Please try to get it right in future

[Andy Jarvis]

Before I start with the real issues, let's get one thing straight.
Despite the myriad external issues which exist with Ubuntu as a Linux
distribution (and we know that they are many), one thing is extremely
clear and I believe accepted by most if not all of those reading this,
that the install is the cleanest and simplest of all distributions to
date. And congratulations must go to the team for that.

Nevertheless, there remain some serious problems which must be resolved
for this to become a truly excellent distribution.

A week or so back, I executed a Synaptic smart update, as is my wont on
a fairly daily basis. I noted that, due to some discrepancy between main
program and lib, Evolution was to my horror uninstalled. A subsequent
reinstall put it back with moderate inconvenience. This week however a
more serious failure occured. On Tuesday evening I carried out a
Synaptic smart update and a new version of the K7 kernel was installed.
Nothing over which to raise eyebrows. That evening I shut down my PC and
went to bed. The next afternoon I switched on same PC and Linux, to be
precise Ubuntu Linux, failed to boot. The problem transpired in that all
the initrd files had been deleted, the Grub menu.lst had even been
scrubbed of references to initrd and I was in the wilderness.

I booted into my BeOS partition and sent a help request to the user
list, with a reply that indicated the symptom of the problem - no initrd
command. True. When I asked for a solution, the reply came: run a
dpkg-reconfigure against the kernel version. How to do this when I
couldn't boot into Linux? Next reply: same way you viewed the menu.lst.
Well one way was by mounting the Linux partition in BeOS and reading
(Linux partitions are of course read only in BeOS) the other way is to
view the code within the Grub bootloader. Again all is read only and
Shell commands as such cannot be executed.

When I requested further help, such as whether there exists a boot
floppy image from which I could repair the problem or whether the Ubuntu
install process has been fixed to allow non-destructive install (i.e. a
repair rather than complete re-install) I was met with utter silence.

The simple facts are these. You can, under the partitioning section of
the install, select to use an existing Linux partition without
formatting, but the install WILL fail. So my problem could only be
"solved" by a total re-install of Ubuntu Linux. I lost all existing data
and configuration information.

There has been no other solution offered. And as far as I can tell, it
was all caused by a rogue release to the repository of a new version of
the Linux kernel. No doubt if I had waited an hour or two, perhaps even
a few minutes, the problem would not have occured. This is of course
speculation on my part. I do not know the real facts.

I like Ubuntu very much indeed. Having previously wrestled with Red Hat
9, amongst other distros, Ubuntu is a genuine breath of fresh air. But I
am using this on a home PC. Were I a serious business user, my situation
might have been somewhat more serious. But then, as an IT professional,
I would not of course have invested my confidence in anything such as a
pre-general release version of an OS. Others may not be so wise.

My point with all this is that there remain some significant problems to
be resolved. I very much hope that they will be resolved and I look
forward to the day when I can truly depend on my Ubuntu installation as
my OS of preference. So far I have had 4 of the releases since the first
back in mid-September, and have carried out 4 complete installations on
the same machine, indeed the same partition. If I am to be able to rely
on Ubuntu, I should never have to carry out a 5th install, but hope very
much to be able to maintain an ongoing update process to keep my system
current.

Best of luck to the team responsible for the most significant (and
certainly the most headline-grabbing Linux distribution to date). My
plea: do not rest on your laurels but continue to improve and perfect
this excellent OS. Yours may indeed be the prize of being the
distribution which buried once and for all the myth that Linux cannot
compete with Windows for the mass market.

AndyJ