Hardy Heron: Best Distro Ever? (Page 1 of 1)
Written by
David Alan
Posted on: Apr 28, 2008 at 02:10pm
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It was with great anticipation that I downloaded Hardy Heron to install on my notebook. As is my usual custom, I downloaded the alternate install CD from the mirror and burned it, then booted from it. I won't go into the steps of the install as most Linux users know how this works.
I should have suspected something was up when Hardy was unable to detect my DHCP server and prompted me for a static IP address. I checked my network connection just to make sure that wasn't the problem, and sure enough, the problem was not in my network. Oh well, I slogged on with install, because surely my static IP address was working.
My next issue came in partition manager. I have Vista loaded on the notebook, and wanted a dual boot setup. Once I got into partition manager, Hardy saw the Vista partition, but didn't have its type defined. So I moved to the partition, selected it and went to select NTFS, only it was listed in the choices. Something was definitely amiss. Keep in mind, I made no changes to partitions at this point, because I was concerned by what I was seeing.
I quickly rebooted and tried to boot Vista. Ugh, no go, it stalled on the loading screen. My Vista partition was hosed. I stuck the Hardy CD back in and attempted a repair, I figured that since my Vista partition was already hosed, I really had nothing to lose by attempting to repair the partition. After attempting to manually define the partition and reboot my Vista partition was still hosed. Ugh, I knew this meant I had to reload Vista from my vendor provided restore DVD.
That was done fairly quick enough, and I started over with Hardy. This time, my DHCP server was detected, and partition manager recognized my Vista partition, as well as seeing my previous Gutsy install. I was pleased, and went about installing Hardy.
Everything went smooth and I stepped out of the room while installation was taking place. About 20 minutes later, I returned and found the install done and Hardy waiting to reboot. Oh oh I though to myself, it skipped over Grub, this is not good.
I rebooted anyway and hit ESC when Grub started. Sure enough, Vista was not loaded in the boot manager. Ugh, I hate messing with Grub. I selected Hardy and booted into it. Once booted I toggled to the console and typed "sudo nano /boot/grub/menu.lst" with the intent of adding Vista to the boot manager, but I got the dreaded “host name not found” error. By now, my level of frustration was rising, so I walked away to clear my head and took the Harley for a ride.
I came back a few hours later, settled into my desktop and searched the Ubuntu forums for a solution to the host name error. I discovered that all I needed to do was edit /etc/hosts and straighten the naming out. But how was I to do this if I couldn't execute sudo?
I rebooted and selected the second boot option and came up in single user mode. I was then able to edit the hosts file, saved it, and rebooted. This time I came up and hit console logged in and was able to edit /boot/grub/grub/menu.lst, and added Vista manually to the boot menu. I saved the changes, updated grub and rebooted. I was able to see Vista and sighed with relief. Just to be sure, I booted into Vista. I found myself hung up again, at the same spot as before. I was fuming by now, because that would mean I would once again have to reload Vista.
Once again, after reloading Vista, I stuck the alternate install CD in the drive and booted again, feeling a vague feeling of apprehension. I went ahead and installed Hardy, and this time it went off without a hitch, even prompted me to install Grub and recognized Vista as being installed. I was elated this time around, and rebooted the system into the fresh install of Hardy.
Once there, I loaded the restricted ATI drivers and of course, rebooted once again. Following reboot Hardy came up, in my preferred resolution of 1280x800 and was pleased. Then, I selected restricted drivers again to get my wireless network going.
I have a Dell Inspiron 1526, which has Broadcom B43 wireless, and its been a bugger to install in other distro's. Having had experience and luck with this same driver in Gutsy, I figured I would not have much problem getting it to work in Hardy. Wow, was I ever wrong.
The first thing I noticed was Hardy reporting that the B43 was being used, but not enabled. Thus, I enabled it, and it downloaded fwcutter as it is supposed to. I right-clicked on the network manager icon and saw where I could configure the wireless network. This was a change from Hardy, but nonetheless I slogged on to get wireless working.
I entered a name for the wireless calling it Home, then went on to add my SSID, only I couldn't enter anything in the text box provided. I searched the application, looking for a way to configure it, but didn't find anything suggesting setup. I opened a terminal window and ran iwlist scan and iwconfig, both reported seeing the wireless network. So why couldn't I configure it net manager?
I closed the wireless window and opened up the real network manager. There of course, I saw my wireless and wired network. I changed the settings of my wireless network, defining it with the SSID, encryption type and so forth. I switched to the terminal and again ran iwlist scan and iwconfig, but this time I saw nothing of my wireless network. I ran ifconfig and noticed now that my wired IP address had gone from 192.168.1.10 to 192.168.1.240, what in the name of blazes was going on?
A quick ping to yahoo.com showed that something in my network settings was hosed. I went back into network manager, turned off roaming mode of the wired network, and defined it to use DHCP, and also entered my host name, domain name and DNS servers, pointing it to my LinkSys router at 192.168.1.1
and tried another ping to yahoo.com, and still had no network.
Ok, as you can imagine, I was totally frustrated and went to the desktop and searched the Ubuntu forums for a solution. Wow, some solution I found. Don't manually change network manager, or it will blow up, become useless and quite unfixable. Thus, I let loose cursing Canonical LTD, and rebooted into Vista giving up on Hardy.
Thats where I am now. Running Vista on my notebook and Gutsy on the desktop, I won't be upgrading it to Hardy at this point in time. I've done some searching on the web, and have found that many others are having issues with Hardy, in various aspects, many of which were reported bugs, that seemingly were not fixed before going Gold.
One thing that I have noticed with Ubuntu, something that works and works well in a previous release, seemingly does not work in the next release. I'm not sure why this is, but the “push it out the door, we'll fix it later” mentality that Canonical LTD has is totally unacceptable to the Linux community. Canonical needs to address these issues and stop pushing crap out the door, to be fixed later.
I cannot, in good consciousness recommend Hardy to anyone at this point in time. Having network manager blow up because of a little manual configuration is a definite show-stopper, and I really have to ask what was Canonical thinking by pushing this poor release out the door? And why should sudo not work because of a misnaming in hosts? Ubuntu users need to be able to use sudo, since a root user is not setup by default, and to setup a root user, it takes, wait for it, sudo to do.
If Canonical really wants to be viable in the Linux community, and get it installed in the enterprise and desktops, it really has to do better at its releases and clean its act a bit more than where it is now. With a six month release cycle, five to six beta releases and a release candidate before going gold, all these issues should have been fixed before release. Are you listening Canonical?
Edit: Article was originally posted under the wrong username. It has since been updated with the correct one. Sorry for the confusion.
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