Damn Kubuntu
I'm in the process of transitioning to a new project at work and have been given open slather with the GNU/Linux distro I install on my development workstation. Currently the workstation was running Fedora Core 5 which is half decent but fairly outdated. So like the geek equivalent of a manchild in a lolly shop I've been mulling over a few different distros.
The logical step was to go with Fedora Core 6 but word on the street, well actually just my own pigheadedness and my housemate's opinion, is that it's not that great and is only popular because it's the successor to the old Red Hat Linux. In the annals of geek history Red Hat Linux was the distro that pushed Linux into the fringes of the mainstream of the computing world. Actually Red Hat Linux 5 was the first GNU/Linux distro I ever installed and was quite a good one at that when compared to the more arcane distros that predominated back then.
First up I tried the live CD version of SuSE Linux 9.1. I actually installed the full version of SuSE Linux 9.1 when it first came out with Linux Magazine a couple of years back. It was distinguished at that time for having one of the best sets of admin tools around, in particular YaST. Its latest successor, openSUSE 10.2, has received quite a few good reviews and has continued to receive acclaim for its admin tools. If I were to have GNU/Linux machine for personal use this is the distro I would install because I figure the admin tools are what distinguishes a distro.
What made up my mind was playing around with Kubuntu. Kubuntu is a KDE based variant of the increasingly popular GNOME based Ubuntu distro. Kubuntu is distributed as a live CD from which it can be installed onto a hard drive. Now this live distro disc doubling as an installation disc is quite a nifty feature and is one thing that openSUSE can learn from. Currently openSUSE's live DVD cannot be used to install openSUSE onto a hard drive.
However this seemed to be about the only great thing about Kubuntu's installation process. Granted I was a bit ambitious in wanting to install a GNU/Linux distro onto a removable hard drive which I could then boot, okay make that very ambitious. Kubuntu's installer failed the first time to format my 2.5" USB external hard drive but was then able to afterwards even though I did not change the configuration of the system in the mean time.
In most other distros there is a fairly clear option to select and configure the packages to be installed, not so with Kubuntu. Granted my previous experience with installing GNU/Linux distros have involved DVDs or multiple CDs. Perhaps Kubuntu only ships with the most useful software packages which is why it fits on a single CD and why everything gets installed.
My main problem with the Kubuntu installation process however has to do with GRUB. The only option that could be configured during the installation with regards to GRUB was the hard drive to which GRUB would be installed to. There was no other options or dialogs to specify where on the hard drive GRUB should be installed to or how GRUB should be configured.
Initially I forgot all about GRUB which wasn't too surprising since there were no prompts to specify which hard drive GRUB should be installed onto. It was only after a second attempt at installation I noticed the option to specify which hard drive GRUB should be installed tucked away between text. I tried to get GRUB installed onto the USB removable hard drive but the installation process kept protesting.
Eventually I gave up and let GRUB be installed on the laptop's hard drive which was a bad mistake in light of what I wanted to install Kubuntu for. GRUB would crash upon getting to stage 1.5. At first I was stumped but after a lot of swearing I realised that the BIOS has to enable USB support for legacy operating systems. It turns out that GNU/Linux is considered a legacy operating system even though it is more up to date than Windows XP.
It turns out it was crashing because it was trying to progress beyond stage 1.5 with the remaining stages on the removable hard drive. Of course with USB support for legacy operating systems disabled in the BIOS this mean that the USB removable hard drive was inaccessible thus causing GRUB to crash. Furthermore, since GRUB has been installed on my laptop's internal hard drive, this means that everytime I boot up the laptop I would have to connect the USB external hard drive to be able to run GRUB successfully.
Whilst I understand that this is a problem of GRUB itself I still think Kubuntu sucks. I should have been able to configure GRUB better during installation. My conclusion is that (K)Ubuntu sacrifices efficient admin tools and processes for a more user-friendly distro. However I've always thought that the more user-friendly a device is touted to be the harder it is for people with some working knowledge of the device to manage it.
The logical step was to go with Fedora Core 6 but word on the street, well actually just my own pigheadedness and my housemate's opinion, is that it's not that great and is only popular because it's the successor to the old Red Hat Linux. In the annals of geek history Red Hat Linux was the distro that pushed Linux into the fringes of the mainstream of the computing world. Actually Red Hat Linux 5 was the first GNU/Linux distro I ever installed and was quite a good one at that when compared to the more arcane distros that predominated back then.
First up I tried the live CD version of SuSE Linux 9.1. I actually installed the full version of SuSE Linux 9.1 when it first came out with Linux Magazine a couple of years back. It was distinguished at that time for having one of the best sets of admin tools around, in particular YaST. Its latest successor, openSUSE 10.2, has received quite a few good reviews and has continued to receive acclaim for its admin tools. If I were to have GNU/Linux machine for personal use this is the distro I would install because I figure the admin tools are what distinguishes a distro.
What made up my mind was playing around with Kubuntu. Kubuntu is a KDE based variant of the increasingly popular GNOME based Ubuntu distro. Kubuntu is distributed as a live CD from which it can be installed onto a hard drive. Now this live distro disc doubling as an installation disc is quite a nifty feature and is one thing that openSUSE can learn from. Currently openSUSE's live DVD cannot be used to install openSUSE onto a hard drive.
However this seemed to be about the only great thing about Kubuntu's installation process. Granted I was a bit ambitious in wanting to install a GNU/Linux distro onto a removable hard drive which I could then boot, okay make that very ambitious. Kubuntu's installer failed the first time to format my 2.5" USB external hard drive but was then able to afterwards even though I did not change the configuration of the system in the mean time.
In most other distros there is a fairly clear option to select and configure the packages to be installed, not so with Kubuntu. Granted my previous experience with installing GNU/Linux distros have involved DVDs or multiple CDs. Perhaps Kubuntu only ships with the most useful software packages which is why it fits on a single CD and why everything gets installed.
My main problem with the Kubuntu installation process however has to do with GRUB. The only option that could be configured during the installation with regards to GRUB was the hard drive to which GRUB would be installed to. There was no other options or dialogs to specify where on the hard drive GRUB should be installed to or how GRUB should be configured.
Initially I forgot all about GRUB which wasn't too surprising since there were no prompts to specify which hard drive GRUB should be installed onto. It was only after a second attempt at installation I noticed the option to specify which hard drive GRUB should be installed tucked away between text. I tried to get GRUB installed onto the USB removable hard drive but the installation process kept protesting.
Eventually I gave up and let GRUB be installed on the laptop's hard drive which was a bad mistake in light of what I wanted to install Kubuntu for. GRUB would crash upon getting to stage 1.5. At first I was stumped but after a lot of swearing I realised that the BIOS has to enable USB support for legacy operating systems. It turns out that GNU/Linux is considered a legacy operating system even though it is more up to date than Windows XP.
It turns out it was crashing because it was trying to progress beyond stage 1.5 with the remaining stages on the removable hard drive. Of course with USB support for legacy operating systems disabled in the BIOS this mean that the USB removable hard drive was inaccessible thus causing GRUB to crash. Furthermore, since GRUB has been installed on my laptop's internal hard drive, this means that everytime I boot up the laptop I would have to connect the USB external hard drive to be able to run GRUB successfully.
Whilst I understand that this is a problem of GRUB itself I still think Kubuntu sucks. I should have been able to configure GRUB better during installation. My conclusion is that (K)Ubuntu sacrifices efficient admin tools and processes for a more user-friendly distro. However I've always thought that the more user-friendly a device is touted to be the harder it is for people with some working knowledge of the device to manage it.
Labels: computers
posted by Forrest Rivers at 23:49
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