Ardent Meridian… incoherent rambletastic techno-babble …

This evening I began my installation of Linux for my operating system evaluation experiment.  For my non-desktop needs I typically use RedHat, though it is not something I would find especially desirable  as a desktop environment.

For this experiment I decided to give Ubuntu 9.04 a try.  I have used a variety of other Linux distributions over the years, and all have had their ups and downs.  Ubuntu seems to get the bulk of the desktop-centric press lately, and it is Debian-based (or at least derived) – something I have built from source in the past, so it seems a good candidate for my experiment.

The First 10 Minutes:

The first 10 minutes with Ubuntu were actually quite impressive.  In fact 10 minutes is all it took from first booting the machine with a CD in the drive and having Ubuntu restart the machine, reboot and be prompting me for my username and password.

Now, there are still things to do from this point before you could call the O.S. installation “complete”, but this is still much faster than Windows or OS X.  But if I was willing to ignore the updater I could have been browsing the web at that point, which is, by any standard, rather impressive.

The install process was, to this point, actually quite pleasant.  In fact I really only had one niggle with it.  And that was with selecting a time zone.  Now, and I fully admit that it is a niggle, it really bugs me that I either look at a tiny map and select a region to designate my time zone or I pick from a VERY limited set of cities and choose that way.

Really, what on Earth is the difficulty with either:

• Making the map large enough that I can actually see it well enough to reliably click on the my time zone if I know where it is geographically.
• Adding enough cities that I there is actually one that resides in my own state to choose from.

I understand that, as a former European resident, I have a better grasp of U.S. time zones than many of the people that have lived here all their lives, but still – it would take a few minutes work to add the 5 biggest cities, per state, to the list to select from.

Is it necessary?

No … I will concede that the current system works.

It is just not very pleasant.

Another pleasant surprise, and it really was a surprise, is that upon Ubuntu restarting and my logging in I heard an audible little ditty play … just like on Windows!  This has NEVER happened for me, on any system, without a lot of tedious messing about with configuring sound hardware.

More surprising still was that it just “worked” on my Mac Pro and that I have my audio on that configured to run though the optical outputs and into an external DAC/amplifier.  Even Vista had to be manually configured to send its output to the digital optical output before it worked.

So that is good stuff!

Yes, it does feel odd being surprised about that … but damn it, I AM – and credit where credit is due.

Printing:

This has always been a bane for me in Linux.  I was a long-time Unix guy, building applications for it, installing it, designing massive systems around it, and back in the old days, while printer setup was different, it was never that big a problem.

For some reason it has always been a major source of annoyance for me under Linux.  And it never really made any difference which distribution I was using, nor which printers were involved.

Getting my HP Color LaserJet 2500n to work in Ubuntu was unexpectedly easy.

It was still absolutely not something ANY “normal” user is going to have a hope in hell of getting to work, and “easy” is a very relative term here, but I had printed output in under a minute from selecting “Administration | Printing”.

My printer, like many today, resides on my network.  It is not shared from another machine; it has its own built-in server.  Knowing what that was, what message format it needed, and its IP address was something I had to “just know’ in order to configure it at all (no way I could find to browse for it).

But after I had chosen the proper connection methodology, and supplied the appropriate IP address (even this it was asking for a “Host Address”, and then manually chosen my printer and model, the rest of the printer configuration proceeded uneventfully.

A moment or two later I was told my printer was ready, and was offered the opportunity to print a test page, which I elected to do.

And out said test page came …

… in glorious grey-scale.

“Red” it said … only to be followed by a series of grey-boxes …

Lovely.

So the “recommended” driver for my per-the-name-in-the-model-dialog COLOR LaserJet has no color support?

Does the printer setup routine NOT read the metadata in the driver?  Or is there just no metadata in the driver designating simple things like, oh, MONO or COLOR for one of the printer capabilities.  I have a feeling I know the answer to that one.

Regardless, I am printing, but only in monochrome.  Not terribly useful, but actually no different to what I went through for the first six months with the same printer and Windows Vista.  Only there is was because HP’s own driver for Vista simply did not support color in any mode other than PostScript … and that had its own issues with available RAM on the printer.

Still, this has to be viewed as a total failure from a user perspective.

While I was able to supply the correct protocol and connection point/address data for the printer, I do not expect any normal user to be able to do so.

Under OS X it is sufficient to request addition of a new printer for it to find it, offer it as a choice, AND install a perfectly functional driver for it.

Vista required a manual driver download/install but it now works.

Linux requires the user providing three pieces of information that they are very unlikely to know OR be able to find without already having the printer setup on a Windows or OS X machine, and then they will need to manually reselect a driver (which is not the recommended one, so hardly intuitive).

After which, they will still be missing printer features (consumables reporting, for example), and they will be using a less efficient interface than necessary, but it does “work”.

I stopped on printer configuration here, surprised it worked at all, and really not expecting it to have any clue whatsoever how to talk to my Epson Artisan 800 … but I will come back to it later this week.

Displays/Monitors/Video Cards:

Another aspect of Linux I have become accustomed to is the need to download binary drivers and perform kernel recompilations to get something approaching a useful screen resolution to work.

My lowest resolution panels are 1600×1200 and until today it has been an issue getting anything over 1280×1024 without afore-mentioned driver download/build/recompile-kernel.  I was dreading trying to get my 30” Apple Cinema Display to operate at anything near its 2560×1600 native resolution.

So I find myself extremely surprised to find that, while by default the installer chose a resolution of 800×600, the option for 2560×1600 (and many other settings as well) was but a couple of clicks of my mouse away – much like one would expect in Windows and be assured of in OS X.

This is a nice change!

I was even offered the option to specify rotation for the screen, something that requires vendor-downloaded (and buggy) drivers under Windows.

What I was not offered was any awareness at all of my 2nd video card (identical to my first, so obviously supported) nor my 2nd and 3rd monitors.

Three screens are required here … I am not compromising my working environment for any piece of software or O.S. … and I was not in the mood to trouble shoot this tonight … so it remains the next issue I have to resolve before I can finish configuring my Linux setup for this experiment.

Still, this is real progress compared to previous desktop Linux distributions I have run on primary hardware and it will be interesting to see how the remainder of the installations goes.