Ubuntu Failure Story

On Thu, Oct 27, 2005 at 11:09:41AM +0100, Matthew East wrote:
> A friend of mine mailed this morning to tell me about his complete and
> utter failure to make Ubuntu work with some hardware, so I have
> published his brief report here:
> 
> http://mdke.blogspot.com/2005/10/ubuntu-failure-story.html
> 
> I think it makes a change to hear about these things because we get a
> lot of awesome reports from users (i've had nothing but success on my
> hardware) and it helps keep things in perspective to see that there is
> still plenty of work to be done if we are gonna pull in users.
> 
> No doubt installing Windows XP on the same machine would prove equally,
> if not more painful, but Ubuntu needs a higher standard, because it is
> us that have to convert users to increase market share, not them...

It sounds like something is very wrong with this installation; the symptoms
are not indicative of a simple missing driver or any other hardware-specific
problem.  The assumption that Ubuntu doesn't work well on older hardware
seems to be a common one in situations like this, but is often not justified
by the facts.

For what it's worth, I run Ubuntu on a server with similar specs (400MHz
Pentium II) and it has worked perfectly since Warty.

Since this problem hasn't been reproduced by anyone willing to diagnose it
further, there isn't much to be done.

-- 
 - mdz