Ubuntu and Linux are NOT consumer ready

Let me just qualify "consumer" as home user with mild-fair Windows knowledge. Not sysadmins that know everything inside-out, back-to-front, etc. Oh my god. I go through two cycles with my gradual migration towards Linux: Virtualisation of the latest builds

Let me just qualify "consumer" as home user with mild-fair Windows knowledge. Not sysadmins that know everything inside-out, back-to-front, etc.

So its coming up to the crossover between those two cycles. Ubuntu's Edgy has me crying in my pants from all the slick graphics and having installed it successfully on a laptop (where none of the graphics work) and in VMWare (where some do but it lags like a monkey) I've reached my limits for how much I can be teased.

I went about installing it today, and in the optimism that builds up at the beginning of an install of Linux, I started a post titled "Moving to Ubuntu - Part 1" envisaging a 4-part thriller of non-stop bells and whistles.

Well how wrong can someone be? Quite wrong, it turns out. Ubuntu failed pretty much at the first real hurdle: hard disc detection.

Now I know Ubuntu has excellent hardware support. You can plug in a random HP all-in-one printer and it'll set everything up so scanning, printing, copying and faxing all works within about 20 seconds.

So why won't one of the most fundamental systems work on a 18month old motherboard?

There have been 3 major releases of Ubuntu since my motherboard hit the shelves and still no (working) support for nforce4 nvraid. The SATA support was fine but I had a feeling that installing over 1/2 of my RAID0 may have borked the whole thing.

I even went through all the steps to install dmraid and still nothing. Just all my RAID drives as individual volumes.

This might not be so damning but I'm not the only person that's had serious issues with Ubuntu and the sad thing is neither of is are particularly retarded with computers. Both devs even we can't do it on our main systems.

What I'm getting at is if two different devs can't get it of the ground on their respective computers, what hope has Joe Public? Well probably better than me because most have standard hardware... Ok ok I bring it upon myself, but why should someone bend over backwards to let Ubuntu in? I'm willing, I just don't know how.

#1 /* 2 years, 12 months ago */

I run ubuntu 6.06 and mandriva 2007. I have been running linux on my primary desktop for over two years and currently have no windows install at all. With linux, you have to bite the bullet and go cold turkey. The learning curve is step, even with Mandriva and linspire, both of which offer more administration wizards than ubuntu currently offers.

As far as hardware support, you need to start planning for you linux cold turkey switch months before you actually do it. You need to start buying hardware with an eye to linux support. You need to read up whether your existing hardware is supported and make plans to either replace it or do without.

As far as linux not being ready for the average consumer, if linux was pre installed on a pc and the consumer just had basic needs, no games, no financial software then yes linux is ready. But linux hardware support among manufactures is not to the point where joe average can just walk into best buy and buy whatever digital camera or printer he wants without doing some substanial research.

Linux is great and actually much cheaper to run than windows, assuming you are buying licensed copies of your software, since that antivirus, antispyware, nero for cd burning and the like software soon adds up, but desktop linux will remain the preserve of the above average individual who is prepared to spend a bit of time to research the hardware issue. Not a problem for the average digg or slashdot reader who probably readers hardware reviews sites anyway, but it is a problem which is not going to change on the desktop anytime soon.

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brent wyatt Anonymous User

#2 /* 2 years, 12 months ago */

Well it might work... When I run the setting thing, it shows this:

ubuntu@ubuntu:~$ sudo dmraid -s
*** Set
name : nvidia_hgedfcjg
size : 144607676
stride : 128
type : stripe
status : ok
subsets: 0
devs : 2
spares : 0
ubuntu@ubuntu:~$

But when I run:
ubuntu@ubuntu:~$ sudo dmraid -ay -v
ubuntu@ubuntu:~$

clearly nothing happens... its not adding that stripe, which is my problem.

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Oli Anonymous User

#3 /* 2 years, 9 months ago */

I am having exactly the same problem - I've read so many different tutorials on this, all of which gloss over what you're supposed to do when dmraid -ay doesn't actually work! I've be intrigued to hear if you've managed to sort anything out for this?

