Ubuntu Preview

[John]

There are my notes taken as I installed the Ubuntu Preview.
The MUT (Machine Under Test) is a Gateway Pentium III 550, 256 Mbytes of 
RAM, BX chipset, ATI Technologies Inc 3D Rage Pro AGP 1X/2X, 3Com 
Corporation 3c905B, Intersil Corporation Intersil ISL3890.

Ubuntu Preview

Requirements:
32 Mb RAM seems a little optimistic.

Configure the Network.
I'm a Linux person, I know roughly what eth0 means. A BSD person won't. 
A Windows person especially won't.

Also, MUT has two network cards, one uses wire and is not attached to 
anything, the ohter is wireless and needs some firmware.

Which network adaptor is this?

Partition disks, manually.
I plan to use existing partitions; it would be helpful if the display 
showed me how much of each is used.

What it has displayed is
A number (which might correspond to hd[1-4] but might not,
Size
Filesystem type.

Additional information I'd like to see:
Partition label if one exists
Device name. Sure it won't mean anything to non-Linux people, but it's 
useful to those who understand it.
Amount used/free. I think I want the 4.9 Gb partition; if I knew how 
much is used I'd know.

Also, in the case of reusing a partition, it would be nice if it could 
default to how it was used before, even use /etc/fstab if it exists.

Maybe default to format if it's a recognised system partition, use as if 
if not (this should default to reformatting /usr, /var etc, preserving 
/home).

Also, defaulting to "no filesystem" once a user has chosen to format it 
doesn't make sense to me.


This time it ignored the partition I ignored. This is good.

Time for a cuppa.

reboot.
I booted the install media with
vga=791 acpi=force
I'd like these to be incorporated into Grub's boot-time parameters.

Still asks about ppp
I don't (yet) have a working network and it wants to download from the 
Internet?

I still don't like that congratulatory msg; it means I have to 
acknowledge it an wait longer to get to a login screen.

I've logged in.
Root terminal has sbin directories in PATH. Good. I've never been 
convinced having local {bin,sbin} to the front is good:
Can create unexpected behaviour if a binary is in local and system bin 
directories.
Always causes failed exec() system calls because they're run against 
directories least likely to contain the required executable.


Menu entries provide name and describe function. Good.
Evolution in Internet. Good.

Browser and email in top panel. Good.
Firefox opens in a window the width of the screen. Yuck.
Should "Accessories" menu contain a terminal? Some Windows versions do, 
so may users will look there.

I have some misgivings about the Computer menu. Seems all wrong to me.

As I recall, IBM's CUA requires (some of) these menus:
File
Edit
View
Windows
Options
Help

in that order.
Windows standards seem somewhat similar, not too surprising considering 
the heritage common to OS/2 and Windows.
Apple's standards are different too, but not too different. On my Mac, a 
lot of what's in U's Computer menu is in Finder's Go menu.

Windows typically has a selection of menu-related operations plus a list 
of the applications windows. I don't see a way of getting a list of 
Gnome (or Firefox!) windows.



symlinks
What useful purpose do the symlinks in / for vmlinuz* and initrd.img* serve?
Is /cdrom needed?

Lost mail
See /dead.letter

Prism54 Wireless
To get this working I needed to copy the firmware into 
/usr/lib/hotplug/firmware (no suitable directory in /lib exists) and 
then run network configuration.

Nautilus!
I run apt-get to install openssh-server. Nautilus popped up a window on 
the mount.

CD drive
My CD drive keeps spinning. I don't recall this behaviour from Sarge on 
the same system.