Ubuntu impressions 5 days on

Five days ago I installed linux for the first time in a decade.

am I impressed? Hell yes.

upfront, ease of use, intuitive configuration and accessibility were great.

everything was detected and worked out of the box, or should i say out of the ISO.

so that was great, I spent quite some time browsing around, saying ooo, aaaah, wow!, hey and associated other remarks of amazement and happiness.

so for first impressions, definitely a winner.


The Next Step

Trying to do something a bit more technical, and a bit more in line with using it like a desktop.

I downloaded Wolfenstein: Enemy Territory.

it took me a little while to install, then when I worked out how to install it, I was missing a gtk lib.

but a quick google found me several great tutorials on how to install ET on linux, including a few distro specific solutions.

I also used windows logic, using the gui i discovered I could mark it as executable, right click and go "open"

so thats all good.

the tutorial I was reading said to test the system for direct rendering, using

"glxinf | grep rendering"

so I did that, but to my despair, the answer was NO!
so I then followed off a link to a site that had two sets of instructions, one for installing the proprietary ATI radeon driver included in the repository, and the other set was how to install the latest from ATI.

me being a geek and loving a challenge, thought I might go through the process of a manual compile and install.
(Ignoring all the flashing warning signs)
So I followed the instructions, rebooted and...

....................................BLANK

right.

so then I went through the whole process of rebooting, loading the bootstrap off the cd to see if anythere there could help,
searching the web,
and went through all sorts of things.

I knew how to get to the console via the recovery, but couldn't work out what to do from there.

I even joined a number of Ubuntu IRC channels to ask for help, (got completely ignored)

however just before I gave up and went back to windows full time.

I discovered there was a ONE LINE COMMAND.

thats all, JUST ONE LINE!!!

all you linux gurus out there I'm sure will know it already, but maybe one day this will help someone who was stuck like I was.
This line allows you to reconfigure X.

sudo dpkg-reconfigure xserver-xorg

and that brings up a reconfiguration wizard/tool.

ran through that, got X going again.

so then I chose to install the ATI drivers from the repository. followed all the instructions to the letter....
except one towards the end, saying you need to restart.

so after messing around with a number of problems, I realised I needed to reboot. did that,

ran glxinfo | grep rendering
and got a nice YES

so then I ran Wolfenstein ET (after patching etc.) and man does it run well, I am getting a similar framerate on two cloned screens as i did on a single screen through windows,

and I am running at a better quality.

the other problem is I keep getting kicked by Punk Buster after about 3 to 5 minutes for "GAME INTEGRITY VIOLATION"

what on earth that means I don't know.

But hey, at least I'm 3D Accelerated.

so now I am Happily running Ubuntu 6.10, without any further dramas.

I'll continue to learn. however now that I have a week of linux under my belt, I'm going to jump in the deep end and get one of my other machines up and running with a Ubuntu LAMP server.




Other related posts:
Ubuntu install update. (Boot into Windows Count: 1)
Installing Ubuntu - So easy, I may be about to join the darkside