Josh Saddler

I installed Ubuntu Studio 8.10 on my laptop a couple of days ago, wiping out the unused Windows Vista partition. Eh, the laptop didn't come with a recovery DVD anyway.

I know. Why Ubuntu, right?

Simply put, I didn't want to waste time trying to install audio applications that either aren't available in Gentoo, don't compile, or otherwise require excruciating configuration. I wanted an out-of-the-box setup ready to work immediately. My piano has MIDI and line out jacks, and it's about time I finally did something with 'em.

I shopped around the various specialty multimedia production distributions, and finally settled on 64 Studio and Ubuntu Studio. Haven't yet tried the former; I've just installed Ubuntu for now.

Alone among the various official Ubuntu flavors, it still uses the ugly ncurses installer. At least it worked perfectly. It correctly detected my existing Gentoo partition and left it alone.

I have some notes on the experience so far, though as I'm still waiting for my USB-midi adapter to arrive, I can't actually comment on the audio applications themselves. But first, a digression on troubleshooting Ubuntu.

Due to the complexity of the software, with all the vendor configuration, patches, package integration and the like, when problems do arise, they feel much harder to fix. Part of this is that I'm not sure what all's been installed. With Gentoo, I know exactly what's going on the box; there's nothing there ahead of time to discover. Not so with Ubuntu. Figuring out what's on there (that I don't need) is an ongoing process. That being said, when problems do arise, they're not the kind that I run into with Gentoo. I suppose my unfamiliarity with the distro contributes quite a bit to my initial ability to fix things -- what isn't a problem on Gentoo can be in Ubuntu, and vice versa. Ubuntu has solved problems I didn't have the first clue how to fix on Gentoo. By contrast, trying to fix the things I take for granted, like decent hardware acceleration everywhere, is unfamiliar turf on Ubuntu. Here be dragons. Ye be warned!

The Good

• All kinds of hardware working that I was sure I didn't even have. Apparently I actually do have a bluetooth chip, as advertised. For ten months now not a single LiveCD or distro has picked it up, so I thought they left it out when they refurbished my laptop. No need for the USB dongle.
• Working hardware that I had no idea how to make work in Gentoo. ThinkPad features like hotkeys and decent power management. Onscreen popups for backlight and sound. Only thing not working is the mute button.
• Exceedingly nice desktop integration; I generally appreciate the extra upstream patches. The "hidden" options for such things as desktop icon behavior for Xfce are made available in the Desktop dialog. Proper power options on the shutdown menus. Preconfigured audio bundles that all work together out-of-the-box? Heaven.
• Package management is generally a snap. I'm not as concerned with bloat since everything's binary. Lots of package choices, and many 3rd-party repositories that seem trusted and well-used.
• Beautiful desktop environment. Finally, a decent dark theme.
• Good documentation on the Ubuntu homepage, though the search function for both official and community docs sucks big-time. It really can't be counted on. The wiki itself is freaking weird; the generated page titles aren't so human-friendly. Takes some getting used to, as it's not as intuitive as Wikipedia.

The Bad

• No wireless networking ready out-of-the-box, though at least it doesn't ship with the bloated POS that is NetworkManager. Fortunately, wicd was an easy install.
• Slower bootup. Uses Gnome, so that's noticeably slower than my usual Xfce setup.
• In spite of some small improvements here and there to specific areas of power management, battery usage is actually a little higher overall than Gentoo.
• No real working HDAPS. Documentation is spotty, inconsistent; scattered across thinkwiki, ubuntuforums, and the internet. In fairness, this isn't working on Gentoo either, but you'd think Ubuntu would have this working, since all the other ThinkPad hardware works.
• Synaptic sucks for managing multiple installs/removes. Having to right click a million times for each package is a pain. The database is kinda slow to load. The search features needs work.
• I still miss USE flags. Having to install Ruby just to install gVim is bleah. Same for other packages.
• Manually compiling packages doesn't bear contemplation. I miss the automation Portage provides.
• Despite following the official instructions on enabling DVD playback and DVD navigation, the default player in the menu (Totem) can't actually play DVDs, failing with an error message that said "No reason." (No, really. That's what it said.) I had to go to the command line and run totem-gstreamer. Unnecessary stumbling block. Similarly, mplayer can't go through the menus, even though the appropriate libraries are installed. Mplayer was one of the suggested players to use with libdvdnav, but a quick scan of its binary doesn't indicate it was built against it. It can play the main feature, however.
• DVD playback is somewhat slower than Gentoo. So far I've tried gxine, mplayer, VLC, and totem. All exhibit more clipping and framedropping in Ubuntu than in Gentoo.
• The ubuntuwiki font is ugly. Need a way to change that without disabling custom fonts for all sites in Firefox. Yes, it hurts my eyes enough to merit inclusion here.
• Not being able to eject discs after playing them. Why doesn't the button work? Could just have been a bad session.
• No Handbrake available? Sad day.
• Right-clicking in gVim to copy text doesn't work, despite the same config files copied from Gentoo. Neither does pasting it with Ctrl-V in Firefox. Something's screwy here.

The Ugly

• Worst nonworking version of Alacarte EVER. Don't bother trying to adjust menus or move items up or down or drop items into a new subfolder. Almost nothing works.
• At boot, when the desktop tries to load, occasionally I'll get a frozen, garbled screen that repeatedly resets as X tries to restart. So much for "bulletproofX". Whatever Ubuntu developers have done to the kernel for Intel graphics, they screwed up. Odd; this X3100 chip works perfectly in Gentoo for every kernel up through 2.6.27.
• Having to spend hours tweaking the system to get something only vaguely close to my comfortable, familiar Gentoo setup. (And hoping that I don't just uninstall the whole thing after all that work!)

Will it stay? Will I completely make the move to Ubuntu Studio, at least on this laptop? Too soon to tell. But I am very, very impressed with what I see. I like it a lot. I'll know more after I've had the chance to use the audio production software in a few days.