Distros That Just Work

I sigh every time I read a Distros That Just Work article. Because the reality is not all hardware is supported or tested. For the record, the same problem exists with Windows too.

A recent example.

At work we have some old netbooks. We are updating them with Linux and giving them away. On one netbook all versions of Ubuntu ISOs that we had on the shelf refused to boot. 16.04, 15.10, 14.10 — didn’t matter.

Curiously, some other distro ISOs did boot, such as Slackware Live and Puppy.

I ended up using my Ubuntu MATE partition images. I copied the images to a hard drive. With a SATA to USB adapter I copied the images to the netbook hard drive. Installing GRUB was next. Everything looked great upon rebooting.

No, not really.

The system booted but the boot splash refused to function. I had seen this happen before with Ubuntu. I knew the fix. I created /etc/initramfs-tools/conf.d/splash:

FRAMEBUFFER=y

Then update the initrd with update-initramfs -u.

Even then, the boot splash exhibited the usual quirks seen often in Linux systems.

I used the same images on my spare computers. Similar issues with the boot splash.

Another example. This blog is filled with articles addressing the topic.

Just works? No, not really. Perhaps some day.

Posted: February 04, 2018 Category: Usability Tagged: General

Next: Broken Xine

Previous: Linux on a 486