Ubuntu is a Linux distribution which is famed for its ease of use and has built up an image of being a newbie friendly Linux distribution. Ubuntu has arguably the largest community following compared to all other Linux distributions. And it has enhanced its cause many times by following the policy of shipping free CDs of Ubuntu to anyone willing to try this Linux distribution.
Nowadays if you visit any tech blog or site, you seldom fail to notice at least one article espousing the cause of Ubuntu Linux. In fact, even the media pundits have jumped on to the bandwagon and have started tomtoming the virtues of this very popular Linux distribution (see here, here and many other places).
But recently when I reverentially downloaded the latest version of Ubuntu 7.04 (Feisty Fawn), burned it to a CD and booted into it, guess what? it failed to load.
Fig: Error encountered while booting Feisty Fawn LiveCDThe picture of my monitor above gives an idea of what I was faced with while booting Ubuntu 7.04 from the CD. It was showing an error on the lines that the ata2 port on my machine failed to respond. And I was put into an initramfs built-in shell.
The machine I tried to boot Ubuntu is a moderately recent Pentium 4 machine with 631 MB memory - more than twice the recommended minimum memory needed to load Ubuntu. The machine doesn't have any extra features like bluetooth, WiFi or out of the ordinary peripheral devices. And Debian Etch has been running quite flawlessly on this machine.
I am not an Ubuntu critic. Not even by a long short. In fact, if you search this blog, you will find numerous articles related to Ubuntu where I have talked favorably about it. I was really impressed with Ubuntu 6.06 (Dapper Drake) and its 6 step install method.
But a regular reader of this blog will find that I have been unusually quiet about the next release version which is Ubuntu Edgy Eft (6.10). It is not because I hadn't downloaded and installed it. But I did not find anything worth talking about that particular version. In all fairness to Edgy Eft, it at least booted to a complete desktop on my machine. But the latest version of Ubuntu 7.04 - Feasty Fawn, refuses to even boot and gives me the message as seen in the picture above. In all certainty it is a problem related to the Linux kernel bundled with Fiesty Fawn. Then the question arises as to why the Ubuntu team decided to use that particular version of the kernel. Perhaps that is a price you pay when you adopt experimental features without proper testing. I would really like the Ubuntu team to bring out succeeding versions at par with ver 6.06 in terms of quality.
Considering my experience with Ubuntu Fiesty Fawn against the eulogies in the media, I am forced to ask if the brand name Ubuntu is over hyped - most probably the residual effect of an over-zealous community behind it. No Linux distribution is perfect. Each has its pros and cons. I for one would like to see a balanced discussion about the pros and cons of a distribution without delving into unnecessary fanboy-ism.
Update (22 May 2007): It seems this problem is the result of a bug in Ubuntu Fiesty Fawn. Two days back, I received the CD I ordered through shipit. And even this CD refused to boot properly on my machine. A bug report has been filed at launchpad.net which you can read here. And Bheesh has provided a work around to this problem on his site, which I concede I haven't tried out yet as I do not have the patience to go through the whole ruckus just to boot into a Desktop. So as long as Ubuntu team sleeps over this undecided bug, it is sayonara from me to Ubuntu.
Update (22 May 2007): It seems this problem is the result of a bug in Ubuntu Fiesty Fawn. Two days back, I received the CD I ordered through shipit. And even this CD refused to boot properly on my machine. A bug report has been filed at launchpad.net which you can read here. And Bheesh has provided a work around to this problem on his site, which I concede I haven't tried out yet as I do not have the patience to go through the whole ruckus just to boot into a Desktop. So as long as Ubuntu team sleeps over this undecided bug, it is sayonara from me to Ubuntu.
30 comments:
Are you sure that the ISO image and the CD are ok? Maybe you should try redownloading and reburning. Or ordering through ShipIt.
Thanks for pointing this out. I agree, although I might go so far as to say that if they would slow down the release cycles and pay a little more attention to quality versus speed of release, we would see Feisty with Edgy's stability.
I was amazed that this was released as non-beta as they forced network-manager onto people, thus killing wifi access for at least a third of the wireless users while making it super easy for others.
So again, yeah, I have to admit that they are overdone to some extent, but then again, they are finally pushing Linux into the spotlight. With any luck, this will prove helpful for all of us. :)
If it didn't work for you doesn;t mean it's not great
i guess ubuntu is good but they need to do much more testing before they release. anyways i prefer debian. i use debian lenny which is the new testing. it works real fine.
it seems this problem is happening to those who have more than one hard disk:
This article highlights well why Canonical marks Feisty as an "unstable" release.
