It-just-works [LWN.net]

It-just-works

Posted Mar 10, 2005 19:10 UTC (Thu) by sjj (guest, #2020)
Parent article: The Ubuntu 5.04 preview is available

I have been a Debian user for almost a decade. A week ago I got around to test-installing Ubuntu hoary (I'd tried warty earlier, but ditched it for some reason that I can't remember anymore).

This thing is awesome. It really just works, it's as fast as my Debian sarge with XFCE4 desktop. The only thing it got wrong were the monitor frequencies, so I got 60Hz flicker city. Admittedly, this is a generic machine with no exotic or bleeding edge hardware (Athlon 2400 on an nForce2 mobo, integrated nVidia MX400 video).

I also installed it on a Toshiba Portege 3500 laptop. No problems, and the existing XP was integrated into grub boot menu just fine (I had an empty partition on the disk where I installed Ubuntu).

The default install from the single CD includes everything a regular computer user needs in about 1.5 GB.

The only gripe I have so far is the default brown color scheme. While I applaud the different look from all the blue-tinged desktops, I find it ugly (but since one of the authors of the theme is Mark Shuttleworth, maybe hard to get changed ;-).

I think the Ubuntu people have really made a leap here. All the goodies of Debian, without the pains. Somehow even Gnome is bearable now, and Evolution is almost zippy.

Well done.

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It-just-works

Posted Mar 10, 2005 19:58 UTC (Thu) by allesfresser (subscriber, #216) [Link]

The LiveCD got my monitor frequencies wrong too--so much so that my monitor gave up and showed "Out of Spec" on the OSD. And I didn't see the screen that would have allowed me to choose what resolutions to allow--kind of annoying. But once I ran the live CD within VMWare, I was able to see everything. (It was slow as molasses of course, since the VM only had 128M allocated to it, but I was expecting that.)

It-just-works

Posted Mar 10, 2005 20:09 UTC (Thu) by tomsi (subscriber, #2306) [Link]

I also saw the monitor issue when I installed Hoary.

But I think this is a general issue; SUSE has been overly optimistic many years - defaulting to a way too high resolution that the monitor can't handle.

I think it better that the distributions starts conservative and let me
increase it later.

Tom

It-just-works

Posted Mar 11, 2005 17:41 UTC (Fri) by tjc (guest, #137) [Link]

The LiveCD got my monitor frequencies wrong too--so much so that my monitor gave up and showed "Out of Spec" on the OSD.

I'm using an older monitor, so all I got was a black screen. It installed on the hard drive OK, so I guess it was just a problem with the live CD.

It-just-works

Posted Mar 11, 2005 20:51 UTC (Fri) by daniels (subscriber, #16193) [Link]

If you guys could all email daniel.stone@ubuntu.com, and attach the output of running 'sudo ddcprobe', your generated /etc/X11/xorg.conf, and /var/log/Xorg.0.log from when it started with a blank screen, we'll see if we can't get it fixed. Thanks.