A few people have asked me why I haven’t been blogging about my Linux experience. Remember that I promised to switch to Ubuntu for a month? Well, it’s fallen through. Sorry. I wish I could have followed through with it but here’s what happened:

The Install

My experience with installing Ubuntu was pretty good. I like it how with the newer versions there is only one CD which acts as a live CD and installer. The graphical installer is always welcome. Last time I installed Ubuntu it was a text-based installer. Yerck.

However, something odd happened during install: to actually get the system to boot from the CD, I had to go into my BIOS and disable both Bluetooth and WiFi. Otherwise it would hang while it was loading up, showing the shiny Ubuntu logo and a progress bar which didn’t move. No big problem I guess, once I had installed Ubuntu I could google for a solution for this little compatibility glitch, and fix it later.

Getting Beryl To Work

My first priority was to get Beryl working. Beryl is the software that gives Linux really glassy, over the top effects. However, I installed the fglrx drivers, and set up Beryl as instructed by the tutorial I was reading, yet it mysteriously didn’t work. After several attempts the system eventually got to a point where I reformatted because I had somehow screwed up a heap of packages. I probably could have fixed them, but a reformat was a lot faster, and for a considerable part of the weekend that I had Linux for I was occupied with other things, including a fun poker night with my friends. I can’t play poker for craap.

A reformat later, and I tried another guide, and it still wouldn’t work. The annoying thing was the guide I followed was written for exactly the same hardware, running Ubuntu Edgy, same graphics card, yet it wouldn’t work. I was quite annoyed, however I didn’t quite need glassy effects. All I was using was Firefox, I hadn’t really explored much of the other preinstalled software (and the extra software Automatix spent five hours downloading).

Bluetooth

The next night, I sit down at my notebook and fire up Ubuntu. I manage to connect to my PC to grab music from it. Samba works surprisingly well, and it’s quite easy to use. However, as I wanted to listen to the music more privately I decided I would need some headphones. The only thing remotely-like headphones I had was my Logitech Bluetooth headset that I use infrequently when Skyping.

However, Bluetooth was turned off. By the look of it, the hanging-on-boot issue I came across earlier was caused mainly by the WiFi and not by the Bluetooth, though I had turned off the Bluetooth anyway. I thought as a challenge, I’d turn on the Bluetooth, and see if Ubuntu picked it up automatically, or whether I’d have to configure something.

So, into the BIOS I went, and turned on Bluetooth. Rebooted, and .. holy shite.

Time-of-day clock stopped.

That’s rather serious. The computer has to know the time to function. So, somehow re-enabling Bluetooth completely hosed my system to a point of no repair, since I couldn’t get into the BIOS to reconfigure it, or boot from anything, or get inside to find the RTC battery to clear the CMOS. (Well, I probably could have, but disassembling notebooks is not fun). After some googling, it appears that this problem has happened to a few people with the same hardware and Ubuntu Edgy. Shit.

Email Support

The good thing about this little hardware mishap is, Dell support are good. I emailled them ONCE. They send me an email straight away saying they’re going to replace the motherboard, no questions asked, and they’ll ring me to arrange a guy to come out and pick it up. Brilliant! A few days later, and it’s today. My dad comes home from work with my notebook, all back to how it was. Except it’s minus an operating system, I formatted the HDD before I sent it away. Don’t know why, it’s a force of habit.

And, a nice thing I’ve noticed, when I turn it on, it has *my name* on the BIOS screen! How nice! Must have been because the BIOS is newer, revision A10 instead of A8 that my old mobo had.

Heh, only 13% into the text-mode stage of the Windows XP MCE install, and I receive a text message on my phone: “Dell Ref: xxxxxxx, Ben, I would like to check if our engineer has attended on-site. Please email me if you have any concern. –Eugene”. It’s nice to know Dell cares. They make make products that break, but their customer service cancels the bad products out.

Conclusion

I’m not jumping back to Linux for a little while. I think I’ll stick to Windows for a few months, until there’s a newer version of Ubuntu, or a newer kernel, or both. Unless someone can convince me otherwise to heal my emotional penguin-scars, and try again? But I doubt that’s going to happen for a little while.

–Ben

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This entry was posted on Friday, March 2nd, 2007 at 7:43 pm and is filed under Computing. You can subscribe via RSS 2.0 feed to this post's comments. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.