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0 pointscosgroveb15y ago0 comments

Sounds like you haven't tried Ubuntu in a few years. I switched permanently a year or so ago after trying several times to make the switch over the last decade or so. It works almost completely without issue on three different systems of mine with very different hardware.

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6 comments · 2 top-level

leon_15y ago· 4 in thread

Yesterday evening I installed Ububtu (32bit because recommended grml) on my Macbook Pro 5,5. Booted it up, spent 2 hours getting everything set up (sound, keyboard backlight, power management, the touchpad - o m g the touchpad was the most frustrating, xmodmap tweaking for the keyboard).

Then I realized ubuntu would only recognize 3GB of my 8GB of RAM. (Yeah, it's a 32bit kernel but wtf? My 32bit OS X kernel recognizes all the RAM and 8gb isn't that uncommon nowadays.)

So I googled and found there was the option to install the PAE kernel (alternative would be to reinstall the 64bit ubuntu). So I fired up the packet manager, installed the PAE meta package, rebooted and nothing worked. My NVidia and Broadcom wireless drivers were not updated. X wouldn't start up.

So after fiddling with the X config files I got X to run again (by removing the nvidia stuff). Only to discover that my wifi card wouldn't work. I tried to reinstall the drivers but the jockey driver tool quitted with some obscure error message like "error, there was an error. see error logs." ... the error logs had something like "couldn't install wifi driver". (NVidia drivers wouldn't install because I wasn't connected to the internet but the error message stated that clearly.)

I went to bed and haven't tried again to get it running. I guess I will install the 64bit version when I got time to play around. (But I have a strange feeling that there will be problems with flash.)

Maybe a little rant to defuse my inflammatory comment:

I was really impressed by Ubuntu. I remember the times when I couldn't get copy and paste working between Netscape Navigator and a text editor. I remember when it was almost certain that I wouldn't get sound with my exotic non-soundblaster card. I remember when I had to fiddle hours with X-Setup to get a graphical environment.

Linux has come a long way. I certainly didn't expect Ubuntu to support something like keyboard backlight or the extended function keys of my Apple Notebook. But it did. The Desktop environment is really thought through and usable. I love that chat integration with the Desktop. I love that the 32bit version had installed binary blob drivers so I could just enter my wifi password and was online.

Nevertheless I chose the "dumb user easy linux" and went the recommended road. And that's why there's a bitter taste to it that something like updating the graphics drivers to a new kernel was not done for me, the dumb user, automatically.

But it's nice to see that there's an alternative to OS X for my Macbook if Apple should ever decide to completely fuck up OS X or to deprecate my hardware too soon.

masklinn15y ago

You could always run Ubuntu in a fullscreen VM on top of a barebones OSX. That would probably work correctly.

wtallis15y ago

I find that it generally works better to have your X server running outside the VM. You'll still want to install X on the VM to satisfy dependencies, but as for actually using it it's easiest to just install xquartz and use xdmcp.

ez7715y ago

I thought 32-bit operating systems had a hardm limit of 4GB of RAM, no? (Something to do with 2^32 being roughly 10^9, but I frankly don't know the details.)

julian3715y ago

32-bit operating systems do have a hard limit of 4GB of RAM but that's per process. See PAE: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Physical_Address_Extension

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neutronicus15y ago

It was Fedora and, yeah, it's been 2 years. I don't think I'll own a laptop made by anyone other than Apple for some time. Desktops, I'll probably use Linux.

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