Last night I semi-succeeded in installing (or perhaps I succeeded in semi-installing) Ubuntu 6.06.1 onto my wife’s computer.

I played around with the Ubuntu KDE user interface and included software. It’s a really spiffy combination of the best of the Mac and Windows. Superficially — I only spent a couple of hours with it — the Ubuntu UI is appealing, engaging, productive and fun.

But: Ubuntu is not yet ready to compete with the Mac and Windows for the gazillion of desktops out there. Close, but close in the way that taking a 3 meter leap across a 3.2 meter gap is close. Too bad, because I really want it to succeed.

The night before, the installation process froze as Ubuntu tried to install hardware drivers. The problem turned out to be that my wifi card uses the RTL8185 chipset, which the installation disk doesn’t support. That’s fine. Ubuntu will support it at some point or I could get another card. (In fact, I had a spare Linksys card on hand.) What’s not fine is that the installation hung without telling me why or what to do about it.

Once I (randomly) took the wifi card out and Ubuntu successfully installed itself—six questions and you’re done—I had three problems, none of which I would expect to have with Windows or the Mac: I couldn’t get it to enable the Linksys card I’d installed, I couldn’t get it to mount the system’s second hard drive (although it showed up in the list of drives), and I couldn’t get the motherboard’s sound system to work.

These are not insuperable problems. But they’re stoppers. And Ubuntu throws me straight into the bony arms of Linux to solve them. For example, it tells me that I can’t mount the second hard drive because it’s not listed in /etc/fstab. I shouldn’t have to know how to edit fstab to get my hard drive working. On the other hand, it gives me no help or hints about how to get wifi working. “Linux hacking or nothing!” is not the right battle cry for tech support.

I don’t mean to sound whiny and demanding. Linux is a gift. Thank you! And Ubuntu and KDE seem to have gotten the installation and desktop stuff right, which is no small feat. But I’m desperate for breaking up the OS duopoly. Until Ubuntu handles its inevitable errors and failures as well as Windows and the Mac do, users won’t get far enough to fall in love with it. Which is a shame. [Tags: ubuntu linux windows open_source]

Categories: Uncategorized dw