[colug-432] PATH: Ubuntu v Centos

[Angelo McComis]

>
> Lots of funny stuff w/Ubuntu. Main reason I use Ubuntu is that it will
> run the Broadcom wireless out of the box on my Dell Inspiron 1520
> laptop. I found .dll's, wrappers, and etc while looking at the innerds
> with less. Will change to another OS after I have a better understanding
> of the Linux Command Line.
>
> Tom
>  _______________________________________________
>

This is funny, as that's the exact reason I don't run Ubuntu... it doesn't
like the built-in wireless card on my Dell D620, which uses the "b43"
driver. It does, however have enough smarts to tell you so and where to go
get the right driver, how to build it for the kernel, etc.

But one day it prompted me to run the updater, and after it rebooted on to
the new kernel, it no longer was active on the wireless network. I needed to
rebuild the b43 driver against the new kernel. That slowed me down for a
little bit. Fortunately it happened while I was docked, because I hadn't
kept the source for the driver that time and needed to go find it again.

Then a few weeks later, it wanted to run the updater again, and after it
rebooted, it no longer liked my display. At all. Built in Intel M915
graphics is hardly something I would call obscure, so the lack of support
(or losing it due to lack of proper regression testing) is pretty
unforgivable.

In the end, I reformatted and went with openSuSE 11.3 on that box.
Everything works out of the box, and updates have caused zero pain.  I'm
also ok with Fedora too, but I already had a running Fedora 14 instance, so
this box was going to be Ubuntu. Maybe next time.

Angelo
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://lists.colug.net/pipermail/colug-432/attachments/20110128/b7bc5826/attachment.html