So, here I am, trying out Ubuntu since I've heard it's all "easy to administer". I love the control Gentoo gives me, but I don't need it everywhere, right? More work for not much benefit, I think.
After a few days of wrestling with Ubuntu's installer (which is so simple that if even the slightest thing goes wrong, it chokes and doesn't bother to inform the user of this, even in "expert" mode), I'm able to get it installed and booting. "Now comes the easy administration!", I think. Then I meet Ubuntu's update-grub. update-grub is a handy-dandy script which edits your grub/menu.lst when you, say, install a new kernel. Useful, huh? Except it seems to be putting in some options I don't like: quiet and splash. So I edit it out. Huh, it's put them back? Okay, let's check the manpage. Okay, it mentions a bunch of weird commented out options which it's then going to parse. It doesn't mention the one I need to change, but there's defoptions in the file, and it's all changed and happylike. Except that it's back when I run it again. Not only is it back, but it has handily edited defoptions for me to have splash and quiet in them. YOU WILL HAVE THESE OPTIONS. COMPLY. COMPLY. The script is a hackish shell monstrosity which repeatedly parses the doubly-commented options, adds their values to some defaults which you can't configure, and then resets every option back to whatever idiotic defaults someone out there thinks that everyone who runs Ubuntu should use, whether they want to or not. Who writes this shit? Whatever happened to the idea of configuration files being things that users edited, and programs followed? -- <> :#,_@ v <^ " Michael Leuchtenburg | http://slashhome.org/ " +73 ^ " cell: 413.433.0739 " +7<
