I never thought I’d be switching to Ubuntu — but I can’t believe how painless this Ubuntu 9.04 install just was.

After years on RPM-based distros, I was stymied just now, trying to get Linux back up and running on my HP Pavilion dv7 laptop, running in to all sorts of dorky installation issues that I never seemed to have difficulty with in the past.   I’ve always stuck to RPM-based distros (Fedora, RHEL, CENT, OpenSUSE) just because they were what I knew, and always shied away from Ubuntu since I didn’t want to have to learn a new package manager.

That was a pretty dumb reason to stay away from what’s turned out to be an amazingly slick distro and installation process.  Just staggeringly smooth, actually.

I’ve got quite a bit more I want to catalog on this, but I’ll give you the overview of what I’ve just experienced with this, just in case you’re running into the same:

My laptop is a pretty new HP Pavilion dv7 17″ — a total steal I picked up for $650.  It’s an AMD Turion x2 based system with 4GB RAM, with an integrated ATI Radeon HD 3200 graphics controller (which has turned out to be just the achilles heel of the RPM-based Linux setups I’ve tried).  It’s got 2 SATA hard drive bays, one that I have Vista loaded on, and another that I’ve got just for Linux.

HP Pavilion dv7 17"

My HP Pavilion dv7 17"

Figuring that this is a pretty straightforward configuration (much more so than some of the hot-rod desktop configurations that I’ve thrown together) I thought that getting Linux up and running on these would be simple.  Oops.

Fedora 10: The first time I installed Fedora 10 x86_64, the install worked beautifully — all of the way up to where I was to naive as to install the Linux video drivers from AMD so as to get 3D support.  The system then bailed completely, and when rebooting I couldn’t even get a text terminal to come up.  As soon as that kernel module loaded, the system was toast.   I tried 3 more times, baking the system and re-installing, using the i686 and the x64 versions, and finally the way I was able to get 3D drivers to work was by following the instructions on the Fedora FAQ and using the packages he suggests there.

Now, while that allowed me to get Compiz Fusion to work, I was never able to get Google Earth to work — the one app I NEED as I am doing development work on a number of on-line mapping sites.

Fedora 11: I downloaded this as soon as it was available, and it was a total bust, as far as this laptop was concerned.  The display, on the install and on the final install, has a set of vertical bars on it that just will not go away no matter what.  Also, I could not find anyone who had Fedora 11 packages ready for fglrx, and none of the instructions or FAQs I could find would make me a system that worked.

OpenSUSE 11.1: As I had good luck with OpenSUSE back when I had an nVidia card, I tried the x64 version out.  This installed beautifully, and came right up — just with no sound.  I then used the 1-click install for ATI, which looked like it was working beautifully, until I rebooted afterward and the system was totally locked with no virtual console or keyboard at all.  I tried again, baking & re-installing, and no joy.

OpenSolaris 2009.06: I know it’s not Linux, but I figured I’d give this a go, since it just came out.  The installer went extremely smoothly, and the system installed and came right back up without a hitch.  However, I got stymied even before trying to install the graphics drivers — nothing I would do would let me get my wi-fi adapter to work, so I had no network interfaces.  So, that pretty much stopped me right there — didn’t even get to see if my ATI 3200HD would work with OpenSolaris — though I did see some positive blog posts to make me think it might have worked.

Ubuntu 9.04: So, this morning I downloaded Ubuntu and installed it on my laptop.  The installation was totall painless, and was significantly faster than any of the above.   Booting afterwards gave an odd error — looks like the installer didn’t set any partition as “active”.  But, pressing escape boots the machine.   And boy, does it boot fast.  Matt Cutts was not lying — it really does boot in about 8 seconds.  Even on a somewhat midpack Turion x2 machine like mine.

But then, here’s where things were magically different from the installs above:

  • Video drivers just worked:  After booting up, I then went and downloaded the ATI Radeon HD 3200 Linux driver from AMD.  I installed it, rebooted, and it was working.  Blam — just like that.  Compiz Fusion was immediately working.
  • Flash install:  Another source of pain on any x64 Fedora, the clickety-click “install the plugin” dialog in Firefox actually worked.  I know for any Windows type person, you’d be wondering what the big deal is, but I don’t think on Fedora, I’ve EVER had Flash work without having to manually do the nspluginconfig thing or manually move around the .so files.  This was something I could have talked my grandma through on the phone.
  • Package management:  As I said earlier, I was a bit turned off of going to a new package management system, as I was already familiar with RPM.  However, I was astounded at how polished the clickety-click version of their package manager was.  Skype, Google Earth, etc all just installed by downloading and double-clicking on the download file.  I.e. just the same user experience as you get on Windows.

Anyhow, I’m taken aback actually on how simple and painless this setup was.  I don’t know if I just have the worst hardware that Fedora people have never ever tested on or something, but I’m now quite taken in on how good this Ubuntu install experience was.