They've made it clear -- a thoroughly tested "stable" release comes every 18 months. The media fanfare is testament to the Ubuntu team's ability to release a passable distro every 6 months, however not without bugs.
Personally, I was disappointed when Edgy 6.10 was all but unusable on both of my Pentium 4 home computers...but I understood it wasn't reliable when I installed it. That's what stable releases (like Dapper 6.06) are for.
So if an unstable release works for you, then great! If it doesn't it should come as no surprise.
I'm a newb to Linux and I've got Feisty Fawn. I found it easy to get going on my four year old non-upgraded machine. I'm no tecchie either. Maybe you just got unlucky?
I'm seriously struggling getting my favourite game working, but I'm painfully aware that that's possibly due to my lack of knowledge in this area.
I like Ubuntu so far, and I hope I can ditch MS at some point..
:)
Name a cutting edge Linux distro that has stability and compatibility with everything. I can't. I've had problems with each one.
I think Linux is moving into such diversified structures and schemas between distros and that hurts acceptance of the Linux brand in corporate environments.
I've always thought FreeBSD was the best Open-Source os, for stability and compatibility. It feels more solid and only uses 50 MB of RAM after install.
I agree.
The pass two release of Ubuntu refuse to work with my computer which is working fine with Mepis, openSUSE and Debain.
Also noticed that Noteedit in Ubuntu could not start without crashing :-(
Try with boot option noapic or noapci or acpi=off
Good distro but the is still still much room to grow.
The hype is true and I am worried it might juts die out suddenly.
If this is an 'unstable' version then why did Dell agree to put it onto their desktops? That honestly doesn't make sense.
I agree with you here...Ubuntu is nice for people that already know and use Linux but it is NOT for new users. There are a handful of other distributions out there that are doing things right. Ubuntu is just overhyped.
I tend to agree that Ubuntu is over hyped as a brand, though do as well agree that it is an excellent Linux distribution with some excellent manuals and literature as well third party applications and sites that make the Linux experience much easier and fun.
But when it comes to me I still prefer openSUSE over Ubuntu.
Your proof that Ubuntu is over-hyped is based on a single incident of it not loading on your particular machine? I've installed 7.04 desktop and server on a few machines and also done upgrades to a laptop and server of my own with no hitches. I think the excitement over Ubuntu is well justified, it's a very polished Debian! Doesn't have a couple issues the other hugely popular distros have - namely, SuSE with the Microsoft stink, and RedHat with the FC for the masses to be lab rats for the different enterprise distros.
If you think Ubuntu should have more testing, you should get started in testing.
It is *IMPOSSIBLE* for any test team to test any and every single possible combination of hardware and configuration.
To the Author:
If you already have 6.anything installed, why did you download the CD for 7.04? You can install 7.04 simply though live updating while the computer is on...
Saves space, time, and nonsense.
If this is an 'unstable' version then why did Dell agree to put it onto their desktops?
Because they are used to installing unstable operating systems on their machines! It's standard operating procedured. And because it's the only version that will work on their newest machines. I have an Inspiron 1501, and 7.04 is the only thing that works well enough.
I use Ubuntu, and have been using it since Warty. My 7 year old niece uses Ubuntu Feisty all by herself (she installed it by herself too). I build our computers and use generic parts and we have never had any problems with any Ubuntu release.
Most of the people who say bad things about a Linux distro are the folks who try it once, see problems and don't bother to understand the system or learn how to fix anything. You can't go from piloting a glider to piloting a jet fighter without having to learn/do something new.
If this is an 'unstable' version then why did Dell agree to put it onto their desktops?
Because it is mainly hardware issues. On the right hardware choices it should be quite stable,or coded to make it work on "their version" release.
I used Ubuntu for a short time quite a while back and then again since installing Dapper on a new machine last fall. Since then I have done a fresh install of Edgy and then of Feisty. All I can say is that in my own experience on the same exact hardware configuration, each release was easier to install and configure than the previous, BUT each release was less stable than the previous.
I don't know if that is a pattern to be concerned about or not, just an observation. Maybe it's just my dumb luck. But doesn't Ubuntu themselves warn you about "other than LTS" releases being more "experimental"? Hmm, maybe that was on the support forums I read something like that.
