Switching to Ubuntu… for a while

February 1st, 2005 • 1 comment Linux

“What the hell?! I’ll switch!”. These words kept ringing in my head while I was spending a ridiculously huge amount of time trying to get X.org 6.8.0 on Gentoo to make at least some use of the great GeForce 6800 Ultra.

I’ve heard a lot about this Ubuntu thing, and I laughed at the name when I first heard it. But to be fair, Ubuntu has won this time, it literally saved me from a stroke.

It took me about 10 minutes to get Ubuntu up and running. A minor setback was that my BIOS for some reason doesn’t enumerate hard drives correctly, so I had to boot from a LiveCD (and guess what? it was Gentoo’s) to fix grub’s menu.lst. I restarted again, and this time Ubuntu started unpacking deb packages then tried to start gdm and XFree86 crashed. I didn’t have nVidia drivers installed *gulp*.

Hesitating, I thought that was it, I’ll never be able to use GeForce on AMD64, but my luck led me to a wiki page on Ubuntu’s site and it took only a couple of minutes to login to GNOME. Here’s exactly what I did:

• su: entered password
• Uncommented repository lines in /etc/apt/sources.list
• apt-get upgrade
• apt-get install nvidia-glx
• nvidia-glx-config enable
• startx

… and voila! Everything works, I mean EVERYTHING. Not a single glitch. They even took care of Firefox’s middle-click-don’t-paste-but-close-tag annoyance. My God I was impressed. The installation was simple, clean, slick, and deb-compliant. Fedora’s yum couldn’t even do it, but then again , Fedora on AMD64 is a joke.

Now don’t get me wrong, I still love Gentoo, and I still prefer to have a minimalistic distribution that I can play with, and I still love the fact that I compiled my own distribution. But with a damn stable Debian base, up-to-date packages, and a 10 minute install, I think I’ll stick to Ubuntu for a while, maybe until Gentoo on AMD64 doesn’t cause me so much headache.

Note to Fedora: By the way, unpacking copied packages after installation is a nice way to save some time. Copy first, unpack later, I don’t really like 30-minutes installs.