Joseph Brower

Ubuntu 9.04 has been awesome in every sense of the word for me.  Unfortunately that doesn’t ring true for many friends (and a few family members of mine) that are running Intel graphics chipsets.  Let’s be optimistic and talk about the good things first.

The latest version of Ubuntu works extremely well on my laptop.  I have a Compaq nc8230.  This isn’t a state of the art laptop by any means, but it does it’s job well enough.  My system has a Pentium M 1.86 ghz CPU and 2 GB of Ram.  It also sports an ATI Mobility X600.  I don’t do a lot of gaming or 3D graphics on the laptop, so that provides plenty of power.  Out of the box on 9.04 everything worked, without requiring any proprietary drivers.  In fact, none are listed in the Hardware Drivers tool provided in the System menu.  I also have a compiz desktop, bluetooth, wifi, and other nice things working without needing to do any extra.  Installing packages is the same as before, except now there is a “Janitor” that helps you clean up packages that go awry or that don’t have a home in the repos anymore.  Overall, I couldn’t ask for a more pleasant experience.  Unfortunately it hasn’t been that way for everyone.

The only problems that I’ve experienced is my X server restarting when I try to do too many compiz effects (I’m suspecting that I’ll just have to live with that, since the x600 for laptops wasn’t built to do a whole lot.)  It has only happened a few times and has been when I’m tinkering with things.  For some people though (like my father, who is using a Dell 1505 (sometimes called the 6400) Inspiron, he can’t even start X after an upgrade.  Not only that, but when running off of the livecd, he gets told that he’s running in a safe graphics mode because his card isn’t acting properly.  That wouldn’t be so bad (I believe an update fixes that issue) but his mouse no longer works in 9.04.  Everything in his laptop was out of the box magic on 8.10 but 9.04 apparently has regressed.  I thought maybe he just had bad luck, but I just spent a considerable amoutn of time troubleshooting an issue with another intel graphics chipset.  Apparently Intel is in an uncomfortable position with their drivers.  I understand that this happens from time to time, but shouldn’t there be a bit more testing done?  This issue has really made life difficult for these people that I’ve set up with Ubuntu, have began to enjoy it, and then try to upgrade.  I love Ubuntu, but I feel like the QA was dropped a little bit in this release.  Everything outside of Intel has performed wonderfully however.  I don’t know how much could have been done to avoid this problem, but hopefully it can be resolved quickly.

Anyways, I don’t want it to sound like 9.04 is terrible or anything.  It really is the best Ubuntu release.  It runs faster, has more goodies, better stability, and other perks over 8.10, but for some users, it doesn’t appear to be a valid choice.  I hope that 9.10 resolves these issues and let’s new users easily step up to the next version without having any of these critical problems.

It looks like the date has finally been set for this year’s Utah Open Source Conference. You can find information for it at http://2009.utosc.com . I’m going to be putting in a few papers to see if I can present. Probably something about pfSense, freeNAS or phpTimeClock. Either way, if you haven’t gone before, you should. If you have gone before, then I’m sure you are already planning on coming to this one. It is quite an experience.