Installation of Linux has certainly come a long way – Getting Ubuntu onto my system was considerably less painful than even Vista’s more streamlined installation process.
The post-install experience is usually where things start to go a bit less smooth though, and this iteration was no exception.
I must state though, that once again, the amount of painful hacking and setup required this time around, was significantly less than the last time I went through this exercise.
I’ll give each of the things I had to do a completely unscientific difficulty rating, with higher being worse, and the person the difficulty applies to being someone rather unfamiliar with Linux.
I must warn you, if you’re a rabid free and only free software proponent, you may take issue with the software that I install onto my machine after a fresh installation. While I have tremendous respect for the people who insist on free software and only free software on their machines, I’m a bit more pragmatic personally, and having 3D acceleration and media support is kind of a big deal to me.
Graphics Driver
The first thing I do after installing a new Linux distribution is get my graphics in order. While the default NV driver that ships with X.Org is decent, I much prefer using NVIDIA‘s accelerated driver. I actually got a notification message that alternate drivers were available upon first login.
The installation process for this driver is fantastic this time around:
1. System -> Administration -> Restricted Drivers Manager
2. Select NVIDIA accelerated graphics driver, enable it, and wait for it to be downloaded and installed. Reboot, and X.Org is now using the NVIDIA driver.
Difficulty Rating 1/10, Brainless.
Font Rendering
Next up, my pet peeve with Linux is its absolutely atrocious default font rendering. I understand that their hands are kind of tied, given that there are some patents out on the algorithms for the much maligned “bytecode interpreter” patches to FreeType by David Turner.
But the reason that I am so picky about font appearance, is that I spend so much time looking at text, and imperfections in rendering really annoy me.
I also have purchased copies of the Sys (proportional) and Pragmata fonts. Without the proper FreeType patches applied, Linux doesn’t do such a great job of rendering these fonts by default, and I am used to seeing them render how I want.
There is a thread on the Ubuntu Forums that describes how to get the improved rendering packages installed, and it is simply a matter of adding the appropriate entries to sources.list, and installing the packages with the patches applied.
Difficulty Rating: 5/10 (Relatively easy, but you have to know what you’re looking for, and may involve command-line editing).
Wireless
Well, if this was a laptop, that is what I would be looking at. As it happens, the motherboard has built in onboard wireless via some RTL chipset. Unfortunately the NetworkManager applet reported that my hardware was not capable of WPA2 (which I use on my home WLAN, so I was not able to test the ease of use of switching between wired and wireless configurations). I imagine I might have been swearing a bit had I needed wireless to get network connectivity going.
Difficulty Rating: Possibly 10/10 had I tried to get it going.
Multimedia Codecs
Ah, yes. The Ubuntu documentation that showed up by default when opening Firefox actually contained some documentation that explained the reasoning behind excluding support for MP3 and other codecs, and offered some advice as to how to get playback going.
I have had less than good experiences with GStreamer for media playback. I don’t think it has ever not crashed, or had artifacting, or some other defect when playing back even formats like Xvid. If I was helping someone else to set this up, I’d go the same route that I did, which is to install the totem-xine package, and the libxine1-ffmpeg package (the latter which is needed for Xvid playback in the xine version of Totem, and this fact not documented that well either, annoyingly).
I also installed a number of DVD playback related packages from the Medibuntu project.
I spent more time than I expected on getting everything together and being able to play the media on my NAS and iPod (sans protected AAC support). A fair amount of forum trawling, and I would expect the average user to give up after a while, due to the amount of conflicting information out there.
Difficulty Rating: 7/10, this is still a weak spot.
The rest of my configuration process revolved around installing all the development toolchains I use (build-essential stuff, Rails, Django, PostgreSQL, etc), none of which was much more than an apt-get away.
Summary
Some good improvements in the overall setup experience, but hardware support (if drivers don’t happen to be bundled with the distribution) could be a bit of a tricky issue still, and I don’t see that being solved while the Linux kernel maintainers happily replace subsystems and break ABI in minor patches, as they seem to delight in doing. Less of an issue for servers, but more of an issue for desktops.
Multimedia experience is also centered around codec support issues, which will remain thorny while patent and DRM issues swirl around formats, something which proprietary operating systems in theory don’t struggle with (but Mac OSX isn’t exactly the model of being able to use all proprietary formats, to be honest – VLC is the only thing saving playback on that platform).
Overall, though, things are improving, and I have not noticed any regressions yet