Installed Ubuntu yesterday, very displeased so far

[kyzen]

So I wiped Vista Ultimate off an older laptop of mine last night, mostly to ensure I deleted all the, uh, stuff on there that I didn't want my girlfriend that I'm moving in with to see. Rather than reinstall Vista though, I decided that was the perfect opportunity to install Linux.

I looked around a bit online, and it seemed that Ubuntu was one of the more popular choices, so I grabbed the latest version of that. It took about 5 hours to install it, then download the 199 updates available for the base installation.

Now, here's where I'm at right now.

My machines specs:
1.6ghz Pentium M
1.5 gigs of RAM
60 gig HD
64 meg Radeon 9000 Mobility

With Vista, with Aero enabled, and the gadget sidebar running, I booted to the login screen in about 40 seconds, and went from the login screen to the desktop in about 8 seconds.

With Ubuntu, it's taking 1 minute 34 secons to boot to the login screen, and a rather painful 36 seconds to go from the login screen to a useable desktop.

Also, I'm trying to set the laptop up so I can do school work on it. For that, I need NetBeans. This likely isn't so much an issue with Ubuntu as it is with my general ineptitude, but I can't seem to get it installed. I downloaded the Netbeans/JDK bundle from Sun, and it's a .sh file - what the hell do I do with that?

I'd really like to give Ubuntu a fair shot, but the speed issue is killing me - over 2 minutes to get to a useable desktop is a little much.

Any advice?

 

[leingod86]

1. NetBeans should be available from the "multiverse" repository (look in add/remove programs after selecting multiverse from the combo box. If no luck there, then try synaptic). Makes that installation much, much simpler.

2. Try enabling all repositories under "Software Sources". As a complete linux noob myself, I find most of my issues get resolved simply by running an update with all the repositories enabled. Hopefully that will fix your boot times. I generally find Ubuntu slightly slower to boot than XP, but much faster and snappier once I'm actually running.

 

[Griffinhart]

I recently played around with Ubuntu as well. It was on a dell laptop with the same processor but with 2GB of RAM and a 128MB Radeon Mobility x300.

It took me a while to get everything working the way it should be but I honestly saw no benefit to running it for me personally. It actually took longer to boot to ubuntu than it did Vista and the file copy tests I ran showed that it didn't do them any faster than Vista on this laptop.

In the end I wiped the laptop and installed Vista Business and it's running like a champ.

 

[Bateluer]

Are you running with Vista SP1, Griffinhart? Copying files under Vista is painfully slow for my system (E6600 stock, 4GB RAM, 2900XT). Copying files under my Gutsy partition is lightning fast in comparison.

One of the larger benefits to running a *nix OS though is that you're not firmly attached to the M$ cock. Pardon my French.

 

[soonerproud]

Originally posted by: kyzen
So I wiped Vista Ultimate off an older laptop of mine last night, mostly to ensure I deleted all the, uh, stuff on there that I didn't want my girlfriend that I'm moving in with to see. Rather than reinstall Vista though, I decided that was the perfect opportunity to install Linux.

I looked around a bit online, and it seemed that Ubuntu was one of the more popular choices, so I grabbed the latest version of that. It took about 5 hours to install it, then download the 199 updates available for the base installation.

Now, here's where I'm at right now.

My machines specs:
1.6ghz Pentium M
1.5 gigs of RAM
60 gig HD
64 meg Radeon 9000 Mobility

With Vista, with Aero enabled, and the gadget sidebar running, I booted to the login screen in about 40 seconds, and went from the login screen to the desktop in about 8 seconds.

With Ubuntu, it's taking 1 minute 34 secons to boot to the login screen, and a rather painful 36 seconds to go from the login screen to a useable desktop.

Also, I'm trying to set the laptop up so I can do school work on it. For that, I need NetBeans. This likely isn't so much an issue with Ubuntu as it is with my general ineptitude, but I can't seem to get it installed. I downloaded the Netbeans/JDK bundle from Sun, and it's a .sh file - what the hell do I do with that?

I'd really like to give Ubuntu a fair shot, but the speed issue is killing me - over 2 minutes to get to a useable desktop is a little much.

Any advice?

I suspect you have a problem with drivers for your graphics card. Have you tried to install the latest drivers from ATI? You may have to install the ones from ATI's website in order to fix the issue. The reason I suspect it is your graphics card is Ubuntu should boot in under 30 seconds to a usable desktop. ATi did not support Linux very well until very recently. The drivers that really improved Linux support were released after 7.10 was released, so the drivers in the repo are really old.

