brlancer's Journal: Ubuntu, Debian, Windows

I have a work laptop that I originally set up to triple boot Win2k, Debian, and Fedora, all through lilo in the MBR; Win2k so I have it for the marketing or management dork who presumes everyone is using Windows, Debian because that's what I normally use, and Fedora because I had wanted to test it for possible use on servers (at the time I was admin'ing a lot of old RH boxes). Unfortunately, I never got Fedora on there because the installer is stupid and I don't feel like wasting my time explaining why.

Anyway. So I've had this dual boot for a while and I decided to try and move from lilo to Grub on my Debian install; cool, went ok, but I couldn't get it to boot Win2k. It appears that somewhere along the way Grub nuked the Win2k boot loader at the begining of hda1. Oooh, that's bad. It also turns out that the system never realized I went to Grub, so when I upgraded kernels it configured lilo.

Anyway. I thought I would need to re-install Windows, but I was surprised to find out that I was able to reinstall the bootloader without dorking Debian. Go Microsoft! (Mark that one kids.)

So as part of this, I wanted to repartition my *nix slices and reinstall Debian using Grub. I also threw on Ubuntu because a friend has been raving about it. I was very impressed. Aside from manually partitioning the drive (it offered to do it automagically, but I don't think it would have done it properly), the system installed itself. It configured my regular user with full sudo, set up both network interfaces (and eth1 stayed eth1 when not docked, a very neat trick), configured both the scroll-wheel external mouse and my touchpad. All very awesome.

But not all was perfect: without a cd in the cd-rom drive, HAL fails to initalize; the pointer occasionally flakes, both with the touchpad and an external mouse; their default WM is Nautilus, which has very non-standard configs. Other items here and there have cropped up--no show-stoppers, nothing that can't be fixed, but obvious bugs which will hinder its adoption.

I'm considering using Ubuntu in six months to a year, when Debian Sarge is out of date but Etch isn't getting security updates. But one main issue nags at me: configuration. Sure, Ubuntu is Linux and almost infinitely configurable, but it's always harder to undo than start from scratch. In order to get Ubuntu to work in the way that I want and expect, I'll likely have to spend longer than if I started with something more bare. Like Debian.

For the great masses who need choices made for them and a system that "just works", Ubuntu is great. I got my wife to start using it on this laptop and I'll likely replace Win2k on the "family computer" with Ubuntu. Web browsing, managing money and computer games are all that machine is used for. But for my boxes...no no no. Unless Ubuntu allows me to easily swap out Gnome and anything else I want, it won't make it as a desktop for me or most engineers.