Linux on a laptop
The time came when my old HP Omnibook 6100 finally died and I needed to get a new laptop. I was sick of dealing with the crap that was Windows (WGA checks, inflexibility in general and bad development environments) and decided that I wanted to try Linux again. I'd tried various incarnations of Linux a couple of times before, once in 1999 (a version of RedHat) and again in 2004 (with a version of Mandriva) but both times it took so long to get the basics working that I'd given up.
I looked into laptops that had official linux support and the only product that I could find was the Dell Inspiron 1420 which was shipping with Ubuntu 7.10 Gutsy Gibbon. This laptop suited my needs (small form factor and cheap) so I went ahead and ordered one. Overall, my experience has been a good one, with a few great experiences and one or two annoying experiences.
The Dell Shopping Experience
Living in Canada, but having spent the summer in the US, I browsed both the dell.com and dell.ca sites looking for the best deal. On both sites I was only looking at Inspiron 1420's with 2GB of RAM, a dual core processor around 1.5Ghz and either a 120GB hard drive at 7200rpm or a 160GB hard drive at 5400rpm.
I found that I could only order the linux version (which ships with Dell's factory installed version of Ubuntu 7.10) from the US site but that I could order the windows version from either site. The strange part was that the windows versions of the laptops were actually cheaper than the linux versions. I confirmed that this was in fact the case based on a slashdot article. I ended up getting the windows version from the dell.ca site because it was something like $200-$250 cheaper than the systems from the dell.com site.
Setting up the basics
My 1420 arrived and the first thing that I wanted to do was scrape Vista off of it and put on Ubuntu. I could have installed the Dell factory image which probably would have eased installation but I didn't realize this was possible until I had solved several of the initial problems. The basic install went fine, with a little bit off difficulty getting the partitions right.
I booted up and the first thing that I tried to do was connect to my wireless network. I had a fair amount of difficulty doing this, mostly because I hadn't installed the correct driver for my Dell Wireless 1390 802.11g Mini Card. The confusing part was that their was no indication from the networking UI that I hadn't installed the correct drivers. Having had a little previous experience with linux, I figured that this was the problem but this would have been pretty difficult to resolve had I been a less experienced user. This sort of UI problem will come up again later and is my single biggest complaint about Ubuntu 7.10. After I installed the right wireless driver, connecting was pretty straight forward.
The next step was installing the various pieces of software that I'm used to, which was pretty straight forward using the apt-get utility. I noticed that there was a graphical UI to this but I found this more difficult to understand and for some reason I didn't trust that it was doing the same thing as the command line utility.
The only other major difficulty that I had getting the basics working involved some difficulties with suspend and hibernate. Initially, resuming after a suspend caused crashes and when it didn't crash, the sound wasn't working correctly. After some brief research, I found that there was a problem with the Inspiron 1420 sound card and suspend and the fix involved adding some lines to a script. This wasn't too difficult to fix, but getting the basics working really shouldn't involve editing OS level executables.
In contrast to these initial annoyances, my experience trying to download pictures from my Canon Powershot A520 was great. I expected to have all kinds of problems with this but after I plugged it in, a popup came up telling me that I'd plugged in a camera and asking me what I wanted to do with the pictures. I'd always had difficulty getting windows to do what I wanted (even with the Canon downloading utility) so this was a very pleasant experience.
All in all, I spent about as much time getting the system to this level as I would have with windows if I had had the same level of experience with both.
Getting a little more advanced
In addition to getting these basics going, I wanted to get SAMBA working and my VPN into school to work.
Getting SAMBA working was actually pretty straight forward, after some initial setbacks. Having been used to lots of difficulty with SAMBA, I tried using the command line smbclient package to connect. As it turns out, the graphical UI is much more intuitive than the command line UI. Also, in my brief usage, Ubuntu's graphical UI is better at interfacing with SAMBA shares than the native windows client. It was just a couple of quick clicks and I was browsing my windows computer and copying files.
Mounting my home directory from school and getting the printers set up there was also straight forward and I ended up spending less time doing this than I did when I tried to do the same thing on my old windows machine.
Finally, I tried setting up VPN into school which is where I thought I'd gain some real advantages over my old windows system. The windows VPN client was always causing problems and I was always deleting my connection because it caused some really annoying popups. I thought that I had installed the right VPN packages and ended up having the same problem as when I set up the wireless networking. The UI gave no indication that I didn't have the right drivers installed which cause a lot of confusion when my connection didn't work. After some quick research, I determined the problem and my VPN was working.
Conclusion
The experience I had here was far superior to my previous experiences with linux distributions. In retrospect, most of my difficulties resulted from an unfamiliarity with the linux interfaces which wouldn't have been much different had I switched from linux to windows rather than the other way around.
This all causes me to give the recommendation that linux is ready for the casual user, as long as they use hardware that is fairly mainstream. It really helped that a lot of other people had installed Ubuntu on Inspirons which produced tons of useful posts in forums.
My first major complaint is that the Ubuntu desktop UI is not very good at indicating that the correct drivers aren't installed. I'm not sure why there is any wireless or VPN utilities accessible at all when the system doesn't have the correct drivers to allow these types of connections.
