonprofit lapse, and didn't get it re-instated for six weeks. I saw the founder offer to run things again and be turned down. IBM made an announcement that we would start officially supporting Lotus Notes 8 on Ubuntu. I know, I know, Notes basically blows, but we have to use the thing either way, and the idea of not having to run VMWare (I mean seriously, I work with Xen for a living) to get my corporate mail is appealing. Ubuntu has some serious momentum right now, while Gentoo is stalling. Note: I'm not saying it's falling apart or the quality has decreased. It's just that the project doesn't have the buzz it used to, and it definitely doesn't have the mainstream uptake that Ubuntu is getting.
Also, while the it's fun being able to say, "I pretty much know everything that goes on with my system, because I told it to happen," it's not that big a deal to me anymore, and at this point I'd honestly prefer to say, "All I know is that everything works." At work I write code; at home I play video games, watch movies, and futz around on the internet. Nowhere in there do I see a good reason to be a top-notch Linux sysadmin. At this point, I just want to use the thing.
Finally, if I'm ever going to convince Nina that using Linux might not be so bad, I'm going to need to try a different approach from Gentoo and Ion3.
So how's it going so far? Pretty good. It hasn't been this paradigm-shifting, quasi-religious, epiphany or anything, but it's been nice. Lots of little things that make me smile. Most of them are probably more an effect of running a well-configured Gnome environment than Ubuntu itself, but all I know is it works. (Tada!) For example, there's a little thing in the top corner that looks like it should relate to wireless. It does. In fact, when I turned on the computer in the waiting room here, I clicked on it, selected "PRESTIGE SERVICE" from the list, and starting using the internet. And if I understand correctly, that AP just got added to my list of "if I don't have a LAN connection and I can see this, I'll use it" stuff. So handy. Hibernate is another one. I was going over the backup checklist with Sean and when I mentioned the hibernate scripts, he interrupted and said, "You won't need those." I of course asked how I would hibernate, and he clicked this little green man in the top right corner of his workspace. A series of buttons appeared, one of which was labeled "Hibernate." In case you haven't figured out the theme, it just works.
One complaint. I did the LiveCD install without plugging into the wired network, rebooted, and plugged in my LAN connection. Nothing happened. A little diagnostic work and some frustration didn't get me much, so I left the LAN plugged in and rebooted. Tada, I'm on the internet, but stupid my LAN card is eth1, my wireless is eth0. Which is dumb. But it was fixed easily enough; I just found the udev rule file for persisting network card names and swapped the two cards, rebooted again, and it's been great ever since. So it was resolved quickly and I even got to get my hands a tad bit dirty; all good.
I think is what happened is the T60 put the nic to deep sleep because it wasn't plugged in, and so it failed to autodetect as even being present. There is a known problem on boot, where the nic will often go into deep sleep before the appropriate module is initialized, and so the EEPROM checksum fails and linux doesn't even think the card exists. I think a similar problem bit me on this one, so I'm willing to let it go. That kind of silliness is not something I expect such a hands-off install to be able to handle. Besides, I didn't have to tell it a single thing about the actual hardware. It detected and configured everything else correctly on the first try, even the oh-so-unfriendly Intel 3945 wireless chipset.
Another little thing was what happened when I thought I might have mercurial installed but wasn't sure. I ran 'hg' on the command line, which will dump a little help output if mercurial is there. I got this:
jay@hrunting:~$ hg
The program 'hg' is currently not installed. You can install it by typing:
sudo apt-get install mercurial
You will have to enable component called 'universe'
bash: hg: command not found
I thought that was a nice touch.
So bottom line? Too soon to tell, but I think I'm going to be pretty happy with it. And I would highly recommend it if you've thought about running Linux but don't want to have to figure out your wireless chipset or write your own xorg.conf. It is by far the fastest 0-60 I've ever had with a Linux install, Gentoo or otherwise.
posted by SomeJerk at 2:43 PM
2 Comments:
Somehow I missed that you started a new blog. Remedied.
If it makes you feel better, I switched to Ubuntu, too. After almost six years with Gentoo.
I got tired of fidgeting with my wireless, and having to deal with all of that. And NetworkManager didn't really work on Gentoo without doing a bunch of crap. All that worked right away in Ubuntu.
I miss some things about Gentoo, though. I don't like using old packages. Cross-compilers suck a whole lot (man do i miss crossdev --target i386-pc-linux-gnu). There's not much consistency in package building, so every time I have to build my own deb I have to deal with a new way to do it.
What would be awesome is using emerge and the collected knowledge of the portage tree to build debs. I haven't gotten around to trying it yet, though.
Hey it's Lundles! How goes?
Yea that was really the big "oh sweet" with Ubuntu. Don't need to remember the exact chipsets I have and the wireless just comes up and connects. Network Manager is not without it's occasional quirk, but it's a far more coherent situation in Ubuntu than it was in Gentoo.
I do also get a little frustrated with the old package thing, but I'm getting used to "oh and update, this definitely is safe to take," which wasn't a huge problem with Gentoo but was a real possibility with the heavy duty packages.
I don't tend to build my own stuff much, so I can't really speak to that part of things.
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