A Brief Historical Background (Or, Why Linux?)

My father is a computer engineer, so I grew up around several different predominately PC-based computers and have witnessed every stage in the development of Windows. We had a few different Macs sitting around the house as well, which were neat because they were different and easy to use, but all the cool games could only be played on the PCs. I have a vague memory of seeing a weird computer in my father’s office that started up with “OK” written in green on every line, but couldn’t make it work at the time ;-)

As a result of this exposure, I used Windows growing up and throughout my education until I wandered into the Computer Science program at SUNY Potsdam. Up to that point, my computer was a platform for gaming, word processing and, eventually, web browsing…and it worked fine for those purposes. I also never had to pay a dime for any of the software I used; it was always handed to me. Once the nightmare assignments from Dr. Charles Marshall started piling up, using Windows (98 SE at the time) to do work become more of a task than a tool. There’s nothing like the BSOD when you’re writing up solutions to proofs or trying to implement solutions to problems like the Towers of Hanoi, Dining Philosophers and, one of my favorites, the permutation generator. Dr. Marshall’s education by intimidation drove me (frantically, in fact) to learn several lessons that I probably otherwise would not. The power of the GNU/Linux toolset was one of the many lessons. While the learning curve was steep, as is the case with all good lessons, the effort was immensely rewarding. Therefore, fed up with reboots and enlightened after a trial by fire, I’ve been using Linux as my OS of choice since 2000, only resorting to Windows when there is no other alternative.

My first Linux installation was Red Hat Linux 6.2, and I continued with the Red Hat lineup through Fedora Core 4. I don’t remember what it was for sure, maybe it was the desire to explore or something that turned me off during the upgrade to Core 5, but I finally jumped ship. After first trying SuSE and Debian, I tried and ended up choosing Ubuntu 6.06 LTS (Dapper Drake); it was the easiest install of any distribution I had used by that time and it “just worked”.

The Issue

Since I currently work in a “Windows shop” that uses Exchange, I use Evolution with the exchange-connector as a client for mail and calendaring. The version of Evolution in Dapper had several bugs that are fixed in the latest Ubuntu 7.10 (Gutsy Gibbon) release, making interaction with Exchange much smoother. Outlook Web Access, by the way, is just about useless without running Internet Explorer, and I refuse to run a virtual machine to communicate. I stuck with Dapper as long as I possibly could (over a year, which is long for me), but finally caved in to the desire to run the latest versions of Firefox, Gnome, Evolution, etc.

I upgraded to Gutsy, as soon as it was released, on my Dell Optiplex 745 at work and my old Dell 8200 at home and was pleased overall, despite some minor annoyances (such as the unavoidable brown background and occasional garbled screen during login). The experience running Gutsy on my Toshiba Tecra A8 laptop, however, has been buggy enough to consider switching to another distribution. Power management has seen a serious regression in this latest release resulting in my laptop freezing during suspend/hibernate. Despite my best efforts to resolve the issue over the course of many wasted hours, I’ve resorted to disabling the power management features as best as I know how. This is a serious issue, though, for a laptop that already suffers from lousy battery life, and I still have a freeze if I sit at the GDM prompt for long or close my laptop lid. Also, every once in a while when I login to Gnome, all of my desktop applets will be sitting in their own little windows instead of docked as I last left them, requiring me to logout and log back in again. While these may be upstream issues for which the Ubuntu team is not directly responsible, they weren’t issues I was dealing with in Dapper. I’m concerned that the focus on usability and “it just works” has been lost somewhat, in favor of the things that don’t really matter like jiggly windows. Now that I think about it, this may have been the reason I left Fedora during the Core 5 upgrade.

Make the Switch?

I just got a “new” used Dell SX270N SFF desktop to replace my old Dell 8200 desktop. It came along with the bad capacitor issue, but, fortunately, Dell is covering replacement motherboards under an out-of-warranty extension program until the end of January. I called Dell support and, after a satisfactory (but somewhat lengthy) process, had a replacement motherboard on the way. A few days later the motherboard arrived. I was pleasantly surprised and have to give Dell kudos here for the excellent service and quick response. The replacement was a little tricky given the size of the desktop, but I was able to swap out the damaged board and everything is, apparently, working well.

