Teleidoscope

Wed, Aug 29, 2007

Ubuntu

Posted at 8:31 pm MDT to Technology

I'm getting annoyed at Ubuntu. I had more or less gotten used to their admin oddities, I thought.

But last night I learned (the hard way) that they have /bin/sh linked to /usr/bin/dash instead of /usr/bin/bash which is used by all the other Linux distributions. They are even sneaky about it: they use bash in user environments, but dash behind the scenes. And the two sheels are NOT functionally interchangeable. This means that software packages set up for generic Linux will often mysteriously fail to install or run properly.

I'm not sure they haven't also done something odd to their perl installation. I know perl, and I've seen a couple of different perl scripts acting out-of-spec in ways that break things. I was blaming my code, but I have my doubts, now, since the VMWare config utility is also acting up..

I downloaded vanilla perl source from perl.org and built it, and I've been downloading loading perl modules this evening. Tomorrow I'll see whether things behave any better. If not, I'll load a VMWare image of Fedora or Centos and see if I get the same behavior there as I do on Ubuntu.

I'm using this laptop for the remote access for my current gig, so I can't redo the operating system until November, but if Fedora is really providing decent KDE support in thier new releases, I may switch to Fedora instead of upgrading to the next version of Ubuntu.

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