The insanely boring life…

That what makes Ubuntu very popular!

I can’t understand why this Ubuntu fans been harping how good it is. Well, I maybe just stupid like you, in identifying things that doesn’t work.

Oh, btw, have you tried other distro with a better GUI interface?

You can always go back to XP though, if you miss something.

Printer/scanner support: I haven’t had any problems - then again, I haven’t attempted to use a Cannon printer/scanner. From what I understand, support for Cannon and Epson (or maybe it’s Lexmark I’m thinking of?) is still pretty poor. Overall though, one should always expect to have some previously used hardware not work whenever switching operating systems. Manufacturers for the most part just don’t see any reason to make drivers for more than one operating system, and the one they support is most often Windows (unless they happen to specialize in Mac hardware). It’s kind of a catch 22 - more manufacturers won’t start making drivers for Linux until it gains more users, and I’ve seen evidence that it loses a substantial amount of users due to lacking drivers. That being said, it does support many, many devices out of the box - you’ve just got to be a bit picky about your hardware. In my experience the best thing to look for on a hardware box that clues you in that it is supported in Linux is when it says “IBM compatible”.

Command line: Ubuntu actually requires more use of the command line than many other “newbie-friendly” distros I’ve seen. If you want less command line work, I would recommend going with something like PCLinuxOS, Mandriva, or Mepis.
“If some random person tells me to paste something into command line for some or other feature to work, then I have the right to wonder what is going on with this world. Even if it takes slightly longer to do something the GUI way, it at least means that I know what I am doing.”
This is the same complaint I had when I was first starting out with Linux. I didn’t like copying and pasting commands when I had no idea what they meant - it made it that much harder for me to figure out what went wrong if something went wrong, not to mention I was learning nothing about the OS by simply copying and pasting cryptic commands I didn’t understand. I highly recommend that if someone tosses a command at you that you either look it up or ask them what it all means before copying and pasting it into the terminal. Otherwise you learn nothing. Even better - get a few steps ahead and learn the absolute basics - they’re surprisingly easy to learn.
USB devices: I haven’t personally ran into this issue. Normally whenever you plug in a USB device it should show an icon on your desktop that you can click on to access the device. *But* I haven’t tried using a USB device in Ubuntu yet short of my wireless mouse, so I don’t know how it behaves. And I also don’t have any experience with connecting a cell phone via USB.

Multimedia keys: Ok, to put it quite simply - multimedia keys in Gnome, for the most part, suck. They’re preset according to the type of keyboard you’re using and you can’t customize them at all (at least that I know of). But, you *can* use them - it just involves going into keyboard layouts and selecting your keyboard from the list (or going with Microsoft Natural Pro if it isn’t listed). In KDE however you can turn on keyboard layouts, select your keyboard (or just go with Microsoft Natural Pro if your keyboard isn’t listed), and while it sets up some defaults (like your volume keys) you can go into keyboard shortcuts and make your multimedia keys do whatever you want them to do.
Numlock on by default: Go into your keyboard settings and select “numlock on by default” or whatever it says (it says something to that effect). As for the numlock light not showing when numlock is on, I think it’s a Gnome issue - I had the same problem.

I hope some of this helps. I can’t help you on the midi or special characters thing as I don’t use either, but I assure you that if I did I would help you out with them.

With the Cannon stuff, you couldn’t have picked a worse compatibility match for Linux.

The guys at http://www.turboprint.info/ have a linux driver that supports your Cannon PIXMA ip5000 printer, which reputedly works better than your MS-Windows driver. You can download and install a trial version of the turboprint drivers to see how it works–long-term use will require a license purchase ($39 US).

When I plug-in a USB device into my Linux box, an icon appears right on my desktop. No muss, no fuss, no rough stuff.

Most distros of Linux set the Num Lock status to on when booting.

You can find a list of scanners compatible with Linux at:
http://www.sane-project.org/sane-mfgs.html#SCANNERS
Look for scanner models marked with *Complete* support. There are lots of them.

Consult the Linux Journal Magazine for the latest info on Linux MIDI support at:
http://www.linuxjournal.com/article/7912

Finally, scrap Ubuntu, and get and install PCLinuxOS from:
http://www.pclinuxos.com.

Your article was a nice read, but your comparisons were very poor.

I’ve been using Linux as my main desktop for the past year… and Ubuntu to be precise has been my choice for the last while (6.06).

I print photos, and I scan images, and I make documents.

From your article it looks like your needs are specific. Ubuntu, in my opinion, is a distro for the masses… designed to cover all the bases fairly well.

I print to a HP Photosmart 1115 printer.
I scan with an HP ScanJet 5200.
My numlock is on by default (it’s a bios setting).
My multimedia keys work (because they’re hardware keys… so complain to your manufacturer).
I have no trouble with USB devices… in fact, I plug in my camera (Canon Powershot S110) and it picks it up every time… as well as my USB flash drive.
I have had the need to drop to a command line only ONE time since I installed 6.06 which was to install the driver for my built-in wireless card (broadcom).

