My month in computers
May. 10th, 2011 10:50 amUbuntu 11.04 is released, with Unity as the default UI. I decide to try it out on my home desktop—it often serves as a (Windows) gaming computer, so I use it less for work of any kind (i.e. with Linux) than my laptop or my office desktop. Upgrading Ubuntu leaves me with the impression that Unity is actually worse than I thought: It looks like some horrible, developmentally challenged bastard offspring of OS X and a Fisherprice Toy, i.e. rather like an Apple computer except dumber and implemented poorly. Needless to say I am not impressed—it might be more accurate to say that I feel like my computer has been vandalised.
So I experiment with this and that. Gnome Shell on Ubuntu, though it’s not officially supported, and has a lot of hiccups. KDE in both a Fedora Spin and the Kubuntu version—it impresses me as having improved greatly since I last used KDE, but still holds no great appeal, not least because some features are so poorly integrated that the recommended solution is to install Gnome tools instead, notably NetworkManager configuration (go ahead, change your default connection to a static IP using the KDE tools).
I also decide to try Fedora 15, which is still in beta, with Gnome: They allegedly do a good job of releasing a desktop with the standard Gnome 3 Shell, which may or may not annoy me but is at least worth a shot. So I install that and find that the menus and launchers don’t work, but okay—it’s prerelease software and I haven’t updated the packages; of course there will be some issues at first. So I fire up gnome-terminal and yum upgrade and it starts installing hundreds of updated packages and…freezes mid-update. Well, it’s prerelease software and it’s replacing most of Gnome while I’m running Gnome, no biggie: I won’t hold beta crashes against anybody. Annoying to have to hard reboot, but it’s no worse than— Except it is, because on hard reboot, Fedora kernel panics early in the boot process.
Now here’s the interesting part. Not only does it kernel panic—my keyboard doesn’t work. And I mean at all—not in Grub, not during BIOS startup, not at all. I gather what can and probably did happen is that the OS sets a USB mode that the BIOS can’t use, but restores it during shutdown, which latter will of course not happen if you have to hard reboot. This is now a bit of a problem, because with the OS panicking on boot and my keyboard unusable, I can’t access the boot menu to start from CD, my HDD being the primary boot device; nor can I enter the BIOS setup to change boot order. To make things even better, if I disconnect the HDD, my BIOS cleverly decides not to boot from the secondary boot device (which would run a Linux live CD and probably load and restore USB functionality), but to issue an error message about a system disk being missing.
(On a side note, this is not a Linux issue. The same thing can happen if you run e.g. Windows. You just have to be really, really unlucky, regardless of which OS you choose.)
All in all, it has not been a good month for my computer.
I’m borrowing an old PS/2 keyboard from the pile of six such keyboards sitting on a shelf in the office, gathering dust; I doubt anyone will care if it goes missing for a day. With any luck at all, the PS/2 keyboard will work and I can change the boot order, load a live CD, reset the BIOS options, something to fix this damned thing. If I’m unlucky, of course, PS/2 will be disabled and I will have to reset the BIOS via hardware pins, if that’s even possible on my mainboard. Otherwise, presumably, it’s fucked and will need replacement.
I have to say I’m rather unhappy about this entire experience.