Some General feedback

[Steve Ovens]

Hi all,

I thought I would provide some general feedback from my experience with
Ubuntu Gnome. Before this weekend i had no problems with the 3 or 4
installs i had done. I speculate that is because of the older nature of the
hardware (anywhere from 2years old to 8 years old). However i just received
my new Galago Ultra Pro from System 76 and i had a heck of a time. (For
those who dont know this is a company that specializes in machines that rjn
Ubuntu)

First i tried 13.10. The install went fine and the only thing i did was
setup 3 partitions and i selected the defaults. When i booted in for the
first time I was unable to log in. I clicked on the user name but no
password prompt. I dropped to the cli and was able to log in there just
fine. So i rebooted  few times then gave up and inatalled Antegros. This
went fine and I am comfortable with Arch to a point (i run it at work
daily). I decided to take another go with Ubuntu Gnome. This time i tried
14.04. I couldnt get past the installer with the alpha 1, alpha 2 or any of
the 3 nightly builds i have previously used.

I went and redownloaded 13.10 iso and tried that again. I wiped the machine
got through the install and was finally able to log in. This time however i
had all kinds of problems with network manager. Wifi worked fine but it
wasnt detecting eth0. On the cli I used dhclient manually and that would
bring the interface up just fine. I checked network/interfaces, as it is
supposed to, only the loop back was defined there. I then followed various
online guides for working with NetworkManager.conf. I finally got the
device to show in network manage (i had to uninstall it completely, remove
the /etc related files, reboot than reinstall) but when toggling the device
to on, nothing would happen. I tried working the gnome3 ppa into the mix
but the updated packages introduced other problems i didnt want to fix

I gave up and put on Xubuntu and then installed gnome shell. This was super
ugly. Things seemed to work ok but this time i could not create any vpn
connections regardless of installed packages or how many reboots. I plugged
in the ppa and installed ubuntu gnome desktop. That helped somewhat with
the ugliness but this still looked off. In addition i started to have login
problems (intermittent) again.

I redownloaded 13.10 ubuntu gnome and wiped the computer again. Install wen
fine but this time rebooting brought me to busybox prompt. Examining the
errors it appeared that it could mount the root device. I tried to fix that
(verified root uuid and the fstab, was able to chroot into the partition
just fine).

At this point i used chroot to do-release-upgrade to 14.04. I have been
successfully running 14.04 for a day using this method. I have been able to
do everything i need and have had no crashes but man what an unfriendly
user experience. I would rate this as advanced skill level activity because
doing a do-release-upgrade from inside a chroot (from a live usb) is not a
normal process.

Like i said at the beginning i have to imagine that its due to brand new
hardware (even though all parts are certified for ubuntu). I have 3 laptops
(2 on 12.04) running with problems as well as a handful of vms. I should
also note that versions less than 13.10 produced kernel panics during
initial boot of livecd/usb/pxe boots.

Just thought i would share my 1 bad experience trying to install on brand
new hardware

Steve
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