My other major complaint is that installing the basics of an OS should be possible without having to type in complicated commands and editing OS level executables. It's not difficult to have basic patches for each of these hardware problems for the major linux laptops and I could imagine this scaring off some moderately savvy users and forcing them back into windows.
I looked into laptops that had official linux support and the only product that I could find was the Dell Inspiron 1420 which was shipping with Ubuntu 7.10 Gutsy Gibbon. This laptop suited my needs (small form factor and cheap) so I went ahead and ordered one. Overall, my experience has been a good one, with a few great experiences and one or two annoying experiences.
The Dell Shopping Experience
Living in Canada, but having spent the summer in the US, I browsed both the dell.com and dell.ca sites looking for the best deal. On both sites I was only looking at Inspiron 1420's with 2GB of RAM, a dual core processor around 1.5Ghz and either a 120GB hard drive at 7200rpm or a 160GB hard drive at 5400rpm.
I found that I could only order the linux version (which ships with Dell's factory installed version of Ubuntu 7.10) from the US site but that I could order the windows version from either site. The strange part was that the windows versions of the laptops were actually cheaper than the linux versions. I confirmed that this was in fact the case based on a slashdot article. I ended up getting the windows version from the dell.ca site because it was something like $200-$250 cheaper than the systems from the dell.com site.
Setting up the basics
My 1420 arrived and the first thing that I wanted to do was scrape Vista off of it and put on Ubuntu. I could have installed the Dell factory image which probably would have eased installation but I didn't realize this was possible until I had solved several of the initial problems. The basic install went fine, with a little bit off difficulty getting the partitions right.
I booted up and the first thing that I tried to do was connect to my wireless network. I had a fair amount of difficulty doing this, mostly because I hadn't installed the correct driver for my Dell Wireless 1390 802.11g Mini Card. The confusing part was that their was no indication from the networking UI that I hadn't installed the correct drivers. Having had a little previous experience with linux, I figured that this was the problem but this would have been pretty difficult to resolve had I been a less experienced user. This sort of UI problem will come up again later and is my single biggest complaint about Ubuntu 7.10. After I installed the right wireless driver, connecting was pretty straight forward.
The next step was installing the various pieces of software that I'm used to, which was pretty straight forward using the apt-get utility. I noticed that there was a graphical UI to this but I found this more difficult to understand and for some reason I didn't trust that it was doing the same thing as the command line utility.
The only other major difficulty that I had getting the basics working involved some difficulties with suspend and hibernate. Initially, resuming after a suspend caused crashes and when it didn't crash, the sound wasn't working correctly. After some brief research, I found that there was a problem with the Inspiron 1420 sound card and suspend and the fix involved adding some lines to a script. This wasn't too difficult to fix, but getting the basics working really shouldn't involve editing OS level executables.
In contrast to these initial annoyances, my experience trying to download pictures from my Canon Powershot A520 was great. I expected to have all kinds of problems with this but after I plugged it in, a popup came up telling me that I'd plugged in a camera and asking me what I wanted to do with the pictures. I'd always had difficulty getting windows to do what I wanted (even with the Canon downloading utility) so this was a very pleasant experience.
All in all, I spent about as much time getting the system to this level as I would have with windows if I had had the same level of experience with both.
Getting a little more advanced
In addition to getting these basics going, I wanted to get SAMBA working and my VPN into school to work.
Getting SAMBA working was actually pretty straight forward, after some initial setbacks. Having been used to lots of difficulty with SAMBA, I tried using the command line smbclient package to connect. As it turns out, the graphical UI is much more intuitive than the command line UI. Also, in my brief usage, Ubuntu's graphical UI is better at interfacing with SAMBA shares than the native windows client. It was just a couple of quick clicks and I was browsing my windows computer and copying files.
Mounting my home directory from school and getting the printers set up there was also straight forward and I ended up spending less time doing this than I did when I tried to do the same thing on my old windows machine.
Finally, I tried setting up VPN into school which is where I thought I'd gain some real advantages over my old windows system. The windows VPN client was always causing problems and I was always deleting my connection because it caused some really annoying popups. I thought that I had installed the right VPN packages and ended up having the same problem as when I set up the wireless networking. The UI gave no indication that I didn't have the right drivers installed which cause a lot of confusion when my connection didn't work. After some quick research, I determined the problem and my VPN was working.
Conclusion
The experience I had here was far superior to my previous experiences with linux distributions. In retrospect, most of my difficulties resulted from an unfamiliarity with the linux interfaces which wouldn't have been much different had I switched from linux to windows rather than the other way around.
This all causes me to give the recommendation that linux is ready for the casual user, as long as they use hardware that is fairly mainstream. It really helped that a lot of other people had installed Ubuntu on Inspirons which produced tons of useful posts in forums.
My first major complaint is that the Ubuntu desktop UI is not very good at indicating that the correct drivers aren't installed. I'm not sure why there is any wireless or VPN utilities accessible at all when the system doesn't have the correct drivers to allow these types of connections.
My other major complaint is that installing the basics of an OS should be possible without having to type in complicated commands and editing OS level executables. It's not difficult to have basic patches for each of these hardware problems for the major linux laptops and I could imagine this scaring off some moderately savvy users and forcing them back into windows.
posted by Timothy Fowler at 1/20/2008 08:13:00 PM
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