I'm doing my Linux due diligence by trying out Ubuntu 17.10 now that Canonical has issued new ISOs that won't brick a BIOS. That's a bit of nasty business, to be sure, but it's not enough to put me off of Ubuntu for good.

It's unfortunate that Canonical/Ubuntu made the kind of mistake that would brick a computer, and I can't see Fedora doing this kind of thing, even though the Red Hat-sponsored distro is closer to the bleeding edge.

Not coincidentally I just tried Fedora 27, and I liked it. I don't see much different in Ubuntu 17.10. Both distros use GNOME 3, feature Firefox as their default browser (good because since FF 57/Quantum, it's also my default browser) and offer the LibreOffice suite.

Sure there are major differences in package management (dnf vs. apt) and firewall (firewalld vs ufw), but it's still more similar than different.

The distros both look fairly similar on my 1920x1080 screen, and the fonts seem about the same in both, though Ubuntu features its own font in places where Fedora offers Cantarell. Both are interchangeable, so it's horses for courses, as they say.

The GNOME-ified Ubuntu made its debut in 17.10, so there will be no GNOME-powered Ubuntu LTS until 18.04 (which, now that I look at the calendar, is due in 4/2018, which is only a few months from now).

Until Ubuntu dropped GNOME 2 for Unity back in 11.04, all of the "top" distros shipped GNOME as a default. By that I mean Debian, Ubuntu, Fedora, Red Hat/CentOS and Suse. So there was a great deal of uniformity that made the distro "wars" seem kind of stupid since the desktop is such a major part of a user's experience, and every major distro pretty much offered all of the major desktops (GNOME, KDE, Xfce, Cinnamon, Mate, LXDE). It was notable that only Ubuntu shipped (or even offered) Unity (to the best of my not-comprehensive knowledge).

Now that Unity is dead and Ubuntu is back to GNOME, I hope that there will be more emphasis placed on not just tweaking GNOME but actually developing it to have more of what "power" users want (like actual knobs, levers and buttons to tweak to get the behavior we want).

Hey, as I write this in the Ubuntu 17.10 live environment, my screen keeps momentarily turning upside down and blanking for a moment. This is on an HP Envy with an Intel i7 processor. Hmm. Hopefully that's a byproduct of the live session and not something that will persist in a full installation. I hope not. I didn't experience that behavior in Fedora 27 or Debian 9.3.

To sum up, I'd say that Ubuntu 17.10 and Fedora 27 are more similar than different, with six-month upgrade cycles unless you opt for the Ubuntu LTS in a few months' time. Both are much more "polished" than stock Debian, with less setup pain, though probably more maintenance pain, as Debian Stable is exactly what the second word in its name says it is.

It all comes down to how new you want your packages to be. This really only matters (to me) for the purposes of software development. I think you can either run Fedora, or Ubuntu (possibly the latter with PPAs), and have things be acceptably new. If you need a newer stack, you'll probably be managing it outside of distro package management anyway, so it all comes down to personal preference and what works.

Am I the only person to notice that comic book shop-owning Stuart (Kevin Sussman) on the "The Big Bang Theory" is wearing an Ubuntu T-shirt on the episode airing Thursday, Feb. 23, 2017? (It's Season 10, Episode 17, if that information helps you.)

The T-shirt appearance isn't as overt as Sheldon's mention of the Ubuntu Linux operating system way back in Season 3 (Episode 22, according to one YouTube video title), but it's an unusual return for Ubuntu to the world of "Big Bang."

What does it mean that the show's most loserly character is a Ubuntu fan?

Update: This issue went away in a normal install. I presume that the added firmware during installation took care of the WiFi issues.

Original entry begins here:

I was just saying how compatible my now-3-year-old HP Pavilion g6-2210us laptop is with Linux at its advanced age. Everything in Fedora works with no tweaking, no modifications.

So I wanted to try Ubuntu 16.04 (with Unity even). First I used Unetbootin to put the ISO on a USB key. That didn't seem to work, though I had enough trouble getting the display to work that the problem could very well lie elsewhere.

So I used dd to put the ISO on the USB:

sudo dd if=/path/to/ISO of=/dev/sdb bs=8M

That worked. I booted into Ubuntu 16.04. Then I still had a blank screen. I tried to switch to a virtual terminal with ctrl-alt-F2, and eventually hit all the ctrl-alt-number combinations, after which ctrl-alt-F7 got me the graphical desktop.

That very well could have worked with my Unetbootin-created bootable USB stick.

Meanwhile, once I had Ubuntu running, I could connect to my older Netgear router running WEP but not to my newer Time Warner modem/router (I can't remember the brand or model) with WPA.

