Praise for Ubuntu
I’ve been trying to get Linux working on i386 since Sunday. Since Sunday! It’s now Thursday. My main problem is that my ditstro wouldn’t recognize my cheap-o Buffallo wireless card that I got for eight dollars at some mail order house. I started with Gentoo, but that was hopeless, so I moved onto Fedora because a friend told me they support everything.
Here is what I have to say about my Fedora expeirence: visualize my tumble into an endless spiral of kernel rebuilds (there is no Linux driver for my wireless card and the default windows driver requires a larger stack), ndiswrapper (which doesn’t support vista drivers, the only ones I have. The ndiswrapper site provides links to other drivers but good luck matching up your exact card, chipset and revision) and fwcutter version hell (you’ll need even more luck to confirm your eight dollar card’s firmware). I’m sure this stuff is obvious if you do it on a daily basis but since I don’t frequently build machines and install operating systems, this was a complete headache.
Last night Matt comes over and after messing around for close to four hours with Fedora, he said, “why don’t you try ubuntu“. I install Ubuntu, it immediately discovers my wireless card, lets me know the driver is closed source but it can install it anyway and proceeds to deal with all the ndiswrapper/fwcutter rigmarole for me. It even figured out I could use a closed source NVIDIA driver. Not to mention it’s beautiful and _fast_. The Vista partition takes ten minutes to load, Ubuntu comes up in 20 seconds. I heart Ubuntu.
