Further adventures with Feisty Fawn

Sam Varghese
Tuesday, 24 April 2007 09:25

Opinion and Analysis

One thing gave me real cause for alarm - my nameserver settings had been picked up and entered in the resolv.conf file. This should happen if DHCP is working and another machine on the network is running a DHCP server; it hadn't happened during my first set of trials though I had a DHCP server running on my workstation on the same LAN.

For me, this is worse than not working. If something fails to function, then you can fix it manually and trace the fault. If it works once, does not work the second time and then works the third time - with all other variables being the same - then you are in a situation similar to that which I often encounter with Windows. With that venerable O-S, things get fixed by rebooting - and you have no idea how they started working again. With Linux, you can always pinpoint a fault, fix it and then not bother about it until your hardware goes bad.

So does the dhclient on Feisty Fawn pick up an IP address from a DHCP server or not? I must admit that I have no answer.

One more oddity I noticed was that when I rebooted, the system ran a disk check - what we Linux users call a fsck. The message that came up before the check said that the disk had been booted 39 times which was obviously incorrect - I had formatted it and it was booting for just the third time.

Back to the GRUB error - this is a bug which has been reported as far back as October 2004. As anyone can see from this discussion, it happens to many people. And it still hasn't been resolved. For the reader who cannot be bothered to click on the link and read the entire discussion, it runs from October 12, 2004, to April 10, 2007. People are still reporting the same bug. Brilliant.

My old PC is precisely the kind of box on which a first-timer will choose to experiment with Linux - a second PC which is just sitting there, one which has no data of any value on its hard drive, one with which one can just play around. It has 10 gig of drive space, 384 meg of RAM and a Celeron 466 processor. Like I said earlier, I have no problem if things are a bit slow. But they should work - at least for the most part.

Here are a couple of suggestions for the Ubuntu developers - of course, you can ask me to take a roll in the hay.

First, give the user a choice at the start between a desktop with a light window manager (the Ice window manager is the best I can think of) and the bog standard GNOME. Explain the choice clearly so that anyone with a basic knowledge of English can understand it. Also provide an escape route for those who don't want to decide.

Second, make sure that these little GUI utilities work as they should. A bit more testing of basics would help. Looking nice is very important. But a dumb pretty face is worth nothing.

The time on my PC after the installation read 8.44pm - when it was 9.44am. It's a fairly basic thing, that clock on the desktop. I have never seen any Linux distribution get the time wrong after the timezone has been correctly chosen; why does Ubuntu alone screw it up?