My next step was to install Windows XP SP2, because…well hell, some people just can’t do without it. I have a rant stored up about open standards and proprietary formats that I’ll certainly be sharing at some point, but this is not that post. Anyway, I ripped through the install process, allowing Windows to take up the entire drive, and performed the requisite update…reboot…repeat.

Onto Linux, since it’s what I’ll be using 99% of the time anyway. I read that Fedora 8 may be better then Ubuntu this time around, so I thought I’d give it a shot and install it on the new desktop. If things worked out, maybe I’d switch and have working power management on my laptop. I threw in the Fedora Core 8 Live CD, and, I have to admit, things looked pretty slick and familiar to my experience with the Ubuntu Live CDs. Next I clicked on the link to install Fedora 8 to my hard drive, jumped through a couple hoops and arrived at the point where I had to select the drive to install on. Here’s where things didn’t go so well. Having used the entire partition when I installed Windows, the installer would not allow me to resize the partition as I had become accustomed to doing with Ubuntu. I also couldn’t immediately find a utility like gparted on the install CD. Now consider that I had a Gutsy install disk sitting next to me the whole time, that a New York Rangers game was on (which they lost BTW…but a good game nevertheless), and that I knew I could resize the partition with Gutsy. Did I really try to get Fedora 8 installed? Not a chance. Bottom line, I’m sticking with Ubuntu…for now.

Ubuntu Install Shortcomings

I can’t let Ubuntu off the hook so easy, though. My previous Ubuntu install was an upgrade, so I didn’t have the luxury of working with the partitioning tools during the install. In this case, a fresh install to my desktop, I was exposed to this confusing interface again. It’d be great if the interface had some description of what was going on and/or what should be done. Some pointers for those of us that either 1) don’t know or 2) can’t remember the requisite knowledge that makes the process bearable. We are, after all, playing with fire during this step. I was able to resize the partition, but not to the exact size I specified (another potential source of confusion). Then I had to juggle some create/delete/modify partition operations to get everything setup the way it should be. For example, I like to have a separate /home partition for those instances where I want or need to do a fresh install, so that I can keep my personal data in tact. As far as I can remember, the default partitioning gives you a single / partition made from existing free space.

I like to think of myself as a capable computer professional, but I still get a little nervous during this step and will typically reference some external documentation just to clarify my understanding of the details. Couldn’t/shouldn’t this information be readily available during the process itself? Perhaps a little “hand holding” isn’t all that bad? I’m not the only person thinking along these lines:

Considering that this is such a vital and dangerous stage of installing Ubuntu, I think this topic is a bit blasé. It needs a lot more detail and clarification, for instance:

1) It says “Select the partition that you want to resize”. Most users will want to create a new partition, not resize one. I assume the process might be resize existing partition, then use free space to create another, but it’s not obvious at all.

2) How do they know which partition they want to install on? Partitions seem to be only identifiable by their size.

3) If the user has to create a new partition (as most would do), should they select “New partition table” (on what i gather is the physical drive), or “Edit partition” (on what looks like existing partitions)?

4) Most importantly: Exactly which files will be destroyed if the user does dare to create a new partition table / edit a partition? Will undo really work, restoring deleted files?

Until this critical aspect of installation is clarified, I won’t be installing Ubuntu anytime soon, and I’m a lot geekier than the average. I know any normal user would _never_ get through that partitioning wizard. I reckon the only people getting through this wizard are experienced partitioners and people with a completely blank drive. That’s not a lot of people.

I was successfully able to get through the installation, but I wonder how many potential converts are turned away or fail in their attempts because of lack of clarity in the most critical of installation steps?

What’s Your Point?

Now I’m not, currently, a contributing member of either the Fedora or Ubuntu community and could easily be told to “put up or shut up”, but I am an advocate for open source and contribute when and where I can. I’m also aware of the impact of buggy and/or difficult to use features as a driving force for change when considering particular operating systems or, in the case of Linux, a particular distribution. If there is a point to this, it’s that examples like the BSOD in Windows, failing suspend/hibernate in Ubuntu and the lack of partition resizing support in Fedora need particular attention, especially when trying to entice people away from one OS or distribution to another. Bad impressions are hard to shake.