Ubuntu Linux review: Worse than failure.

Journal Spy der Mann's Journal: Ubuntu Linux review: Worse than failure. 1

Journal by Spy der Mann on Sunday October 21, 2007 @02:02PM

Everything was going fine in the Live CD until I rebooted.
Grub Loading... Error 18.
This led to a series of long and boring operations of moving my partitions to let my Linux boot partition have a comfortable space within the first 1023 cilinders (why didn't Ubuntu warn me of this in the first place?).

So I tried to resize the partitions, at first I wanted to shrink one of the partitions. Big deal, it'll just resize it and voila. No, it had MOVED the whole 230 GIGABYTES to another part of the disk. It took me 4 hours and 35 minutes. What would have happened if the power had gone out? I wasn't warned it would take so long. Why wasn't I warned? So I tried to abort during the read-only test, and I got a message saying: "Warning! If you abort now, all your data will be lost!". Great, they could have done the read-only test BEFORE altering the filesystem! Why didn't they? Who knows.

Anyway - I created the /boot partition, but I still got an error 18. So I had to delete the Linux partition - oops! Windows deleted my 230 gigs E: partition even when I had clicked on the Linux one. Great, 4 hours and 35 minutes (along with my anime movies and mp3 collection) gone down the sewer. And I didn't make a backup. :( Well, I had one on my USB drive, but not of all the mp3's. Sigh.

So I said, what the heck - and I deleted my whole extended partition (not before a small backup of important data in my *other* windows partition) and put my Linux boot partition closer to the beginning of the drive. This whole stuff took me a whole day, but at least, I was finally able to boot into grub without an error 18.

Grub Loading... Error 17.

WTF!?!?!?

No fallback, no warning, no way to fix things on the fly, and here I am, wasting the whole saturday night trying to research into how to CONFIGURE the "friendliest" linux distro of all (yeah, right). You know what? I don't have time for this. I give up. Screw Linux, if they want me to use Linux they'll have to give me a USABLE distro.

So I rebooted my Windows CD, load the recovery console, and type "fixmbr". Problem solved.

I still fail to understand why the Ubuntu programmers had to give the least attention to the SINGLE MOST CRITICAL PART of an operating system: The boot loader! After researching the internet (using the Ubuntu CD, which is slow as molasses when web browsing), I found out that when you install grub in other ways (which I didn't have time nor patience for), you don't get these errors.

Do you think Joe user or granma have time to become linux hackers to setup Linux "as it should be"?

So, the question is... 2007, the year of desktop linux? And the answer is: Error 18, my friends. Error 18.

This discussion has been archived. No new comments can be posted.