[svlug] Fedora or Ubuntu for novis

[Alan DuBoff]

On Fri, 12 Sep 2008, Luke S Crawford wrote:

> Huh.  I had the opposite experience with a recent install of a Via
> NanoBook (the Everex Cloudbook)

Yeah, but this is a specialized piece of hardware.

I've installed Debian to several pieces of common hardware, like 
a Toshiba M2 (nvidia), and a Acer Ferrari (ati), both worked 
fine, as did a workstation (nvidia).

> The X server didn't have the correct ModeLine (800x480 
> screen... debian stretched it to 640x480)

Not sure if you tried Xorg -configure to see if it would have 
given you a decent start even if it didn't work. I've seen the 
install on some distros and not be able to detect properly, but 
doing the -configure will create a new xorg.conf.new in /, and 
most times it's good.

If it runs on another distro, it obviously has a good driver.

> the wifi didn't work, and none of the suspend functionality 
> worked.  I was nosing around on the 'net looking for info on 
> how to make suspend-to-ram work, (with a laptop of this size, 
> easily the most important problem)

I agree that's important on something like that, but it doesn't 
sound like you tired too much, can understand that, but 
still...that's no reason to blame Debian without trying to fix 
it.

> This was my first experience with Ubuntu (outside of making ubuntu
> Xen images for my VPS customers)   and I was very pleased.

That was mine also...like I said, all of our milage varies.

> Out of box I
> got a nice working laptop.  really all I had to change was the font size
> in the terminal application.  Everything else, suspend to ram, wifi,
> etc... "Just Worked"  I could even configure the wireless from the gui
> with no extra effort.  In my world, GUIs that work reliably are pretty rare.

I don't find that to be the case these days. Xorg gets it right 
most of the time. Again, I don't know what Debian you were 
installing, but maybe unstable would have supported it better.

> Of course, I haven't tried to play multimedia on the thing (to 
> be truthful, I've not even tried to play music)  and the wifi 
> sucks pretty badly (it's the hardware, from what I understand, 
> the antenna is placed in an unfortunate position)  The hard 
> drive is like molasses on a cold day, and, of course, I 
> haven't even touched the webcam.

Will be curious if you can play most of it, I couldn't when I 
installed it.

> But yeah.   I guess it's been a while since I've played with a modern
> desktop-focused distro, so maybe I'm just easily impressed, but I found
> ubuntu to be almost grandma ready.

I would need to run Kubuntu for myself, I would feel naked 
without KDE, but I didn't even get that far, it was other stuff 
like codecs and such that weren't installed.

--

Alan DuBoff - Software Orchestration