This kind of enthusiasm is certainly encouraging as Linux matures. And certainly, this kind of enthusiasm is much needed for the open source community in general. Whether it is proprietary software or free software, the community acceptance is definitely key to the success of its future.

I have three systems running on Ubuntu at home right now. My WordPress server is running Ubuntu 8.04 server (32 bit). One of my working machine is running Ubuntu 8.04 64 bit and the other is running Ubuntu 8.10. For my server, I will stick to the 8.04 as it is an LTS release. But I am thinking of installing the latest Ubuntu desktops onto my workstations in the next couple of weeks…

Update 1 8:00 PM
I have just installed Ubuntu 9.04 using the ISO image I downloaded earlier onto a VM. The installation was made even easier (the time zone is now selected by default). The default installation took just about five minutes. The boot time is also very impressive. It took just about 20 seconds before showing the login screen, which is a big improvement over my 8.04 installation.

Update 2 9:00 PM
Even though a fresh installation might be ideal, I decided to run the update on my Ubuntu 8.10 machine anyway. This is mainly because it was used as a file and VM server and I had done very little customizations on it besides that. So I think the chances of getting a successful upgrade is pretty high. The distribution upgrade is pretty slow though, and it is downloading at about 30k/s right now…

Upgrading from Ubuntu 8.10 to 9.04

Update 3 4/24/2009 7:00 AM
The 8.10 to 9.04 upgrade went surprisingly well. The only problem I had has nothing to do with Ubuntu.

Since the machine I was doing the update on is a file and VMs server, I did not bother attach display or keyboard to it. So when I was doing the update yesterday used an SSH connection and forgot that the updates would need to shutdown SSH and other services in order to install the newer version of the daemons. Anyway, half way through the upgrade, the connection to my server was lost. At first I thought that I could just attach a monitor and keyboard to my server and continue the whole upgrade process. Of course it wouldn’t work since the upgrade process was tied to that particular terminal.

So I had to reboot the machine. For whatever reason, maybe because the machine was only half upgraded, the normal boot does not work and I could not log in via the graphical login screen. I restarted in “safe” mode dropping into a root shell and did a

sudo dpkg –configure -a

And the upgrade process picked up from where it was left at before. This is truly impressive! After the upgrade process finished, I rebooted into the new 9.04 installation:

sudo lsb_release -a

Distributor ID: Ubuntu
Description: Ubuntu 9.04
Release: 9.04
Codename: jaunty

The only thing that did not work after the upgrade was the VMWare Server (which is totally expected as it needs to link to the correct version of libraries). But after a simple re-config, the VMWare Server came back into life.

While personally I see Linux and other UNIX variants as strong candidates to have the possibility to eventually replace Windows in both the consumer domain and the enterprise domain, it seems that this sea change is not going to happen any time soon as predicted by some.

Today although Linux is widely used in the server market, in the consumer domain it remains a niche market, accounting for just around 2% of market shares. Even thought the current economic down turn had sped up Linux’s adoption, it is still too small to make any significant impact on the overall consumer OS landscape.

Don’t get me wrong, I think that Linux is an excellent operating systems and in fact I think that it is a perfect Windows replacement for all the technical folks and certainly geeks. But the following issues remain some of the big obstacles for the normal consumers.

Codec

This is not the problem of Linux per se. Due to the open source nature and the various legal reasons, most free Linux distributions (e.g. Ubuntu, openSUSE) do not come with popular codecs (e.g. the codecs for playing back MP3′s and WMV files) installed. While for geeks it might be quite trivial to dig around in the vast Linux application repositories and find the exact codecs needed in a matter of minutes, the average Joes might have a hard time figuring out why his favorite DVD won’t play on his Linux system.

Consumer Applications

This gap has been closing rapidly over the years. Now we have FireFox, Thunderbird, OpenOffice and many other productivity applications come as standard in almost all popular distros. And even some professional software suites have their alternatives in the Linux World. For example, GIMP is a capable replacement for Adobe Photoshop. However, many of the most popular consumer software products remains missing on the Linux platform. Computer game is one of them. While I do not play computer games, many people would like to use their PCs to play some popular games occasionally. And to some, because of these Windows only and no Linux equivalent applications, there is no alternative but to use Windows.

Drag and Drop

For those who are used to Windows, drag and drop seems to be a given. All most all applications in Windows support drag and drop, but on Linux such support is inconsistent at best.

Copy and Paste

This is another area frustrates a lot of Windows users. In Windows, copy and paste pretty much works among all the applications. In Linux however, it does not always work and sometimes

The Command Line

Most Linux distributions use BASH. For seasoned users, using the command line is just as convenient if not more so than using a GUI equivalent application. In fact I personally prefer the “terminal” as it gave me the most flexibility and none of the overhead. But we can not expect every user has the same level of comfort with the command line environment.

I just mentioned a few areas where I think are among some of the main obstacles to the broad adoption of Linux. And most of these are interoperability issues which are not going to be resolved anytime soon. To the advanced users, most of these issues are pretty minor and there are many ways to work around. But to the average users who have accustomed to the consistencies within the system, even minor incontinence can mean a show stopper.

With all that said, I have found Linux to be a very attractive platform. While Linux might not be able to replace the proprietary Windows anytime soon for the reasons I discussed above, it has seeded deeply inside many people who believe in the free software movement and I am hopeful that one day we will see the OS world dominated by open source software, be it Linux or something else.