Using an Older Stabler Ubuntu

Monday, 10 November 08, 10:10 am
Rich

The Ubuntu Hardy release saw the introduction of PulseAudio as the system's central audio daemon. Hitching a ride along with this were a host of general stability issues for many particular hardware setups. My system became a disaster overnight - Flash would routinely crash the browser, Wine had real problems using sound, and there were many other sound-related issues.

After waiting fruitlessly for several months for a fix, and unsuccessfully attempting to remove PulseAudio, the final push came when I had access to some alternative hardware that I could substitute for the hardware in my box, as I felt the PulseAudio issues must originate from issues with my specific hardware. When it became clear that the issues were independent of hardware, I decided it was time to revert to an earlier version, and so I installed Ubuntu Gutsy Gibbon over my old Debian 64 partition.

It works great - there are no more sound issues at all, and Linux is back to being a stable and powerful OS worthy of its 'It just works' tagline. It was a great relief to know that Linux itself had not become vastly unstable and unreliable.

My plan now is to use Gutsy as my primary Linux installation, and once everything has been transferred over from my Heron installation which still exists on a separate partition, give Gentoo Linux a try-out.

One thing that does annoy me about modern-day computing is the obsessive preoccupation with automatic updating. This morning, my Heron installation at work managed to commit temporary hari-kari, after over-zealously taking it upon itself to update to a new Linux kernel, a new Grub boot loader, and a new X-server. This is a pretty dramatic update, and it took a bit of tinkering around to get X up and running happily again.

So I wasted an hour or so just trying to get my system back to the same state it was last week - i.e. a useable state. This is all that matters to me - I don't have to have the latest features of every installed application the moment they are made available in the repos, and nor do I need to excessively worry about security issues.

So I think the Gentoo way could suit me quite well, as you pretty much install whatever bits and pieces you want as you need them, and handle updates yourself, compiling pretty much everything from source.

Using an old Ubuntu seems like it'll be a fairly nice intro to the Gentoo way of doing things, as the Gutsy repos are not updated as frequently as those of the latest Ubuntu distro, which to be honest is not all that frequently either.

So far I've successfully compiled and installed:

- Apache 2
- PHP
- MySQL
- Firefox (a.k.a. Minefield)
- Wine
- FlightGear flight simulator

as well as a host of smaller supporting packages and dependencies.