ubuntu-us-nj HELP! Hardy Heron is flawed

[Luis R. Rodriguez]

On Sat, Apr 26, 2008 at 9:37 AM,  <rescue130 at gmail.com> wrote:
> Hey all,
>
>  Just a warning, Hardy Heron is broke.

This is subjective. It seems all you have to complain about is Nvidia
support. More on this below.

> I unfortunately upgraded yesterday. Don't do it!

Provided you are not being precise and not patient or understanding
about support issues it seems no one should take this advice
seriously.

> It's the biggest piece of junk to date.

Now this just smells like a troll.

> The first distro to not recognize my wireless card out of the box.

Oh and what other distributions have you tried? What wireless card was
it? Did they use the same xorg release?

> That made it impossible to even troubleshoot. Just wanted to warn the rest of you. 8.04 is nowhere ready for prime time.   And this was an LTS release!!!  (By the way, they included beta software with the final release. What a bright idea!  Pure genius)

What beta software? If you are talking about firefox then let me ask
you -- would you rather they stick to Firefox 2 in LTS and not get
Firefox 3 at all in LTS or they commit to supporting an almost
finished release of Firefox?

>  It still has nvidia/compiz problems too.

Nvidia has no Linux support, except for proprietary modules, remember.
So speaking of Nvidia support and Linux is moot as we can't do a damn
thing except reverse engineer. You should realize this when using
Nvidia hardware. People willing to put with proprietary drivers have
to end up putting up with silly issues and not geting proper support.

> Won't boot up properly from the start. Takes about 4 restarts to get an acceptable screen resolution without compiz working even. Much tinkering will be required.

Same point here.

>  I'm thinking of trying a more stable platform from now on...  Any recommendations??

Go use XP (because Vista seems to be not recommended amongst Windows
users) if you rather deal with getting proper vendor support for
Nvidia and don't mind getting locked into proprietary software or the
bugs and security issues you'll deal with there.

The stability we provide is within the Linux kernel not for
proprietary drivers. Proprietary driver solutions are plague.

>  I'm using my blackberry for comms and internet until I can get rid of 8.04.

Or see if you can get vesa driver enabled instead for now and see if
you can deal wit it until Nvidia provides a driver fix for your card.

>  It does have a really cool new desktop background of a heron.  Not worth the hassel for just that though. If anyone wants it I'll e-mail it to you and you can use it on Gutsy Gibbon and still have a working machine.

Remember the benefit you get with GNU/Xorg/KDE/GNOME/Linux is freedom.
Support is key too but we need FOSS solutions, not proprietary gunk. I
have to sympathize with your experience though and with Nvidia's lack
of proper support to Linux.

Before I came to California I went with my dad to Sams Club, he got an
HP desktop, pretty nice, and he was all up for using Linux. I
installed Ubuntu, the last beta before the stable release. I had tons
of issues but it was related to two key issues:

 * Video card (some new nvidia card)
 * Wireless support (card which requires rndis_wlan module)

Now before further elaborating I have to admit I'm the type who likes
to buy unsupported hardware as I then push for support or try to add
it myself. But provided I had only 2 days I didn't get much done.

The nvidia card just had some serious issues and since xorg recently
switched over to a new configuration mechanism for resolution (beats
me where it is now), I couldn't fiddle with setting the video driver
to vesa which would at least allow decent usage.

The wireless card required a driver which just recently went into the
kernel, 2.6.25. However you can get the latest Linux wireless drivers
through the compat-wireless package [1] so I used that. I still found
a bug, managed to fix it but ran into another. I then went to Bset Buy
and bought a card I knew worked. Still though graphics was lost cause
in the time given I had to get him properly set up. Needless to say it
was painful as well, I ended up leaving the boot loader to use Vista
until I get back to visit and fix all his issues.

Moral of the story -- in my opinion buy hardware from supported and
friendly vendors unless you're willing to put up with issues. Video
and wireless are areas which we are slowly gaining on. If you want
decent video graphics support for 3d buy Intel or ATI. As for wireless
look for vendors who properly support their chipsets or are committing
to it, or from vendors who we already have properly reversed
engineered drivers for. Don't forget to *push for and also just demand
proper support*, pressure is always important. If you don't want to
deal with stupid issues as support for hardware then I recommend to
buy from OEMs like Dell who are supporting Ubuntu platforms.

[1] http://wireless.kernel.org/en/users/Download

  Luis