Ubuntu Linux has regularly been one of the top downloaded distributions for a year or more. I had evaluated both Ubuntu (Gnome biased) and Kubuntu (KDE variant) about a year or so ago at the urging of many younger linux newbie techies ( in their late teens and early twenties), they went on and one about how much they loved it and how much better it was than any other distro.

Maybe I'm getting old (37), but I just do not get what the hype is all about, especially after once again evaluating it.

I downloaded the full DVD for version 7.04, the latest available at the time.

During the install some strange behavior was noted.

A 500 mb FAT partition I had on one of the two hard drives showed up in the partition manager as "unknown" file type! We're not talking about VFAT/FAT32 or NTFS, this was a plain old FAT(16) partition! This wasn't a show stopper by any means, just something quirky that I noted.

During the install, Ubuntu was completely incapable of properly detecting my RAID1 md setup. All the other distros, even the specialized 64 Studio had no trouble with this, but Ubuntu completely failed during the install, and gnome partition manager would not let me do anything about it.

The NIC and vid detected ok, and it allowed the "restricted" drivers from Nvidia.

Unfortunately the Wifi was another story, I used the "restricted" drivers for the ipw3945 wireless card, but as in Fedora, it only gave the option to configure WEP, no WPA options available.

Keep in mind the rules to this eval (see the first article in this series). Sure I could solve all the issues from the command line, but that's against the rules for an evalu trying to determine the most non-techie-user-friendly-install/distro.

After the installation was done, I added (from the DVD) knetwormanager and tried to find ANY tools available to enable WPA, but to no avail.

Ubuntu uses the Gnome desktop and boots/uses very classic/powerPC Macintosh-like sounds. Maybe it's the classic Mac look and feel that these newbies are raving about as so great?

Anyhow, because Ubuntu failed on the Wifi much the same was as Fedora 8, I'm afraid that it gets a failing grade as well.

So the current score now is:

1. RHEL/CentOS 5 = FAIL
2. 64 Studio = FAIL
3. Fedora 8 (test 2) = FAIL
4. Ubuntu 7 (.04) = FAIL