We have so very little to do at work at present. And so I’ve been setting up a dual-boot install of Ubuntu Feisty Fawn Beta, partly to kill some time but also as Windows lockup up on IO is killing me. Anti-virus protection is not helping matters. Oh, and a decent console would rock my world.
The good news: It all works out of the box. It lacks a bit of polish, but having worked on UI before I know the polish takes forever (seriously, it really does). Setup was painless, including resizing my NTFS partition. Almost everything went smoothly, except for it sitting on ’0:00 remaining’ on the language download (which you can, thankfully, skip). A bit more feedback is in order – the partition tool was not as clear as it could have been (e.g. you hit ‘next’ to resize the partition, and then get returned to the same page to do the remainder of your allocation), and the resize was completely oblique, with just an hourglass keeping time. Nevertheless, it all worked and the nastiest thing it did was make Linux the default boot OS.
I did need to arse around with xorg.conf to get any resolutions above 1024×768 though, which wasn’t so good – it’s the sort of thing that should be covered by default. Dual-head also needed a quick trip to the command line. And then all was well, until i decided to be clever and left the bounds of good society. Stop reading here if you’re not a techy. Really.
I’ve seen a lot of Compiz and Beryl, 3D acceleration UI support for X with all the snazzy (and sometimes pointless but nevertheless very pretty) effects that such implies. Unfortunately, setup proved to be a pain in the arse. My workstation has an ATi X600. Unfortunately, the official ATi drivers need Xgl. So, I installed Xgl, and hacked around to get the Beryl packages with Xgl support (as the default universe ones lack such). All was good, except for my second monitor – it showed a screen, but I couldn’t move the mouse onto it (oddly enough, I could see the pointer tail over the side of the screen – it just wouldn’t go any further). Google and the Ubuntu forums were unenlightening, and so I decided to go back to the open ATi driver and AIGLX.
This worked a little better. I got it all working with dual-head, but for one thing – I had to have the monitors marked as being above one another. Why? ATi cards only support 2048×2048 textures, and the Beryl developers just treat the desktop as one big texture. Hence you can have 2 1280×1024 screens vertically, but not horizontally. This did terrible things with my window positioning, and after Java started playing silly buggers with redraws I surrendered and turned off Beryl.
Nevertheless, all was well until I strayed off the beaten path. It did remind me why I use a Mac at home. However, I’m still keen to move off Windows at work, which is a bit of an indictment of XP. (I won’t even comment on Vista – I’ve a copy of Home Premium at work, and really can’t be arsed upgrading when XP MCE is doing what I need it to.) Also, I can’t comment too much on the polish, given this is a beta release – traditionally (e.g. when Google and Yahoo aren’t using it) beta means major-feature complete and rather buggy – so some benefit of the doubt is in order.
And, of course, it does give me more geek-cred at work! Ah, the trials of employment…