The slow boot is probably related to the way graphics drivers interact with the special hardware needs of a laptop so it will properly resume/suspend. If you are still using the open source drivers, you will only have 2d support. If you used the restricted driver manager to install the drivers, they are really old and do not support Linux well.

Try installing the most recent drivers for the graphics and see if that helps. This slow boot issue is definitely a driver issue of some sort.

 

[Fox5]

Ubuntu boots way faster than windows for me on all of my systems, so the reports of slow boot times are odd. That's linux though.

 

[Griffinhart]

Originally posted by: Bateluer
Are you running with Vista SP1, Griffinhart? Copying files under Vista is painfully slow for my system (E6600 stock, 4GB RAM, 2900XT). Copying files under my Gutsy partition is lightning fast in comparison.

One of the larger benefits to running a *nix OS though is that you're not firmly attached to the M$ cock. Pardon my French.

Not all machines have that particular issue. I have 4 vista machines in the house. Only one has SP1. The Laptop doesn't have it. None of them have the copy issue.

 

[SparkyJJO]

Copy issue with vista? Granted I've only had it installed for a few days but what copy issue is this?

 

[Griffinhart]

Originally posted by: Fox5
Ubuntu boots way faster than windows for me on all of my systems, so the reports of slow boot times are odd. That's linux though.

I tried two separate installs of Ubuntu. Both had longer than Vista start times. I also tried a fedora install and that was a little faster to boot than Vista (about 20 seconds off the vista time),but my Vista install was loading a number of apps that the Linux install wasn't and connecting to my wireless network.

Now, I'm not saying Ubuntu or Fedora are bad, just that I didn't see any real benefit over what I was already doing under Vista. At least not on my Laptop. I hated having to revert to the built in 11g connection vs the nice 11n PCMCIA board I have. I specifically ran tests in things like start and shutdown times as well as copy tests under both Linux and Vista. Maybe on my desktop machine there would be different results, but that wasn't the case on the laptop.

 

[Schadenfroh]

As far as boot times, something going wrong during each boot can hit your boot time hard. My Laptop has some weird hardware that causes the boot time for Ubuntu to be almost 2 minutes. I have always had trouble with Linux on that laptop (sound recently started working with the alpha of 8.04) The laptop boots to windows very quickly and works well in it, lack of quality drivers in Linux, I suppose, is the culprit. But, on my desktop, boot times are roughly equal. I have some slowness with my AGP ATI graphics card on my nForce3 ultra chipset, but ATI historically has not been as good as nVidia in the Linux drivers department. So it is probably not linux's fault for any of my problems, although I do not know if it was a driver update or a patch to Linux that fixed my sound in the 8.04 alpha.

Originally posted by: leingod86
1. NetBeans should be available from the "multiverse" repository (look in add/remove programs after selecting multiverse from the combo box. If no luck there, then try synaptic). Makes that installation much, much simpler.

One thing that I do not like is that those repositories are behind sometimes. Last I checked in Ubuntu 7.10, it was still distributing NetBeans 5.5. I also notice that my favorite Linux IDE (Geany) is behind, the repositories have .11 when .13 is out.

I guess there maybe other repositories to install applications in Ubuntu besides the default ones, but I do not know of any off the top of my head.

 

[kyzen]

Stupid question - how do I access the multiverse repositories?

Also, I tried running the shell script using sudo sh <filename.sh>, it got as far as opening a new window for the installer, but the terminal window displayed an error about gtk or something, and the window that popped open for the netbeans installer was white - i could hit tab and enter a couple of times and get another dialog to pop up asking where to install to, but otherwise, I couldn't tell what was going on.

Do I need to install some gtk thing?

EDIT: Also, I tried getting Radeon drivers from ATI, but it seems they only support the mobility 9600 and newer, I'm running an archaic mobility 9000. Thoughts on where to go for drivers for that?

 

[soonerproud]

Originally posted by: kyzen
Stupid question - how do I access the multiverse repositories?

Also, I tried running the shell script using sudo sh <filename.sh>, it got as far as opening a new window for the installer, but the terminal window displayed an error about gtk or something, and the window that popped open for the netbeans installer was white - i could hit tab and enter a couple of times and get another dialog to pop up asking where to install to, but otherwise, I couldn't tell what was going on.

