fragility

Well i am now one more aggregated blogger on the Planet Ubuntu Users, so hi there everyone :) And as so, i thought i’d write something on why i use Ubuntu.

I first started using GNU/Linux around 3 and a half years ago (whoa is it been that long ?). At first i tried out some distros (Fedora, Slackware, Arch) and i ended up spending most of my time with Gentoo (with the occasional tryout of other distros). However, due to many little things on Gentoo and the big thing of having to compile everything i got tired of it and started looking for a “replacement”. And so i decided to try Ubuntu and i loved it.

One thing that is essential for me on a GNU/Linux distro is having a large collection of software ready to install. That’s why i gave up on Slackware. Gentoo has it, Arch kinda has it too, Debian and Ubuntu have it too. Even if you don’t find some weird or really new package on the official repositories, you’ll almost surely find a .deb that someone else already packaged. And i just love that. Some Windows lovers claim that “oh GNU/Linux is so hard to use because it’s so difficult to install software”. Oh really ? Well if you use weird and obscure distros that will almost probably be true, but if you stick with the more polished and mainstream distros (Fedora, Suse, Debian/Ubuntu, etc) that’s just doesn’t happen. I don’t have to go on the web and search for the software and download it and whatever. I just fire up Synaptic (i admit it, i’m a CLI junkie so i’d just aptitude install something) and search for whatever i want and voil??. There it is. I guess it’s impossible to make it easier.

Another thing that i love about Ubuntu is the way the distro was created. So Mark decided to create a new distro. What would he do, start from scratch ? Of course not. There were great distros to serve as the base for something easier to use. It would be just stupid to start everything from scratch. So he picked up a stable and well organized distro, with a strong community and with a strong package collection and went ahead. So what would they do now ? Create some new dialogs and control centers and utilities to manage everything in order to make it easier ? Of course not. There’s already so much stuff done, why would they create new ones ? It’s stupid to create utilities to manage and setup your printers and other hardware and the major desktop environments already created them (i’m thinking of Mandriva and Suse here). They picked up what already existed and just made it work. And when they couldn’t find one of those utilities on the DE’s they didn’t create new ones either (only BUM maybe, can’t really remember any other right now). They picked up what was already done too, like Synaptic, or the menu editor (which name i can’t remember) that was used when Gnome didn’t had a menu editor. They saved up a lot of time by not doing new things and instead used and polished the ones that already existed. Distros like Suse or Mandriva wasted so much time creating those things, that they ended up leaving other parts of the system a mess (ok, things probably changed a lot since the last time i touched those distros, so think of how things were some 3 years ago or something).
And of course, the big reason that brought me to Ubuntu was that i don’t really want to care much about maintaining my system. Back when i used Gentoo it wasn’t uncommon to have stuff to stop working after an update because they would decide to change something in the packages and only mention it on mailing lists and stuff like that. Normal users don’t want to wander around in mailing lists all the time to stay aware that some package is gonna behave strangely. They just want to update the damn thing and move on. And i became one of those users. I don’t care, i just want to use my computer.

It’s been nearly 3 years since i bought my first and current laptop. An Airis Diamond 630, Pentium IV 2.80 Ghz, 512 MB Ram (about to have an upgrade to 1GB), 40GB HDD, ATI Radeon Mobility 9000 64MB, Combo drive, 15″, and some nice 3,5 Kg of weight.

Now, why have i bought such a lousy laptop, you ask me ? Price. It was all about price. And the fact that at the time, i was mostly a gamer, more than the GNU/Linux webdeveloper geek i’ve turned into. Airis (a spanish maker) is cheaper than most of it’s competitors and they had some nice promotions (i got an Epson CX3200 for 50???, where it was being sold for more than 150??? at the time).

Centrino based laptops were really new at the time, and the truth is i haven’t researched on the subject a bit. I knew almost nothing about it, and the little i knew was that they were probably not as good in terms of performance as desktop processor based laptops.