As far as MIDI goes I can’t say much there, nor special characters… mainly because I just don’t use them. If you want MIDI and have all the musical equipment then why not use a Mac. They’re MUCH better at multimedia than anything I’ve ever used.

I guess my main point is that you shouldn’t just jump to spouting off comments like “Scanner support: One word - Terrible” just because your scanner didn’t work. I’ve had scanners that came with drivers that didn’t work right even under Windows… at least consider that your equipment may be at fault… or that it’s not a “standard”. Remember, in Linux it’s NOT the manufacturers that write the drivers, mainly because of people like you that say they give it a shot but don’t give it fair play… until there’s a real effort to increase its usage then we will continue to have to support hardware with outsider-written drivers.

I’ve learned that I need to be careful with my PC purchases since I now use Linux, but it’s really no different than when I rebuild a Windows box and have to spend hours downloading drivers for each intricate part. (I guarantee that you have to download more drivers for Windows than you do for Linux.)

FYI, my laptop is a Compaq Presario v2582us.

- ATI Radeon Mobility 200M
- Broadcom wifi
- AC97 sound
- Built-in card reader
- AMD Turion 64 proc

Everything on it works like a charm. I’ve thought about buying another one just because it works so well.

I have a pretty new HP Printer and I have Mac OSX(x86), WindowsXP and Ubuntu installed on my PC and so i tested the printer config with each of them.

THe easist to setup and use was linux followed by OSX and then WIndows with its crappy driver downloads from the windows updates site.

Ubuntu like any distro is not without problems. Most of the issues you mention are hardware driver issues. They can be a pain but are not without solutions.

Canon makes great printers, but they have lousy linux support. Fortunately, you can purchase drivers from Turboprint that will solve that problem. I have a Pixma ip4000 that works great with Turboprint drivers. Shame on Canon for no linux support and shame on me for not checking better. (I still like the printer, now that I have working drivers). The scanner is likely gong to take some creative Google searches to solve, but it is the same issue. It is a driver problem.

The Lineak project may help you with the keyboard.

Midi does work with linux, but sometimes you will run into hardware issues with that as well. Don’t forget to check out all available linux solutions before giving up.

Don’t do away with xp until you solve your problems in linux and only dual boot for things you really need to run in xp. Eventually, you will find yourself using xp less and less and in the end you will be glad you din’t give up on linux!

After giving my daughter a MIDI keyboard (M-audio keystation 49e) as a christmas present and beeing a Linux oldtimer I still have to agree with you. It took me several hours to figure out the MIDI story on Linux. Usually I can fix most things within an hour. I just wanted a cheap MIDI keyboard making sounds in the speakers!

The progress I ran into started with this article about Qsynth and Qjackctl, two GUI apps that revealed most of the basic stuff:

http://www.linuxjournal.com/article/8354

After quite a while I got it right and have now audio from the MIDI keyboard through the Ubuntu 6.06 computer. So it can be done! Some people do Sodukus, I try to keep my kids happy with Linux! Seriously, I will give feedback to Ubuntu developers and write a web page on my findings to help others. One day the MIDI usability in Linux might be satisfactory and for sure it will still be free!

Happy new year!

Enough people have aready said, and rightly so, that its the manufacturers that should be blamed not Linux.

I don’t think you’ve really given it a chance, Ubuntu that is. I started using Linux around 4 years ago. I’ve had various distro’s since then Kubuntu being the latest one.

To begin with I used Windows and Linux on a duel booting machine but as I became more and more familiar with Linux I found myself using Windows less and less.

Now I don’t have a Window OS on my computer at all, I don’t see any point in it because I stopped using Windows completey at least 2 years ago.

I regulary get asked to install or set up Hardware on friends and relatives Computers and personally I now find Windows much more difficult for most things so I guess its familiarity with a system as much as anything else

What I do notice though is that if something doesn’t install by the ‘book’ on a Windows machine then its almost impossible to sort it out whereas with Linux I never have this problem.

You need to just stick with it for while, why? because right now Linux is way ahead of Windows in many many aspect. I recently had the chance to ‘review’ the new Windows Vista, much to my suprise I found the MS had simply ripped off a lot of functions I have had on my Linux system for the past six months!

I don’t understand some of the problems you seem to have had, like Hotplugging. I had this installed out of the ‘box’ on a Mandrake distro two years ago and on my present Kubuntu system it works much better than on my Wifes Windows XP computer where sometimes it does and sometimes it doesn’t depending on the device.

As for printers and scanners. Again I’ve had no problems, although I will admit I always make sure that a printer is supported before I buy it.

What annoys me is that if you look at present statistics MAC users are now in third place to Linux. My own web site bears this out as I get at least 4 times more hits from Linux users than I do from Mac. So why on earth are manufacturers falling over themselves to produce drivers for Mac and so many of them can’t be bothered with us?