Missives from the 6th Floor

Turns out that the testing I needed to do involved building 32bit binaries, and Ubuntu's multi-arch (a mixed 64/32bit environment) story is pretty bad as compared to Fedora. Their 64bit install puts 64bit libraries in /lib, and wants 32bit libraries in /lib32. Of course, their 32bit install puts 32bit libraries in /lib, which means you have no hope of installing 32bit library packages on a 64bit Ubuntu install, so if you need any 32bit libraries not included in their 32bit libs package, you're building them from source.

To add insult to injury, their 32bit libs package doesn't create the appropriate symlinks in /lib32, so even setting the linker path correctly wouldn't let me link the binaries I was trying to build.

Once I figured out the problem, I created the missing symlinks and was good to go, but Ubuntu's semi-official answer of "use a 32bit chroot" left me shaking my head. I agree that it's more "correct," but it's also a pain in the arse, and very much not the "make things just work" philosophy that Ubuntu is known for.

I was also sorta disappointed that, unlike Fedora, Ubuntu doesn't make it easy to setup winbind authentication and join the machine to a Windows domain. I totally see how it's not a core use case for them, but it also means that I'm not likely to lobby to switch any of the in-house linux servers to Ubuntu in the near future.

As counter-point, I really liked the app that noticed that I had an nvidia card and offered to install non-free drivers - it did the right thing, and one reboot later I had accelerated 2d and 3d graphics, and snazzy GL desktop effects.

After the initial switching pains, I was happy enough that I started thinking about replacing Fedora on my home machine, since I'm due for a (probably painful) Fedora upgrade soon. Since 8.10 was coming out "any day now" I decided to hold off. No sense, I thought, in installing 8.04 just so I can upgrade in a few days.

When 8.10 was released, I did the live upgrade on the machine in my office. I've done a fair number of live (but totally "unsupported") Fedora upgrades via Yum, and they're nail-biting affairs, often involving package tweaking and general jiggery-pokery (even when you haven't deviated from the official package repositories). The graphical upgrade was seemingly idiot-proof and after downloading a shite-ton of stuff, I rebooted into Ubuntu 8.10.

One thing I hadn't messed with at work, but do use at home, was a software raid boot partition, and LVM. Fedora makes the former very easy to setup, and uses the latter by default. I've been saved twice in the past several years when one of my two drives failed - what would have been a tooth-gnashing, breast beating sort of event was relegated to a "ooh, better get that drive RMAd."

I was mildly disappointed that Ubuntu didn't offer any support for either one in their graphical installer, but downloaded the "alternate install" CD and ran through the process on Dawnise's former Windows box with a spare drive this evening.

The text-based installer is functional, albeit less intuitive than the graphical one, but as far as I could tell, while there's a guided partitioning scheme using LVM, if you want software RAID you have to partition your drives manually.

The installer is chugging away on my secondary screen as I type, and assuming it goes well, I'll probably do it over (without the raid and LVM) and use this hardware to replace the certifiably ancient machine in my MAME cabinet downstairs. That'll be an interesting test, as there's no wired network connection in the game room, so I'll find out quickly if Ubuntu groks the PCI 802.11g wireless card I've got sitting in the closet, too.

I'd say that the biggest thing Ubuntu has going for it over Fedora from my perspective is the longer upgrade cycle, and better support for live upgrades. It does feel like a step backwards to run the 32bit distro on my Core Duo machine, but since I've only got 4GB of RAM, I'm not really losing much - it just smells funny.

The real test will be when I boot the installer and try to be selective about which file systems I newfs. If It wipes my /home partition, I'm going to be rather put out (it'll take me several hours to restore from my rdiff-backup...)