Wubi + ubuntu 8.04

2008-04-24

You might have read my previous reviews of Ubuntu which were not very flattering. Basically they apply nearly in full to the latest edition. At least the “scanning the mirrors” issue was fixed. It times out and the installer continues, unlike with previous editions. However, the network driver for my SIS chipset is still broken. It sets the mtu to 1500, setting it to 1492 fixes it. This is explained in this thread by this comment.

Shit happens I guess. At least the right soundcard was used for the sound this time. I’m not sure if that is because they fixed it or because the drivers happened to initialize in the right order by chance (last time the problem was they were not).

The situation on the graphics side is unchanged. Ubuntu still misdetects my monitor and I will have to go to the commandline to fix it.

New uglyness.

  • The clock happily informs me hat it is 4:44 pm. Except it is 23:44. Slight timezone issue I guess. Why not ask me during installation or on first boot?
  • On first boot I was treated to some obscure Gnome error saying that something had failed. Nasty. Probably the graphics driver.
  • The driver icon informed me that something related to graphics was installed (driver presumably). I clicked it and the dialog seems even more confusing now than the previous version. A “new_nvidia” thingy was checked with a red dot next to it indicating that it the driver is unused. Unchecking it, a dialog popped up informing me that the disabling the unused driver would render the hardware unusable. Ehh?? I am looking at a screen, apparently something must be working. It appears that this means that the proprietary nvidia driver is now the only option and apparently it is not working entirely as planned. I guess that means no eyecandy for me (was looking forward to that).

That’s it for now. I don’t know yet if I am going to get my hands dirty on the commandline to fix this mess again or whether I will just use the wubi uninstall.

Update. Not only did Ubuntu guess the time wrong, it mistakenly ‘corrected’ the system clock. I just noticed that my clock was off by 7 hours back in good old windows XP. WTF!

Update. The above was tried with the amd64 bit version. I suspected my problems might be related to nvidia 64 bit support so I retried with the 32 bit version, only to run into this critical issue where the installer freezes while “formatting swap space in partition #1”. This effectively prevents me from completing the 32 bit installation altogether and with the 64 bit version I have as usual a ton of issues to fix to get a reasonably functional desktop.