7.04 was a disappointment for me too. I really didn't think Ubuntu would deliver this kind of product after their previously grant releases. I'm still a fan, but this 'not booting' problem (in my case the infamous bug with ati x...) is just amateurish. Despite of many distro's increasing maturation this ofcourse should not happen.
My conclusion: Ubuntu development and release cycle is two years. 8.04 will probably be an excellent LTS version again. The other versions are apparently too 'edgy' or too 'feisty'. (though edgy worked fine for me).
Ravi: I agree as I've had similar problems myself. The last 2 releases of Ubuntu have not booted into a GUI on my machine.
Most comments say that if ubuntu didnt recognise your h/w , then it doesnt make it bad. Agreed. But to be frank , thats the issue with many distro's right. Fedora's or debian's non inclusion of proprietary drivers and perphaps support for some latest h/w means some functionality will be missing . But this is the exact rant that is going against these distros.Many distro reviewers write exactly this(non inclusion of drivers for their h/w) on their blog and pass a nice little conclusion that the distro sucks since they had to *make* their hardware work. I could well tell them it works for me. So wheres the argument?
I have problems with Feisty too, and so did a co-worker. I initally had a problem with the X Config and resolved it, however, the system kept crashing, so I just gave up and concluded that this release was mostly hype. I reloaded Xandros Pro and haven't looked back. My co-worker couldn't even get his machine to boot after the install, and requested the CD via mail. Although, I have to say that I did expected Feisty to work because of all the hype, but reality tells me that we should not expect something so great from a free system. What I mean is that I expect Xandros to work becuase I paid for the OS and expect to get what I paid for, however, how can I expect something for nothing. That said, Linux users should expect to tweak these OS to meet their hardware specs. I'll continue to try to Ubuntu in the future, but will gauage my expectations as I have with other Linux OS's.
I have just switched from Fedora to (K)Ubuntu 7.04. Installation was smooth, except my wireless everyhting else worked. System seems really fast too. I am on 512MB RAM...fedora was too slow at times...Had been using Redhat for the past 10 years. But I have never been this cool....May be when I work more I might be able to comment more on Ubuntu.
There have been some problems with the Ubuntu ISOs. Not sure why, but burning them at a lower speed seems to fix the problem. I had the same issue when I put Ubuntu 5.10 on my machine. I reburned the disks at a much lower speed and everything worked out great.
Give it a try. I think you'll find that this will fix your problem.
you should try this before giving up
http://bheesh.com/solution-initramfs-ubuntu-edgy-eft-problem-bug-67256
I have downloaded ubuntu, Kubuntu and edubuntu Fiesty Fawn And ubuntu edgy. I have 3 pentium IIIs and 1 pentium IV. one of the systems is of unknown manufacture and the others are all Hewlet Packard (Including the P IV). I originally purchased disks for Debian Sarge and have not been able to get that to work. I have installed ubuntu and Kubunto on all of the systems with no problems. Two of the systems originally had ATI video cards and ubuntu seemed to be fine with that. I have since then installed nvidia video cards (in an attempt to get Debian Sarge to work, which still failed.) and it still works fine. I would say that the problem may well be a bad download or burn because I had to download edgy twice before I could get a good install.
Still wish I could get Debian Sarge to work. Actually it does. I just cannot get a GUI desktop, either Gnome or KDE.
Emmerc:
I have used every edition of Ubuntu Linux since 5.04 in broken machines, and in perfect machines like laptops, pc with two or more drives and everything has gone quite well. I will ask for more support for gadgets like smart phones, scanners, etc. But I think that Ubuntu Linux is a great option in matter of OS for PC and Laptops and it is getting better every time.
I think it is over hyped but you can't say that's just because it did not boot on your machine. That can happen because too many reasons and you have to do some research to see why it happened. Ubuntu became so popular because there was great marketing campaign for it ( still is ). Other distributions may be just as good or better but either don't have the budget for such marketing or are not interested to do this because they activate mostly in the server market ( see red hat )
I only just now, late Saturday night, installed Feisty Fawn 7.04 and there was no problem at all and it is my first Linux installation anyway and i am using it now; it is even installed on partitions alongside some "ms-suck" version and done by self-burned cd and all went automatically. Easier than "ms-suck" ever was. Various people around me also use Feisty Fawn 7.04 and had installed it themselves without any problem at all and doing great. I experienced the installation so very totally easy, that it is even hard to believe yours has failed and why. By the way: i have never seen a Linux system crash yet and i would say such is impossible; yet hardware can break down of old age and whatever. Good luck next time.
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