So a couple of weekends ago I got the new hardware for my personal PC. I was very excited and took a portion of the hard drive space off for Ubuntu. It wasn’t until this weekend that I finally had an opportunity to perform the installation. So I downloaded the AMD 64bit version for my new dual core 64-bit CPU. I burned the disk and installed Ubuntu. Everything came up great, it seemed sound, network and video were working. The only issue with the video is I was stuck at 1024×768. I wanted the full 1600×1050, it appears I need to load the Nvidia driver. This is where everything has gone wrong first I had to find the billion packages the standard install didn’t load. Then I had to install the driver, and it appeared to work. XWindows didn’t dang it. I have battled over this googling my heart out. I’ve come closer but still no victory.

I want to preface my comment here. I’m a DBA and I regularly work in Linux to manage my Oracle databases. However, I am by no means a Linux expert. But should I have to be?

The reason for this long and somewhat uninteresting post is Linux needs to make things work a bit better if they want to have widespread acceptance. As much as people like to bash Windows I have to say generally pretty much all hardware drivers work when you install them as instructed. I can’t say this has been true for pretty much every Linux install I’ve ever done. Your average consumer just wants everything to work. They don’t want to have to spend hours searching for answers. I think this might be a good reason the Mac is popular as it’s closed system just allows things to work better. I’ll continue my struggle to get Ubuntu to work but I wanted to voice my concern.