Ubuntu...I love you, I hate you

 I have been working on seeing if a .NET 3.5 application will port over to Linux, Ubuntu to be specific. I started with version 9.01, then 9.10 and now 10.04 as I find more and more that I need from Mono. I have a dual boot on a dev box, Windows 7 and Ubuntu.

An upgrade from Ubuntu 9.01 to 9.10 caused my mouse and keyboard to lock up. 

I was able to boot from a 9.10 cd. Then, I upgraded to 10.04 as I needed Mono 2,2. Upgrade worked, lost my windows boot though. it seems grub somehow jumped in and messed up the windows boot.

After Googlign liek crazy and trying this and that, these 2 links finally got me my windows boot back:

http://sourceforge.net/apps/mediawiki/bootinfoscript/index.php?title=Boot_Problems:Boot_Sector

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/927392

So, I am now thinking about trying SuSe instead as I hear\read it's more stable. I think a lot of my pains have been related to learning and getting use to Linux.  

 

 

 

 

 

4 Comments

  • We've had great luck with Fedora.

    If you're looking for something a bit more stable, but where you might be required to compile a package (such as Mono) from time to time, you may want to try CentOS or even Debian 5.

  • I rarely upgrade my Linux, I always clean install because
    1 - it is much faster, upgrade checks every package that need to be upgraded which take a lot of time (depends no of packages installed).
    2 - it clean up the mess that I done in last 6 months or 1 yr
    3 - some time issues occurs because old settings are not migrated to newer version of app.

    You can always test if everything work fine by running live

    I keep my home directory in separate partition so my data remains as it is even after clean install.
    Ubuntu is a very stable distro and as good as any other. Since you are using Linux for Mono, I recommend to you to use OpenSuse, because it provides latest packages (in disk) for mono than Ubuntu. If you to use Linux in VM there is a Mono VM available from Mono project.
    Caution:- I read on some forum that Linux runs slower in VirtualBox.

  • Doing a clean install is most preferred way to install newer version of Linux.

  • SuSe would probably have better Mono support, considering their both managed/developed by Novell. Ubuntu 9-10's upgrade process has been problematic they changed their start-up and have deviated drastically from other Linux operating systems moving to upstart and scaling back on what their build into their kernel increase boot time and performance.
    You pretty much have to do a fresh install of 10.04 in my experience.
    But Debian, SuSe, or CentOS are gonna be your best bet, if you want the latest and greatest build of mono for testing Debian or SuSe would be the easiest/quickest to build and deploy from.

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