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<div>I've spent an awful lot of time in the past few days trying to
get a generic wireless card working in a desktop machine. The box
is one from a local shop, which I've tweaked a bit. It was running
Debian. I needed newer versions of a few libs before I could try
the driver, then it didn't like the fact that my kernel was a
different version, so I had to recompile that. Which knocked out my
(nvidia) video driver. But by yesterday evening I'd updated a lot
of the libs (taken them up to testing, in fact) and got the full
video running again.
But a few weeks ago I ordered (for free) the 
<a href="https://shipit.ubuntu.com/">Ubuntu CDs</a> (downloading
distros not fun on a 128k line), this morning they arrived.
Couldn't resist. Basic stuff installed a treat, but not the new
wireless card driver or the video one. Currently downloading gcc so
I can sort the latter out.
Good:
<ul>
 <li>Install of the basic system went smoothly, attractive
 installer</li>
 <li>Samba (or something) worked out of the box - could see the 2
 Win machines here</li>
 <li>Although Gnome's fine (that's what I had before), there was
 kubuntu and edubuntu CDs as well</li>
</ul>
Not so good:
<ul>
 <li>Ubuntu is a Debian derivative, yes? So why didn't I have a
 simple "upgrade" option in-place. The partition options weren't
 at all clear, fortunately I'd got a chunk of free space on one of
 the drives.</li>
 <li>I had to manually edit fstab to see my existing
 partitions</li>
 <li>Ubuntu (grub) hasn't recognised the previous bootability
 (lilo)</li>
 <li>rsync seems to be playing silly buggers</li>
 <li>runlevel 2 is GUI. I guess I'll have to gnobble the symlink
 to gdm somewhere to be able to run without X, as needed to
 install the video driver</li>
 <li>No emacs, ssh, gcc...
 </li>
</ul>
Now I've got to download gcc and associated stuff to get the
video driver going (did I mention I've only got an ISDN line?).
Then I'll start all over again with the wireless card.
Now ok, I'm totally behind the aims of Ubuntu, and the basic
install went very nicely, it looks good. I believe they've done a
huge amount of work on i18n too. But still things aren't smooth for
a fairly common video card and a nothing-special wireless card. For
my own purposes, I don't really see any major benefit over regular
Debian, though the regular releases are very welcome. (As were the
free CDs!).
But I can understand Mac-heads like 
<a href="http://diveintomark.org/archives/2006/06/02/when-the-bough-breaks">Mark
Pilgrim</a> and 
<a href="http://www.boingboing.net/2006/06/29/mark_pilgrims_list_o.html">Cory
Doctorow</a> jumping ship when there's a convincing alternative.
Data lock-in isn't good, nor is having to buy Apple hardware to run
OS X. And Ubuntu's (
still!) cool & trendy. 
But do I really have to use IBM hardware to get an easy
install? Ok, that's a bit melodramatic, but it still seems
there's a way yet to go before it just works, irrespective of the
hardware.
See also: 
<a href="http://www.megginson.com/blogs/quoderat/archives/2006/06/29/macos-vs-ubuntu-linux/">Megginson</a>,

<a href="http://radar.oreilly.com/archives/2006/06/ubuntu_linux_a_threat_to_mac_o.html">O'Reilly</a>

 btw, I'm typing this on an iBook, and when posted the bits
 will go through the Win2k laptop upstairs. Also the title of this
 post isn't entirely accurate, Reto had Kubuntu on his laptop when
 he was here.

Bonus see alsos : 
<a href="http://www.dehora.net/journal/2006/07/switch_block.html">deHora</a>,