What follows is a short log of me installing Kubuntu 6.10 Edgy Eft on an old Dell Inspiron 8000 laptop:

Nice boot screen. LiveCD is a bit slow. Went to black screen, then resorted to text status messages.

An X screen! And the mouse works! Hmm, looks like a light blue screen is all I’m going to get. Trying Ctrl+Alt+F1. Looks like a login prompt. I type `top’ to see what’s running. No output. Alt-F2. No commands usable. Ctrl-Alt-Del. Nothing. Hold down power button for hard reset.

Try again in “safe graphics mode”. 5 more minutes… a KDE splash screen! And a startup sound! This is more like it. It’s even in 1600×1200! And there’s a working battery applet! The sound is a bit laggy, but then that’s probably because it’s using shitty shitty artsd.

No internet. It doesn’t seem to have detected my DWL-122 USB wifi dongle. Well, it’s an exotic piece of hardware. Try hot-plugging a PCMCIA Linksys 54g adaptor. It didn’t crash! Wireless LAN Assistant couldn’t find any networks though (”Did you run using sudo?”; no, then yes, and got the same message). Restart in case the card is only configured on startup. K Menu -> Log Out -> Restart results in black screen with blinking cursor. Hard reset again.

This time I get a stream of errors “while loading bcm43xx” instead of a calm black screen before X starts. Not pretty or reassuring.

No change in connectivity. KDE Network Settings shows the card as eth1, but no wireless networks are found.

Ubuntuforums.org suggests installing bcm43xx-fwcutter or ndiswrapper-utils. Very helpful for a machine that has no networking. I’ll postpone networking for now and just get Edgy installed.

Time in the installer is written as “01:43:10 PM”. Sloppy. Keyboard layout selector is nice. Manually partitioned disk. Decided not to use ReiserFS.

30 minutes later and it’s restarting. The logout sound appears to be an old Windows logout sound. Not good practice for a sueable distribution. Bootup is faster now that it’s installed. Still no networking.

On the whole, I’m impressed with the visual polish. No stuttering glitchy dialog boxes, nice consistent colours, and a generally clean fresh look. I may even be able to overlook the fact that it did nothing on first boot; a moderately savvy user could reasonably remember that there was a safe-mode option that he could try.

It’s clearly the best distro out at the moment, and I’d like to give it, say, 85%, but I can’t forgive its inability to set up a wireless network. Internet connectivity is pretty much all computers are good for these days, and so its final score is:

0%.

Sorry Ubuntu, but broken networking is a total showstopper bug.

Update 31/10/2006

I apt-get dist-upgrade’d my desktop dapper installation. No, of course it didn’t work first time. Several apt-get -f install sessions later, I succeed and discover that Edgy is a total mess. Fonts are shockingly broken. GTK1 applications no longer display any fonts - important only for XMMS, but since Amarok still isn’t stable, it’s kind of important. KHotKeys now works only sporadically. Firefox 2.0 has a bizarre array of rendering bugs in its default theme. Everything seems slower - konsole now has a visible lag as it repaints when scrolling.

This is really, really poor.