I had just entered University at the time, and i was in need of a new computer, so a laptop was the best choice. As i said before, i was a gamer at the time, so i wasn’t really worrying about weight, size or anything else. I wanted something where i could play my games and that was it. However, i changed a lot since then and i haven’t played usual games (other than some emulated games or Frozen Bubble) in almost 2 years. Ok, maybe some Enemy Territory, just to kill time.

A while after i bought it, i was introduced to Linux, and in a couple of months it became my main operating system. At the time there was no Ubuntu, and i was somehow lost in the world of Slackware.

In the meanwhile, some problems started appearing. The battery had a warranty of only 6 months. At the 7th month, it died. Once in a while, i started to have some weird freezes. I soon found out that they were not software related (as i was dual booting into Gentoo and Windows at the time), and less than a year after i had bought it, it had a little trip to the doctor. When it came back, i was told that it was some loose screw that was causing the problem. I found it weird, but since some of the freezing happened when i accidentally bumped it with my hand or knees, i tought it might be possible.

The problem was gone for a long time. Once in a while, it started happeing again, but it was so rare, that i didn’t bother about it. I could have sent it to the store again, yes, but since it happened so rarely i got lazy and never done anything about it.

After the warranty was over, it started getting worse. It started happeing more often, usually after i had transported it for a while. And now it would do something different. After the freezes, it would refuse to boot. When Grub started to boot the OS, it would refuse to do it, feeding me error messages which are rather random, but usually refer to CRC error checks, and Kernel panics, stating it can’t mount the root filesystem. After some tries, it boots. And sometimes freezes again.

It happens every once and then, and the only thing that has gotten worse is the frequency on how much it happens. It’s a pain in the ass, but i have to live with it, and i’m not sending it to repair as long as it works again after a few tries.

Over the time, i talked about this problem to lots of people, and even after i said everything i already wrote here, they would still say things like “have you formatted your hard drive already ?”, and the closest chance i ever got (based on searching Google for the error messages i get on boot and talking to a friend of mine who works at the tech support of one of the largest Portuguese computer store chains) was that it might be the BIOS battery dying out,but i already tried opening up the machine, and given it’s awfully bad construction, i doubt i will ever be able to replace it and use the machine again (unless i send it to repair…which i’d like to avoid).
The other huge problem i have with this laptop (other than it’s weight, and bad materials that are starting to crack), it’s related to hald/dbus.

After i started using Ubuntu (almost a year ago, 10 months or so), i started having other kind of freezes. These would happen if i wasn’t working on the laptop, and only after it was on for a considerable period of time (1 day or more).

The logs report an error related to a timeout on /dev/hdc (the combo drive). After some googling, i found out it’s a problem related to dbus/hald (stopping the services stops the freezing), but it’s in reality a kernel bug (Andrew Morton confirmed this himself on a bug report i read at the time on Red Hat’s bugzilla, which disappeared in the meanwhile).

Dapper came, and the problem remains. I read lots of bug reports somehow related to this, i tried lots of stuff (unloading modules, turning off DMA on the drive, etc), but the only way to stop this is not using hald and dbus, and not just stopping the service but killing every daemon some other application might spawn (actually, i just noticed that despite the existence of a script to do that, the daemon is still spawning somehow…damn, i need some holy water).

So my only hope is that the problem is solved in one of the next kernel or hald/dbus versions. Either that, or wait until i get a new laptop (which i intend to sometime in the next year, but this time i won’t make the same mistakes). And the truth is that without hal and dbus, i’m missing out a lot of interesting features.

The Logout/shutdown dialog in Ubuntu depends on it, so it won’t work. The Hibernate feature won’t work as well (i guess it wouldn’t work anyway but…). And many other programs complain that they need dbus in order to do this or that.

So altough i’m using Ubuntu, i sometimes still feel like i’m using Slackware. Well…not that much…but a little bit.

And now it’s bed time. I guess i just caught a flew so i’m having a really bad day with lots of pain on my body, chills and a dripping nose. Oh, and on top of all that, a huge hangover…