Ubuntu Failure Story

Non-plugandplay boards as well as ISA boards in many older machines are 
a challenge.  Though most issues can be overcome, it does take more than 
typical know-how to find setup information and the files to put them in, 
as it often has to be done with a text editor to start-up files. 

Sometimes we forget the bad old days with everything non-standard from 
sound boards to modems and nic cards.

Harold Sawyer
www.SawyerSphere.net

Matt Zimmerman wrote:

>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.
>
>  
>