I haven’t had a lot of time to play with much lately, but while I processed some OGRE patches (ie during the times I was waiting for builds) this morning I finally got around to installing the latest Ubuntu 7.10 (Gutsy Gibbon) on my new test box. It already has XP and Vista on it, so it’s getting quite cosy in there, but since the box is only for testing I can afford to burn a fair amount of space on OS overhead.
Firstly the positive points:
- I like the fact that it’s a combined Live CD and installer, that’s a nice touch. You can have a play with Ubuntu (albeit rather slowly) before you choose to install
- The install was very easy. Not very many steps, and I could just let it use the remaining spare space on the drive since it’s the last one to the party. The default bootloader setup chains nicely back to the Vista bootloader, which in turn chains back to XP, no issues there.
- The default desktop is attractive and runs decently even without any specific acceleration
- The online update options are prominent and simple as soon as you start up
- There’s finally an ‘install proprietary graphics drivers’ option when you first boot up
So first impressions were good. I still don’t find the Gnome desktop as professional looking as either Windows or OS X, it still has a slightly unpolished feel to it; nothing major but the feeling is definitely there. It wouldn’t stop me using it, but my visceral impression is that it feels a little cheap.
More importantly though, the quick ‘install graphics driver’ feature, the presence of which had the potential to mollify one of my primary gripes with previous desktop Linux experiences, totally failed to deliver. It correctly detected that I had an ATI Radeon in the machine (specifically a HD 2600), and went on to download and install the driver, prompting me for a reboot. All well I thought. Unfortunately after said reboot I was confronted with a sequence of video mode changes that were clearly trying to configure the X server, followed by a fallback to ‘low res’ mode which is even worse than the VESA mode it started up in. I experimented a little with telling it specifically some details about the hardware, but that didn’t work either. Once again I’m confronted with the situation that X server / video driver configuration on desktop Linux completely sucks.
I didn’t have any more time to fart about with it today so it’s been shelved for now. Afterwards I found a thread about Envy which is supposed to make the process slicker than the default Ubuntu version, so I’ll try that next time I have chance. However, I still can’t get away from the fact that some variation of this X server nonsense happens to me every single time I try to install a desktop Linux, no matter what distro I use, and continues to be the primary reason why I find it hard to take it seriously. I know drivers are not easy, but the fact is that Windows and OS X never make this process as awkward as Linux continuously does. Is it something fundamentally overcomplicated in the design of the X server perhaps?
Here’s what I want to do: 1) install OS, 2) install graphics driver, 3) get on with stuff. With desktop Linux, for me at least, it’s always been: 1) install OS, 2) install graphics driver, 3) spend the next few hours arseing about trying to get the graphics driver and X server to work properly together. That’s not time well spent. I love Linux on the server, I really do, but I really can’t see why in 2008 setting up a graphics card is still a hard problem.
February 11th, 2008 at 6:56 pm
Ugh. I’m just glad it worked with my Nvidia 7900 out the box.
February 11th, 2008 at 7:56 pm
It worked with my 7600GT out of the box too, although i havent tried it with my 8800GT yet.
February 11th, 2008 at 7:58 pm
I installed 7.10 on my ASUS laptop which also has an HD 2600, couldn’t get binary drivers working until I upgraded to 8.04 (alpha).
I suppose 7.10 kernel and drivers are ‘old’ for this hardware. Ethernet and bluetooth didn’t worked too and are running fine now.
February 11th, 2008 at 8:41 pm
Odd’s are it would work well with any nvidia driver, as the nvidia drivers are dead simple to install on Linux, ATI has always been uncomfortable on linux, though with their recent acquisition by AMD things are supposed to get better
February 11th, 2008 at 8:45 pm
023Qk10LwdeCF4XkTnLAhOzSmnkzVf
pi9G28n2P0UfkNOItqikvVDjDa4S9p
hEuAvN-_xLNMkS2bkjaJI7nl3V686b
avres81svYp8y284cjt7sx-
February 11th, 2008 at 8:48 pm
OH, some problem with reCAPTCHA
I have an Ati and two Nvidia cards, both nvidias runs on linux out of the box, ati took some hours to work, so i dont thing it is a linux problem, nvidia just cares more about linux
February 11th, 2008 at 9:55 pm
I have not had much problem with my Nvidia, or my older ATI (uses the open source drivers).
