Yesterday, I’ve downloaded the first official release of Ubuntu Linux – codenamed Warty Warthog. It seems – as I’ve been reading on Planet GNOME and Planet Debian – that this distro is the Next Best Thing® for desktop usage, so I decided to give it a try (currently, on my box I’m running Debian Unstable with some packages from Experimental).
I’ve turned my Dummy Mode on, and launched the installation. Well, not exactely “turned off” – since I actually had to carefully choose the right partition inside the partition table, in order to keep my precious / intact.
The installation worked pretty much flawlessy: it was better than any installation procedure I’ve done in years; it seemed more like a LiveCD booting than a disk installation.
Unfortunately, here cometh trouble. I’ve a crappy Radeon 7000 graphic card and an Acer AC711 monitor; this combination yields major PITA, since X seems to work only when using the kernel’s framebuffer device, by setting the “UseFBDev” option to “true” inside the /etc/X11/XF86Config-4 file. Ubuntu’s kernel image comes with the Radeon framebuffer device compiled as a module – thus I’m unable to activate it before GDM spawns.
Hence, I’ll have to turn my Dummy Mode off, and recompile a kernel with the radeonfb module compiled statically and invoked inside the kernel command line.
So long for a dummy mode installation.