Ubuntu spurns Microsoft's advances

FREE ADVICE IS WORTH EVERY PENNY as someone once famously said. For years, I have been guilty of replacing the word 'advice' with the word 'software' as every attempt I made to get Linux to work properly ended, if not in tears, at least in immoderate language and the dog fleeing the room in terror to avoid low-flying Mandrake CDs.

But time marches on. Products evolve and mature. Sometimes they even get better. So when I installed Vista, I thought it would only be fair if I also downloaded the latest version of Ubuntu, burned it onto CD and installed it on another machine. The ease with which the PC booted from the CD was impressive. Installation to the hard disk was a piece of cake. It was relatively simple, if not quite automatic, to get it talking over the LAN to the router and out to the InterWeb.

Quite an impressive start for a piece of free software, I think you'll agree. But (and you just knew there was a 'but' coming, didn't you?) then the wheels started to come off. Despite it being the latest ISO image I could find, the first thing the system did when it saw the Web was to download 104 updates - roughly 60 per cent more than a new install of Windows XP SP2 asks for.

The update process, though surprising in its quantity, was handled quickly enough at the 8Mb/second of my ADSL connection, although those with slower technology will obviously find it a less rewarding experience.

Had I been installing Ubuntu on a free-standing notebook, I must admit it would have been quite an auspicious start to my experience with Linux - an operating system I had always derided as being too clunky, too impenetrable, too difficult and too cheap to be worthy of serious attention.

But I wasn't installing it on a notebook, it's on a desktop machine sharing a LAN with two XP and one Vista boxes. Vista and XP play happily together, doing all the file and printer sharing I need with absolutely no bother. The Ubuntu PC is a different matter entirely. I was advised, by friends who swear by Linux and at Microsoft, that I needed to install Samba, which I duly did. I am assured that Samba's sole purpose in life is to enable Linux and Windows machines to co-exist and cooperate on the same LAN.

Well, I've only been playing with computers since 1972 and I couldn't make it work. Linux can see the Windows boxes and vice versa, but any attempt to access files is met with a login dialogue box that refuses any username and password I enter. Now my learned friends tell me I should be using something called Wine. I've been a heavy user of wine for many years and it certainly helped relax me but did absolutely nothing for my connectivity dilemma.

So I've done what any normal person would do in the circumstances - give up. If the awfully-clever people who write bits of open source code can't make it work automatically, I stand absolutely no chance of fixing it. It looks very much to me as if people clever enough to write an entire operating system can't make a simple bit of networking work, it has to be a deliberate marketing decision rather than a lack of ability.

The Ubuntu box now awaits rebirth as another Windows XP machine. I have neither the time nor the inclination to persevere with its perversity. Maybe I'll try Linux again in another ten years. Maybe by then it will have grown up. ?