Installation Woes

Okay, so now I have installed Ubuntu. I am amazed by its simplicity and snappiness. Definitely more to my liking than Windows. However there are some problems that made my transition unnecessarily difficult.

The main draw of Windows 9aside from support from a wide variety of applications) is perhaps it's a no-brainer to operate. Installation is usually just a double click. Everything is where it's supposed to be most of the time. There is little cryptic jargon.

Linux -- Ubuntu Linux -- should be able to replicate such user friendliness for it to be able to be more accepted by the masses.

For example, the first thing I wanted to do after installation was to update the nVidia video card driver. In Windows, all I had to do is download the driver, uninstall the old driver (but some people don't care to uninstall, and that's possible) then install the new one. In Ubuntu... well. Let's say that it's not as easy.

I started by going to the arcane Synaptic Package Manager. I found some files which I took for nVidia drivers and downloaded them, but nothing happened afterwards. Then I searched the web for an easy way to do it, and I found Envy which installed the proper drivers. But still, for some reason, i can't seen to enable it. Finally, I enabled access to restricted drivers and then -- viola! -- it finally worked.

However, I don't quite agree that driver installation should be that complicated.

Next one is Firefox. I wanted to update it, but the Check for Updates in the Help Menu is not available. Fortunately, I was able to find a solution quickly in Google: Ubuntuzilla. However, this require typing or cut-and-pasting of commands at Terminal, which may scare some people, but really it's not that hard. Just ugly.

I also wanted to improve desktop appearance. So I went to Gnome-Look.Org to see the selection. However, I got lost in the terminologies. What's the difference between GTK, GDM, XMMS and other selections to choose from? The site obviously assumes that the visitor would know what he wants. Unfortunately, I am only familiar with KDE, not GNOME (see previous post to know how I ended up this way). So I just downloaded icons. Installation was easy enough: just drag-and-drop and customize. I also downloaded a wallpaper and log-in screen. Installation was also relatively painless, thankfully.

Now I wanted to download content from the internet, via torrent or direct download. I used uTorrent for torrents in Windows, and Flashgot for direct downloads. I went to Applications --> Add/Remove... to see what is available. It's quite simple to use, and even displays popularity of applications, and that should tell the user what's good. I typed in "torrent" in the Search field and I was presented with a selection of programs. I saw that Bittorrent was already installed, so I tried downloading a torrent. Unfortunately, it was rather too simple, and I could not see any means of selecting what files I want to download within a torrent. So I installed Azureus, which I think is quite popular. After installation, I could not get it to start. I clicked on it in the Applications --> Internet but nothing happened. I tried opening a torrent but I could only select BitTorrent. So using an old Windows trick, I uninstalled Azureus and reinstalled it. that did the trick, but I was disappointed that I had to do that.

Next is the download manager. I downloaded Flashgot extension hassle-free, but I could not find a Linux-compatible version of the manager itself. When I right-clicked on a download link and selected Flashgot Link, I was able to use only WGet. I was surprised that it's text-based. It completed the task, but I am not comfortable as of that time with text-based programs. Besides, I could not find a way to pause the download. So I tried GNOME WGet, again from Applications --> Add/Remove... But this one doesn't seem to work. It loads, but download does not seem to start, much less finish. Please, if someone knows of a better download manager, inform me. For now, I use WGet. It works, but it doesn't get points for good looks.

Overall, Ubuntu programs installation was messy. I don't know if I was just unlucky, but hey, it happened.

Perhaps on the next iteration of Ubuntu, the installation hassles would have been solved or at least partially addressed. I nearly pulled my hair off in frustration over installation of nVidia drivers. As I said earlier, some procedures in installation should not have been difficult. And one should not need to go to the internet to see a more workable solution to a problem. Proper documentation and ensured cooperation with the OS should be the solution.

So I managed to install some programs and had some running. I'm still testing the waters. In the next installment (haha!), I'll report my experience some programs, and some glitches I found.