[Hampshire] Result of the Ubuntu Challenge

Well, after lots of head shaking and much blood, sweat and tears (Not
really ;-) )
we got Ubuntu installed on the server alongside CENTOS.

The O/S OOTB hangs when initialising the desktop. Tony W (The winner of
the prize) dug around and found that the Sound Card was causing the
problem. This is a Creative SB24 Live. The Desktop wants to play some
sounds at startup and if the soundcard does not return an answer to the
play requested (or whatever it is trying to do...) the whole desktop
startup hangs.

This is probably a BUG in UBUNTU. Aside from the fact the soundcard was
not working properly it should not hang the startup. Note that Fedora
Core 7-Test 4 does not hand at this point and remember that both distros
are using Gnome.

We removed the soundcard and we were able to install Ubuntu. After the
install Tony renamed the driver module and we were able to install the
soundcard again it the boot went through ok.

Ironically, the driver that might be at fault (or it might be the
application that wants to play the sound, More likely IMHO) is written
by none other than our very own James Courtier-Dutton (or at least what
modinfo shows)

Once we installed the O/S we tried to configure the monitor. After much
apt-get etc the nvidia driver was installed but plainly refused to
recognise that the monitor was capable of anything higher than 1024x768.
As we were using a Viewsonic VS2235wm 23inch display I was a bit miffed.
Centos and Fedora found higher resolution OOTB.
After adding several extra display resolutions including 1600x1200 to
the xorg.conf is started X in this resolution. This is not the correct
resolution for the display. This is 1680x1050 but 1600x1200 is close enough.


I expect that Tony will add some more info later.

From a personal point of view (please don't start a flame war here)
Ubuntu is actually harder to install than Fedora. Ok, I am more familiar
with FCx than Ubuntu but I have to do less other stuff with Fedora than
Ubuntu to get a basic system working on this hardware. If the bug in
Ubuntu was fixed some of the problems would go away but It just seems
like this.
Configuring the display to use the nvidia driver is a far more
complicated process than on Fedora. ON FCn, I download the package from
Nvidia and then switch to runlevel 3, run the installer and then startx
in config mode. There seemed to be far more apt-get, aptidude operations
than should be needed, This is a general observation.

If Linux is to be a real serious contender to Windows in the desktop
arena the who area of configuring the desktop display OOTB must be
addressed. Adding second (& more ) displays should be as easiy as it is
with Windows. If that gets sorted out then there is a chance to get "Joe
Sixpack" off of Windows and onto OSS systems.

Stephen D