Today Ubuntu version 8.10 (October of 2008) was released. I've been wanting to try Ubuntu for some time, and had decided to wait untill the next release. I've used Red Hat 5.3 and the first Fedora Core in the past with mixed feelings (lots of problems with Fedora, lots of joy with Red Hat 5.3). Since it's been quite some time since I had last used linux, I installed Ubuntu 8.10 today, hoping to play around a bit and see what linux looks like these days.
To my disappointment I have to say that the only thing that really worked in the end was the screen shot tool (as you'll see below). Even the time got screwed with (clock was turned back 5 hours).
I started out by checking out Firefox. To bad, no network connectivity. After trying a few things and even entering all settings manually, nothing seemed to work. After booting into Vista to see if I could find some info on this topic, the following page turned up as one of the first search results.
Tom Worley wrote on 2007-09-16:
I've had exactly the same problem, however just found the solution: In the Gusty Tribe 5 live installer, open a terminal:
$ sudo su
# rmmod forcedeth
# modprobe forcedeth msi=0 msix=0
# /etc/init.d/networking restart
Your network interfaces should come back up and actually work now :-)
After trying the solution, the network came up instantly (didn't have to restart the network, setting the msi/msix, it pops up instantly, but I restarted it anyway).
Now that a network connection has been established, let's open Firefox and browse to my own website. I have some Youtube video's on my frontpage, so the following window came up:
No flash plugin was found, so a prompt came up offering me the choice of three suitable plugins. No problem, let's go with the original Adobe one....
Adobe you say? Never heard of it. Ok, how about Swfdec, do you have that one?
Guesse not, huh? Well, I can think of one more, you'd have to have that one, right? Please hand me the Gnash plugin to play my flash video's.
Sigh... No Youtube for me, guesse Ubuntu doesn't like Flash. Maybe I'll just go and check out a movie I downloaded, it's not Flash based, so i should probably be fine...
Wrong again, but at least he seems to be helpfull this time, please search for some codecs!
Yay! Three suitable codecs, available for free, and on of them is ffmpeg, a plugin I've used in the past. I'll take that one.
Doh! But hey, can't blame them for not having everything on a single 700MB cd, sure you can refresh.
The previous screen just sits there, no feedback, no change, let's see what files he's working on.
Guesse that explains the 'no progress' bit. Let's cancel this and listen to some Metallica, that always picks me right up.
Ah! The case of the missing files is solved, after canceling, Ubuntu is kind enough to show the files he wanted to get. As I said before: enough with this codec/plugin crap, there must be some sort of entertainment that works out of the box. Let's start the included music player and listen to Death Magnetic.
Where have I seen this screen before? Oh yeah, the not working XviD codecs. As you can imagine: same results as before.
While in the program, I noticed Last.FM (streaming audio), but since that required an account and I was no longer in the mood to fill out any registration, I skipped around and ended up in the 'radio' part. Not expecting anything good, I decided to go for the station that had mp3 in it's name, the same codec required to play the music track I tried to play before, but failed becase there were no codecs.
To my surprise I almost instantly had sound! Clear and nice sound, straight off of the internet (isn't is weird how little things can make you happy when your having a bad day?). After making a quick screenshot to make sure I'd have something positive to say, the application locked up at exactly 6:00 of playing time. I'd include a screenshot below, but somehow Gimp saved it to a different folder then my other screenshots (just used alt-printscr), which resulted in me not having the screenshot copyed to one of my NTFS disks. Since I'm writing this from Vista, and have no desire to boot back into Ubuntu anytime soon, you'll have to do without for some time, which is the same advice I have for trying Ubuntu 8.10.
