Zac Garrett

After a year of running OS X as my primary OS at home it was time to give Linux a go again. I felt that I was missing the customization of Linux and the massive amounts of free software. After getting bored quickly with Microsoft Server 2008 it was quickly time to move on to Ubuntu.

The reason for going with Ubuntu was that it is the most popular Linux distro today. Normally I would go with something a little more customizable such as debian or gentoo. This time I wanted to take a look at exactly what everyone says is the easiest Linux distro ever. Okay, that is really up for debate, but most people are talking about Ubuntu today.

Installation

For me the install of Ubuntu was far from painless. The graphics card in the computer is too good or some may say too new. I was not greeted with the normal live CD goodness that I am used to when installing in VMWare or even on my old laptop. Instead I was greeted with a warning saying that the system was not able to detect my graphics card and monitor. It did give me the option to change my resolution, there was just one small problem; it didn’t work for me.

When I changed the resolution the xorg server would stop functioning. It would just show the list of items that had been started while booting. When I issued the startx command it resulted in a great error message. After about ten minutes of tweaking with xorg.conf I gave up and just rebooted the computer. Once again I tried to change the resolution to something better than 640×480; no luck.

Finally I decided to install with the low res options and fix it later. The actual install process was fairly painless. It should be noted that installing Vista and Server 2008 are actually easier now. There are fewer options and the install process seems to be faster. Those OSs use image files to install the OS which is extremely efficient. This is not a complaint, just an observation.

Once installed I got a great error from my BIOS, no master boot record found. The installer decided to install grub on one of the secondary drives instead of the same one the OS. It didn’t even install on the Windows XP drive; it installed on my file storage drive. There is only backed up files on this drive; no OSs. After changing the boot order of the hard drives I was back in business.

X11 Problems

Well, I was on to my next challenge; no login screen.The normal GUI didn’t show up; instead a great flashing screen of xorg trying to start and failing. Good ol’ GDM was continuly trying to start and would fail resulting in the flashing screen. After around a minute it gave an error stating that X had some sort of error and was not able to start and it would try again in three minutes. There I was, on the command line login screen with GDM going to try and start X again in three minutes.

I quickly was able to get a working xorg.conf file to get gnome up and running with startx. After three minutes GDM decided to try again even though I was already running X. It failed again and made the screen flash on me. I didn’t realize what was going on exactly until about the third time and then I was able to shut down GDM (sudo /etc/init.d/gdm stop).

The next step was to install the proprietary NVIDIA drivers. Once again, another roadblock; my graphics card is not supported via the standard Ubuntu way. I had to install the driver directly from NVIDIA which needed the kernel source and quite a few other compiling tools to allow it to be installed. Following the tutorial it was a fairly easy process; I’ve done the same thing many times in the past.

After this process I restarted the computer to make sure everything was working. GDM still didn’t work. Instead of troubleshooting the problem I uninstalled GDM (sudo apt-get remove gdm) and just used startx instead.

Wine Gaming

I’ve been hearing great things about wine as of late being able to run game at full speed. So, my next step was to get Team Fortress 2 running under wine. After finding a tutorial on the subject I went at it. The install process of Steam was fairly simple and I was able to copy all of my games over from my NTFS partition so no major download was needed.

The game started up with an error stating that my graphics card could not handle the game. I ignored the error as I knew that it could; a 8800GT can clearly handle the game. The game loaded and looked surprisingly good. Of course I hit another snag; when I hit the options menu in the game and it froze. I had to end the process the hard way (killall -9 hl2.exe).

After starting the game again I just hit the find server option and clicked on a server to join. Frozen once again. After a little bit of analysis I saw an error about my USB sound card not functioning. After two hours of trying to get it functioning I gave up and just used the onboard sound card to see if I could get something working. Audio worked but the game still did not.

To see if any game would work I tried Half-Life 2, a game that has been out since 2004 and should be better supported. Once again the game froze. All temperatures on the computer were fine, nothing was overheating the game just wouldn’t load.

Conclusion

This right here is the reason Linux will never be a viable desktop solution. I have over three years of Linux experience on both the desktop and server and look at all of the problems I had. I was able to get around most of them by knowing what was going on and what it took to find the solution.

I’ve now booted out of Linux and am in the XP partition of the computer. I really thought I missed Linux as my primary desktop. Today I remembered why I got a Mac instead; all of the *NIX power with the ease of use of an Apple product.

My time is now actually worth something now and I need a computer that works without constantly needing attention. This test rules out Linux and with all of the badware on Windows the best option for me is OS X. If you run Linux as your primary OS, the more power to you. I just no longer have the energy to put up with the hassle.