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Ubuntu is no Windows XP

Time has undoubtedly taken its toll on my mental agility, all those years of abuse by way of pulling all-nighters to get projects finished and living on coke and Mars bars don't come without a price.

However, I'm still at least as smart as the average computer user so I figured I'd put claims that Linux is now as user-friendly and easy to install as Windows to the test.

The target machine was a pretty standard PC with an AMD processor, 1GB of RAM and a 50GB hard drive. Not exactly state of the art but a machine that's ticked along quite happily under the control of Windows XP for quite a while.

Why the change?

Well the missus (finally) wanted to get online so I figured it would be a good chance to see if Linux really is ready for the desktop.

First step was to download the latest Ubuntu Linux LiveCD and burn it to a CDR.

That went smoothly and after a few minutes I was all set to do the install.

To make sure there wouldn't be any hardware incompatibilities I booted from the LiveCD and opted to check out the machine's operation under Linux before I committed to an install.

Obviously it wasn't exactly "snappy" in operation when run from the CD but I was impressed with the relatively short boot time and the not too lethargic response.

After some messing around with ifconfig I established a session with my DSL router and Firefox was able to access sites on the wider web so I was happy. I did notice however, that there's a bug in the network configuration utility that incorrectly displays the setting of the netmask parameter

Right now, the "average" PC user is probably saying "what the hell is a netmask?" but I urge you to keep reading...

After seeing that there were no hardware compatibility issues I decided to do the full install to hard-drive and that's where things started getting nasty.

Answering questions about my locale, keyboard type, etc, things were looking good until...

The first attempt produced the partition manager with all its pretty GUI interface. Presented were the current partition map and the suggested one. I figured I'd do what a typical Windows user would do and opt for the default. It's worth noting that there was no explanation as to what the partitions were for or why they were needed and no online help was available either.

The Partition manager ground away for a while and then crashed leaving the machine in an unstable state. Hmmm.... not a good start.

I repeated the process and it managed to get further, this time attempting to change the sizes of some existing partitions before coming up with the error that there was no swap partition allocated. Again -- the average Windows user would be scratching their head right now and wondering if it really was sensible to leave the fold of Bill's flock.

In the end I opted for the manual option (not the default) which allowed the entire disk to be dedicated to Linux and the swap partition was automatically sized and allocated. Success!

After a few minutes of flogging the CD drive and copying files, the system was installed and a quick reboot produced the marbled background of Ubuntu Linux running from the system's hard drive. Woohoo!

Then I tried to connect to the internet and as was the case with the LiveCD version, nothing was happening.

I followed the spartan instructions in the online help but was anything but helpful.

Given the bug in the network configuration utility, I dropped to a shell and tried to use ifconfig to set the required parameters -- but ifconfig was giving me all sorts of stupid messages for which there was no explanation readily available online.

At this stage I strongly suspect that the average Windows user would have thrown up their hands and popped the XP disk back in the drive to get rid of this annoying pretender to the desktop crown.

But I persisted and eventually I got things talking -- by setting the IP address manually and establishing a connection with the router then switching to DHCP mode only once that connection had been established.

A reboot showed that the configuration had stuck and so we had connectivity (at last).

Then I decided I should set up some desktop shortcuts -- and the wheels fell off Ubuntu's trolley again.

In the case of Windows, setting up a desktop shortcut to an application is a piece of cake. You can simply right-click on the desktop and select "New-shortcut" then browse for the required application and Bob's your uncle.

It was 11pm and after 15 minutes of farting around I discovered that it was easy to dump a document or other file on the desktop but executables didn't seem quite so simple. Suffice to say, the desktop remains bare.

So, the machine is up and running, the missus won't get struck down by the Conficker worm or any of the other Windows worms and viruses and she can use it for email, websurfing or word processing -- but do I think Ubuntu is ready to take on Microsoft?

No, I'm sorry but what should have been a straightforward install turned out to be a marathon session taking several hours and knowledge that the average Windows user just wouldn't have. Even once installed, simply tasks can still be frustratingly difficult when compared to Windows and if you ever find yourself scratching through the thin veneer that the desktop and its graphical shell represents then the resulting messages are frighteningly terse and meaningless to newbies.

In some ways I was very impressed with the installation experience -- it's far quicker to install than XP but it's patently obvious that some areas (such as the partition manager and network configuration) need a lot more work, better defaults and lots of online help for newbies. They could also kill the netmask display bug.

I'm still unable to work out why ifconfig behaved so badly and question why anyone should need to use it when configuring a pretty vanilla installation in the first place.

Finally, what about updates?

There is facility that auto-notifies of updates to Linux (or that's what it told me) but as of last night there was no update available - even though the version of FireFox is not current (only 3.03) and we all know that there have been some critical errors patched just this week. The "check for updates" menu option on the Firefox menu is grayed-out. How do Firefox newbies update their browser?

Anyone with a smattering of unix/linux knowledge will probably be able to install Ubuntu from the LiveCD and I hope that my partitioning and network configuration issues were peculiar to my hardware -- but at this stage I think the Linux crowd still have a way to go to create an environment that truly rivals Windows (much as I hate to say that).

I don't regret switching the missus's PC from XP to Linux but it's not something I'd recommend to the average PC user (just yet) because I think they'd find themselves frustrated and disappointed with the process and the outcome.

The next Ubuntu release is going into beta so I'll check that out when it's released, maybe they'll have sorted some of the issues by then.

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