Project Ubuntu: Report #2 - Bumps in the Road

So it seems our intrepid explorer, who I'll start calling "Max," spent the first full week of Project Ubuntu hobbled by software glitches.

In last week's episode, we learned that the system upgrades Max undertook to be able to listen to his music collection killed off his sound playback entirely.

The root of the issue turns out to be that because of legal restrictions, Ubuntu can't play common media formats out of the box. Max and I didn't know this starting out; if we had, we could have avoided the situation entirely by installing a third-party freeware player like VLC media player.

As it was, it seems like there was a conflict between the Ubuntu installation that came with the laptop, courtesy of Dell, and the device drivers Max downloaded in the course of trying to solve his music playback issue.

I asked Max to leave the laptop with me, and I resolved the issue, but I'm not sure how. I found some reports of Max's issue and attempted a fix other people had tried. The fix was only partially successful, but when, in a semi-desperate moment, I had the system perform another upgrade, the sound suddently started working again. Maybe the partial fix was enough, maybe today's kernel fixed the bug at the root of the problem. I just don't know.

In the end, it seems, all is well, but Max lost a lot of time to the issue, which was not one of the goals of this enterprise. And it took about an hour away from a technology support specialist and his knowledge of Linux, such as it is, to resolve.

I had known that for all its virtues, Ubuntu lacks the seamlessness of, say, Mac OSX, and I suppose that'll be out of reach for a while in the jumble of hardware and software from so many different sources.