Kernelizing

The installation of Feisty did have one huge problem, something that I was absolutely amazed about. The included kernel was set up to detect all drives, including PATA (the legacy non-SATA drives, like I have), as SCSI drives and operate them as if they were. The problem with this is that the drives could not be set up to use DMA, essential for performance on my drives.

So I knew a kernel compile was in order. Unfortunately, this is something I have had no luck on in the past, and has been a major sticking point in my adoption of Ubuntu. But I am now determined to keep it around, so it was time to give it a try yet again.

Fortunately, one thing I did learn from my use of Debian was the proper way to set up a kernel and the NVidia drivers in an apt-based environment, so I went forward with that. Extracted the latest kernel sources to /usr/src (linking them to /usr/src/linux), going in and properly configuring ATA drives to behave as ATA devices instead of SCSI-like ones. And while I was in there, I also told it to use Pentium4 optimizations, a preemptable kernel, and other slight optimizations. I do have to wonder why, for a desktop system made for more recent computers, do they not have the preemptable kernel on by default at the very least, which improves performance for me.

Anyway, after installing the proper tools (kernel-package, the development tools, and fakeroot, and I’m probably leaving out a few — go search for how to install a kernel in Debian/Ubuntu if you need a full list), installed and extracted the nvidia kernel sources (it’s “installed” as a tar.gz file in /usr/src/, and should be extracted there), and did

fakeroot make-kpkg --initrd --append-to-version=-custom kernel_image kernel_headers modules_image

to make the Debian packages for the kernel (which were placed in /usr/src/). Installing them and rebooting was completely successful, even showing the standard Ubuntu booting progress screen (before, it had usually fallen back to the text-mode screen showing everything starting). And so far, everything seems solid and works fine, so success so far.

The question, though, is why Ubuntu decided to go with such a kernel in the first place? Not sure, but Ubuntu does need to fix such strange things before they can go forward. I will be bringing this to the attention of the Ubuntu community and see what they make of it.

Oops; also, Feisty.

Yes, I’ve neglected this poor blog for a while. Sorry.

So here’s what I’ve been thinking: an article came out recently about how Michael Dell, head of Dell Computers, is running Ubuntu Linux at home.

This blows my mind.

Dell, the leader of the PC makers that have directly caused Windows to monopolize the top spot since the Win95 days by packing in Windows by default for users, has a leader that uses Ubuntu Linux.

Neat.

Better yet, also according to the article, Dell is ready to ship its PCs with Ubuntu pre-installed. You have to feel that the tide is finally turning against Microsoft, with their abysmal Vista OS stinking up the marketplace and causing Dell to put WinXP on their machines by request in its place.

But Linux — even Ubuntu Linux — needs help. It’s sad that the best moment of opportunity was missed by both Linux and Apple — the time just after the slow Vista launch to pull confused users away from Microsoft and put them on a better OS. The time is still here, though, and if Ubuntu can get on more desktops by default, and more work can be put into making it an extremely user-friendly OS, then it just might be possible to finally put Microsoft on equal footing and force them to compete fairly and truly innovate rather than put out a glorified XP service pack that consumes far too much memory for an OS and charge full price for it.

So I’m in Feisty now, and I’m going to help any way I can. It seems that this distro is the horse to bet on, so to speak, and I want to be part of it. I want to see more user-friendly features added — there are still important things to configure that a user can’t just pull up a GUI and fix (default monitor settings, for instance), and I want to see it improve enough where the average user won’t be totally lost. Not to dumb things down to the point of Windows, mind you, but offer new users an easy way to get things up and running.

Yeah, I want Linux to win. Is that so bad?