My laptop uses the Qualcomm Atheros AR9485 WiFi module, and that was where I looked first for ideas.

I found something pretty quickly.

In a terminal, enter this line:

 echo "options asus_nb_wmi wapf=1" | sudo tee /etc/modprobe.d/asus.conf

After that, I was able to connect to my WPA-enabled router, and all was well.

I didn't think I needed to resort to this kind of filthy hack in 2016 and on a laptop that has been in the wild for three full years.

But I did.

I'm not sure what I think of Ubuntu 16.04 just yet. I'll need to do a Citrix test. Running the big Citrix-enabled application that I use for my day job is pretty good in Xfce but horrible in GNOME Shell in Fedora. If it is in any way better in Unity, that will carry a lot of weight.

As Ubuntu hits its 10th year as a Linux distribution, cause celebre and all-around topic of conversation among the free-software set, Ars Technica takes a look back at what started with release number 4.10, nicknamed Warty Warthog in 2004 and continues today with the version 14.10, named Utopic Unicorn.

Rumbling around the Internet the past few days is talk about actor/geek icon Wil Wheaton's Google+ post about not being terribly in love with Ubuntu.

At least he's running it with Xfce.

The post made its way to OMG Ubuntu! where it provoked much discussion.

Much of it was of the "How dare he!" variety, though there were plenty of people who pointed out that the opinions of non-Linux users sampling today's distros are extremely important.

My constant complaining about the lack of proper suspend/resume with the open-source drivers and the concurrent lack of a packaged closed-source AMD driver in Fedora is the longtime user's equivalent.

For me, the benefits of Linux on the desktop outweigh the trouble I've had over the last year with video and suspend/resume.

But a new user who's on the fence? It's just another deal-breaker.

Read the rest of this post

You can knock me over with a feather right this very moment: Mark Shuttleworth announced in his blog that Ubuntu will follow Debian in adopting systemd as its init system, even though Ubuntu itself coded the alternative Upstart:

Upstart has served Ubuntu extremely well – it gave us a great competitive advantage at a time when things became very dynamic in the kernel, it’s been very stable (it is after all the init used in both Ubuntu and RHEL 6 ;) and has set a high standard for Canonical-lead software quality of which I am proud.

Nevertheless, the decision is for systemd, and given that Ubuntu is quite centrally a member of the Debian family, that’s a decision we support. I will ask members of the Ubuntu community to help to implement this decision efficiently, bringing systemd into both Debian and Ubuntu safely and expeditiously.

I thought Ubuntu would fight to the end, but the SABDFL appears happy to offload init-system development to Lennart Poettering and company. A wise move, I think. Canonical's resources are spread thinly enough that anything not directly related to getting their phone OS to market should be seen as ripe for offloading to other parts of the community.

I'm nowhere near qualified to opine on which init system is better, systemd, Upstart or even the old SysVinit, but it was clear in the debate coursing through the Debian mailing lists over the past month that the licensing of Upstart, which required contributors to sign a Canonical CLA (contributor licensing agreement) that allowed the company to make the code proprietary in the future, was a huge, huge nonstarter for many free software advocates.

So Upstart will ship in the Ubuntu 14.04 LTS release, and all derivatives like Kubuntu and Xubuntu, which are due in April. These long-term-support releases will be around for five years, so Upstart isn't exactly dead yet, though it's quite the lame duck.

Aaron Toponce is one of those insightful writers about Linux that I like to follow.

Now he joins those publicly leaving the Ubuntu project after what he refers to as a long line of disappointments in the project and its parent company Canonical, the last of those being the "trademark aggression" exhibited over the Fix Ubuntu site, the heavy-handedness for which SABDFL Mark Shuttleworth has apologized.

SABDFL apology aside, Aaron states many reason for leaving Ubuntu as a contributor and user (he's running Debian on everything, if you want to know). Those reasons include swapping GNOME for Unity, the Unity Lenses and the Amazon shopping "app."

He ends (but please do read the entire post):

I can't be associated with a project like this any longer. Effective immediately, my blog will no longer on the Ubuntu Planet. My Ubuntu Membership will be cancelled. My "UBUNTU" license plates, which have been on my car since August 2006, will be removed, in favor of my Amateur Radio callsign.

I wish everyone in the Ubuntu community the best of wishes. I also hope you have the power to change Ubuntu back to what it used to be. I have no ill feelings towards any person in the Ubuntu community. I just wish to now distance myself from Ubuntu, and no longer be associated with the project. Canonical's goals and visions do not align with something I think should be a Unix. Don't worry though -- I'll keep blogging. You can't get that out of my blood. Ubuntu just isn't for me any longer.

Goodbye Ubuntu.