Do I need to install some gtk thing?

EDIT: Also, I tried getting Radeon drivers from ATI, but it seems they only support the mobility 9600 and newer, I'm running an archaic mobility 9000. Thoughts on where to go for drivers for that?

You might just want to stick with the drivers the restricted driver manager installs then. I don't own ATI, so I wasn't certain if the newest drivers supported the mobility 9000. A great resource for getting driver issues worked out in Ubuntu is their forums. They are one of the most helpful Linux forums I have ever visited.

www.ubuntuforums.org

For netbeans, just use the add/remove software feature. It will take care of all the dependencies for you.

 

[Fox5]

Originally posted by: kyzen
Stupid question - how do I access the multiverse repositories?

Also, I tried running the shell script using sudo sh <filename.sh>, it got as far as opening a new window for the installer, but the terminal window displayed an error about gtk or something, and the window that popped open for the netbeans installer was white - i could hit tab and enter a couple of times and get another dialog to pop up asking where to install to, but otherwise, I couldn't tell what was going on.

Do I need to install some gtk thing?

EDIT: Also, I tried getting Radeon drivers from ATI, but it seems they only support the mobility 9600 and newer, I'm running an archaic mobility 9000. Thoughts on where to go for drivers for that?

There are open source drivers for the 9000, so don't worry about it. They should install automatically.

 

[Genx87]

Originally posted by: SparkyJJO
Copy issue with vista? Granted I've only had it installed for a few days but what copy issue is this?

There was an article on anandtech about it a few weeks back. They changed the buffers and backend stuff on how file copies happen in Vista. The result is a noticeable slowness compared to XP.

In SP1 they are supposed to relax some of the restrictions which should help speed up certain types of file copying.

 

[EQTitan]

I've ran both Ubuntu, & Mint with little ot no problems and I'm a complete Linux noob.

For me install was done on a desktop (700mhz, 128mb sdram pc100, onboard video) Install was less than 25minutes {25 for Ubuntu, 21 for Mint}

Booted about 5-10 sec's faster than XP Pro SP2, and about 8-12 sec's faster than Vista SP0

I made sure to run the Live CD with both to see what issues my system(s) had with each OS before installing it and finding the answers I need to fix the issues before installing if there were any. The only issue I did have was my network adapter.

But each install and user is different so are the results your expecting and the downfalls each OS has, I guess for me Linux was just a way to "see what else was available" it's biggest seller is the fact that it's FREE. It does still have a long way to go before I think it will be fully acceptable by the masses. I'd like to see it handle gaming.

Hope everything works out for you...

 

[blackangst1]

Originally posted by: Griffinhart

Originally posted by: Fox5
Ubuntu boots way faster than windows for me on all of my systems, so the reports of slow boot times are odd. That's linux though.

I tried two separate installs of Ubuntu. Both had longer than Vista start times. I also tried a fedora install and that was a little faster to boot than Vista (about 20 seconds off the vista time),but my Vista install was loading a number of apps that the Linux install wasn't and connecting to my wireless network.

Now, I'm not saying Ubuntu or Fedora are bad, just that I didn't see any real benefit over what I was already doing under Vista. At least not on my Laptop. I hated having to revert to the built in 11g connection vs the nice 11n PCMCIA board I have. I specifically ran tests in things like start and shutdown times as well as copy tests under both Linux and Vista. Maybe on my desktop machine there would be different results, but that wasn't the case on the laptop.

I had almost exact results on my desktop.

 

[Nothinman]

You people do fresh boots enough to care about boot times?

 

[Griffinhart]

Originally posted by: Nothinman
You people do fresh boots enough to care about boot times?

I only do occasional fresh boots. Typically my laptop is in sleep mode when I am not using it and then start time is near instant. I keep my Dad's PC to be put in sleep mode when he "shuts down" as well. But, I was really just looking more at the differences between the two when I played around with a couple of linux distibutions.

 

[Nothinman]

I only do occasional fresh boots. Typically my laptop is in sleep mode when I am not using it and then start time is near instant. I keep my Dad's PC to be put in sleep mode when he "shuts down" as well. But, I was really just looking more at the differences between the two when I played around with a couple of linux distibutions.

No one denies that bootup time on Linux is pretty bad because all of the services start sequentially. There is work being done on that but with s2ram and hibernation being fairly easy to get working as long as your hardware has proper PM I'd say that's not terribly important.