February 12th, 2008 at 12:29 am
Been unsuccessfully trying to get my ATI card working in linux for a few months now messing around with it on and off, to the point where I’m looking at buying a cheap nvidea card. Really terrible driver support by ATI.
February 12th, 2008 at 2:46 am
Your main gripes are one of the focus points for the next release of Ubuntu.
You should try 8.04 a month or so after it comes out.
February 12th, 2008 at 8:04 am
I am running Ubuntu Gutsy on my current computer with a Nvidia graphics card. Everything worked “out of the box” from the start for me. It seems that ATI cards are generally giving more problems. Googling “ubuntu ati problems” returns nearly 3x as many results as the Nvidia search equivalent. I think the problem stems from the fact that Nvidia has taken the time to release several graphic drivers just for Ubuntu. ATI, on the other hand, has only released released one at my last count. Although the Ubuntu developers are trying to remedy this problem, I personally think that ATI is to blame, and it should be the vendor’s responsibility to fix this problem.
February 12th, 2008 at 9:17 am
I’ve always previously run Linux on nvidia too, but this time it’s on my test box and that happens to have an ATI in it right now, although it will get swapped regularly.
One of the reasons I wanted to try Gutsy is that last time I tried Ubuntu (Breezy), the nvidia card setup was broken - it picked the wrong X driver or something and I had to configure it by hand. When I complained about that, people told me to try 7.10, and now I have (with an ATI card), people tell me I need the next version!
The 2600 isn’t that new.
Putting myself in the position of someone who just wants to use an OS, I don’t care whose problem it is, it just reinforces my reservations about desktop Linux. Until you can reliably take the same hardware that works just fine on Windows and put Linux on it without having to spend hours trawling through forums to solve problems, I find it hard to take very seriously for anyone except devs who like tinkering with things rather than doing real work
I’ve never had a distro that’s remotely worked out of the box yet. Windows isn’t that expensive, and by the time I’ve wasted 3 hours trying to configure Linux, it’s paid for itself. Give me a Linux server with a simple console interface any day, that pays for itself quickly because it’s generally very slick (particularly with apt based distros), but on a desktop there’s just too many variables.
As it happens, I still need to get this to work because I want to have a Linux machine to test on. So I’ll persevere, but if it wasn’t for that, these partitions would be getting wiped double-quick. Conclusion is still ‘could do better’.
February 12th, 2008 at 12:01 pm
Steve ask ATI/AMD why their graphics drivers suck for Linux. It’s not really Ubuntu’s problem specifically. Next time try with the Nvidia card which has much better drivers.
The process of installing graphics drivers for Nvidia cards has been so simple on Ubuntu since Edgy and even before that, in Dapper it was just a simple hop to Synaptic and grab the package (although you did have to edit the xorg.conf back then).
I believe when you install Ubuntu on a machine with an Nvidia card the drivers are already installed and enabled on first boot with your screen correctly configured. At least that is my experience.
I wouldn’t recommend using ATI cards on Linux, ever. Even though they have “open specs”. They released some specifications for their cards awhile back but it’s only for 2D stuff so it’s pretty useless for 3D.
By the way, Ogre works great in Gutsy with the default package they have in there.. http://hardwar.blogspot.com/
It used to be a nightmare to install Ogre in Ubuntu because the packages were so out of date. I think it’s going to make game programming much easier on Ubuntu now they have my engine of choice.
February 12th, 2008 at 1:02 pm
[...] A Gutsy Fighter [...]
February 12th, 2008 at 1:09 pm
@Andrew: the fact that using the 3rd-party Envy resolved all my issues (see today’s post) indicates that it’s Ubuntu’s fault, not the drivers. I know that ATI’s drivers are dodgy on Linux (although the last Ubuntu I tried also screwed the nv install at startup too, as did SuSE) but that wasn’t the issue in this case, it’s running fine now.