Not another Ubuntu 7.10 review

Well, this certainly won’t be your usual Ubuntu review. Rant is probably the more appropriate word. If you don’t want to hear a rant, stop reading.

I received the ShipIt live CDs for the latest 7.10 release in the mail today, and decided to test drive it immediately. Started the live CD, and everything works just great. Wi-fi, sound, resolution, everything’s just dandy on my Advent 7093 laptop.

So I decided to proceed to the installation. I decided on a clean install, overwriting my existing 6.06 setup. Chose the locale etc., partition got formatted, files got copied and then… nothing. The installer just quit at around 45%. I tried starting it again. Same thing. So I thought maybe it’s done, a bit weird that there’s not confirmation message, but let’s restart.

Not only had ubuntu not installed, but grub was messed up too – I couldn’t even boot WinXP. Here are the steps I took to get XP back:

load live cd

sudo -i

sudo mkdir /mnt/try

mount -t ext3 -o rw /dev/sda4 /mnt/try

grub-install --root-directory=/mnt/try /dev/sda

This gets grub back on restart. Unfortunately, that’s just your garden variety grub, without any boot options populated, and just a grub> prompt. Load XP using

rootnoverify (hd0,0) makeactive chainloader +1 boot

Once XP is loaded, I decided to get rid of grub altogether using this method : http://www.users.bigpond.net.au/hermanzone/p18.htm#MbrFix.exe

So yes, I’ve decided to get rid of linux altogether. For the first time in many years, I’m going to not use linux at all. The reasons for this are:

• XP, really, works perfectly well for the light, non-work use I need.  It’s got all the programs I need, and is still blazing fast with a core duo processor
• I am sick and tired of bugs with linux. This laptop is 3 years old, and the version of ubuntu out back then installed perfectly fine. So it isn’t about driver support. Just some change that happens to mess my system up
• I’m not a student anymore. My time is too valuable to spend, as I just did, 3 hours fixing a buggy install. This is not a dig at the people willing to ride out linux’s bugs, and I’m not suggesting my time is more valuable than yours. But personally, I can’t afford this kind of tinkering around anymore. This laptop worked fine with ubuntu several releases ago. The following release, wireless support went buggy. I did the bug reports etc. This release won’t even install. I’m sick of this shit
• For the fanboys out there: I’m not goddamn anti-linux! I’ve been using ubuntu since warty, and before that I had redhat, suse and gentoo on my box. I know how to use the forums, I know how to submit bug reports, I know how to fix a lot of newbie and not-so newbie mistakes. I ran betas for several ubuntu releases because I wanted to help out. I’ve contributed to the forums. I just don’t want to anymore.
• I also know that the installation probably went just fine for you. Sure, I’ve been there too. I’ve just had one bug too many.