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Haydnw Anonymous User

#4 /* 15 months, 1 day ago */

Nearly a year has passed and in frustration I am finding this article. Still I feel inclined to defend not only ubuntu, but linux as well.

Motherboard raid devices are mostly fake-raid. And up until recently drivers has been a no-no. The drivers that have been availible have been proprietary and information on the inner workings have been kept from the public.

That is the source of the problem. Figuring out how the fake-raid drivers are driven has been a long term problem. So in my opinion nor the ubuntu team or the linux kernel team can be blamed.

But things are improving. Dmraid is looking promising. It's availible on the Gentoo live-cd, but still masked (atleast the 64-bit version). The reason for the masking is that it hasn't still been confirmed to be 100% safe. This is again in part because manufacturers won't release specs on the semi-raid devices.

So Feisty didn't get dmraid in, but I do have hopes that the next release will. Until then running on separate devices remains the safest bet.

And please keep in mind that support for hardware is supposed to come from the hardware manufacturer, not from volentairs trying to make a good operating system. If your hardware is not supported please tell it to the manufacturer. The more of their customers that complain the more likely it is that they, in the end, will listen.

Thank you for taking the time to read this.

BlueEagle
usually found on efnet and freenode irc-networks.

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BlueEagle Anonymous User

#5 /* 11 months, 3 days ago */

be aware that if you just have Linux you are probably better of doing normal software raid than trying to use fake raid

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chainsawbike Anonymous User

#6 — Author comment /* 11 months, 3 days ago */

It's funny you say that, chainsawbike, because that's exactly what I've done. I'm using mdadm software RAID and I've got to say it's pretty excellent for my requirements. I've got it set up in RAID1 at the moment because one of the disks I was planning to make into RAID5 died minutes before I was going to set it up.

The great thing about mdadm raid is you can grow, even shrink the array, changing its type as you go. So when this disk is RMA'd I'll switch back to RAID5. I'm extremely happy with the situation (apart from losing 100gigs of data to the defective HD).

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Oli Numero Uno

#7 /* 9 months, 5 days ago */

clearly nothing happens... its not adding that stripe, which is my problem.

What did you except to see? It creates a raid device under /dev/mapper/

Anyway, dmraid will drive you insane. I suggest you use mdadm through your distro's install wizard.
Sharing a software raid between operating systems is quite a hassle. This is not a Linux problem, but a interoperability problem in general. The best solution is not to share a raid between operating systems or purchase a hardware raid card. The nvidia raid controller you are using is a so called 'fakeraid' controller, which means the raid functionality has to be implemented in software. mdadm will give you the same performance, less trouble, and is not hardware dependent.

OpenSUSE has graphical support for this:
http://en.opensuse.org/How_to_install_SUSE_Linux_on_software_RAID

Ubuntu apparently doesn't:
http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=408461

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LinuxDon Normal User

#8 — Author comment /* 9 months, 5 days ago */

What did you except to see? It creates a raid device under /dev/mapper/

That works fine on RAID0 and RAID1; not so much on RAID5 though.

But as I said in my last comment, I did move all my data off fakeraid, some onto single disks (system disk is just a single Raptor, instead of the pair in RAID0) and some onto a mdadm array.

mdadm raid does appear to be the finest implementation of raid I've seen in terms of scalability and simplicity. As long as it keeps my data safe, that is =)

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Oli Numero Uno

#9 /* 8 months, 18 days ago */

I'm using a RAID controller card, using RAID5 with four 500GB drives. When I install Ubuntu (of any flavor), it sees 181GB.....anyone have any advice?? I don't want to give up on Ubuntu, I dig it for desktop, but I'm trying to set up a file storage server. I'm thinking on leaning towards another distro, or God forbit, going to a Windows box.

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Tim Anonymous User

Ubuntu and Linux are NOT consumer ready

So why won't one of the most fundamental systems work on a 18month old motherboard?

Don't just sit there like a lemon! Reply!

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