I found Aaron's post via Benjamin Kerensa's post on the need to establish a Ubuntu foundation. The idea is intriguing, but I doubt anything will come of it.

As I've been saying lately, there are a few hundred other Linux distributions out there, and even close to home there are a number of fine Ubuntu-affiliated/derived projects like Xubuntu, Ubuntu GNOME, Kubuntu and Lubuntu that offer compelling desktop systems and are run by engaged, growing and inclusive communities. And there's always Mint, Debian, CrunchBang, Slackware and many, many more.

More for technical than philosophical reasons, I'm running Fedora with Xfce. Until my hardware runs better (i.e. suspend/resume works), I need the latest kernels and video drivers, and Fedora offers (in my experience anyway) the easiest, least painful way of getting them. And while Fedora also has a strong corporate parent/overlord in Red Hat, the relationship between company and community is much less frought.

Just to make sure that nothing suits my needs better than what I'm running right now (that being Fedora 19 with Xfce and GNOME), I did an Ubuntu 13.10 installation this week and have spent a bit of time putting the Unity-driven Linux distribution to the test.

The installation was easy. Ubuntu is very good about that. And from the standpoint of actually knowing what's going on during the install, Ubuntu beats Fedora handily.

While the installation process was easy and smooth, I was unable to boot the finished installation with UEFI Secure Boot on my HP Pavilion g6-2210us laptop, which has admittedly "difficult" UEFI. I had to turn off Secure Boot to successfully boot Ubuntu 13.10 in EFI mode. Since I'm now having trouble with Fedora 19 and Secure Boot on this same hardware, I'll chalk that up to an overall Linux kernel problem with secure boot as it stands today. Luckily you can just about always turn off Secure Boot in the computer setup/BIOS, so this shouldn't be a problem.

Ubuntu's Unity desktop environment is snappier than billed. But for me it's just a little bit "broken" compared to and Xfce 4.10 and GNOME 3. For instance, as far as I can tell, in Unity you can't drag windows from one workspace to another. It's also hard to tell when you've minimized a window, though this is also the case in GNOME 3.

Read the rest of this post

Big-time Ubuntu contributer Benjamin Kerensa blogs on why he's leaving Ubuntu.

I'm not surprised about the failure of Canonical/Ubuntu's million "give us , we promise to give you a phone packed with unproven, yet-to-be-seen technology sometime next year" campaign.

And it's not success wrapped in failure. It's just failure.

First of all, is a lot of money.

Second, Canonical is a company that has done a lot -- Ubuntu has certainly (and sometimes even successfully) gone its own way in the Linux desktop, server and cloud spaces. Live CDs, more drivers, a dependable release cycle for a Debian-based distribution, a huge and helpful community. Those are all great. But that seems so ... 2010. For Canonical anyway.

Canonical has promised a whole lot and delivered almost none of it:

• Ubuntu TV (I don't think anybody ever wanted it ...)
• That dockable Ubuntu-running Android phone from a couple years or so ago (seems eerily like Ubuntu Edge)
• Ubuntu Touch preloaded on a phone or tablet (they're promising this "early next year")
• Meaningful numbers of preloaded Ubuntu desktops (despite the claim by SABDFL Mark Shuttleworth of high percentages of Ubuntu-running PCs, you can barely find them in the real world)
• The multicore Ubuntu ARM server (Remember that thing at the last [or nearly last] "real" UDS? It wasn't a Ubuntu-made product, but they did feature it, and I don't see it)

All we do have is Unity -- a desktop environment optimized for touch and tablet with few to no devices to show for it unless you can geek out and install it yourself.

Unity is a big achievement. I don't blame Canonical for jumping off of GNOME. I knew they'd go their own way when they couldn't control the upstream.

But this Ubuntu Edge thing was over the top. Asking tens of thousands to part with today for a phone next year that promises cutting-"Edge" hardware unproven by any manufacturer -- and all this from a company that has NEVER SHIPPED A SINGLE HARDWARE PRODUCT?

(Unless I'm missing something, Canonical has never shipped hardware of any kind.)

No. No. No!

Canonical can fix this. Here's what they should do today:

• Find an existing phone -- a Nexus something-or-other -- that they can get in quantity
• Pound Ubuntu Touch into this device so everything runs as it should. Order up these devices by the thousands, flashed with Ubuntu Touch and ready for market
• Repeat for the tablet form factor
• And then sell the damn things

Once again if I'm not being clear:

• Develop for -- and sell -- the hardware that's available today. Just do it. Do it. Stop asking for multi-millions in advance and START FOCUSING ON DEVICES YOU CAN SHIP TODAY

Just ship. Everything else is noise.