Coolness of Ubuntu
Inspired by Sven’s recent post and some messages on ILUG, I replaced SuSE 10.0 on my Sony Vaio VGN-TX1XP laptop with the Desktop copy of the new Ubuntu 6.06 “Dapper” release. (I tried to install an earlier version of Ubuntu in the past, and hoped this would go more smoothly. Bingo, it was great.)
After doing a full backup of my system (aka rsync -vaRx / brendan@otherbox:/backup/kaylee-20060604/), It took maybe 5 minutes from booting off the CD to having the installation process get underway; you start by just double-clicking the “Install” image on the desktop.
The whole install took about 20 minutes. A reboot at the end and it came back up as a fully functional system.
So far, so good, tho I’m a KDE user normally so its GNOME default will take some getting used to. Of particular interest so far:
- Ubuntu uses
apt-getinstead ofrpmfor packages; - the GNOME Network Manager makes it really easy to switch between Ethernet and wireless;
- X automatically goes to 1366×768, the not-so-normal size of the screen on the TX series of laptops;
- hibernation is quite fast—the same under SuSE took much more time;
- even more amazing: suspending (aka standby and its glowing orange power button) works (well, almost)! I right-clicked on the Power Manager battery icon at the top, and in its preferences I selected it to use suspend when the lid closes. Down goes the lid, wait til it’s orange, open it up, and in about 10 seconds at most the screen saver is prompting for my password, and everything is still there and working (including the network interfaces). Awesome awesome awesome—for about a day. But then it fails to properly bring up X when it’s woken up; this is apparently a known bug, still not fully fixed.
- Fn-F5 and Fn-F6 darken and brighten the screen (I knew there were tricks I could play under SuSE with lots of manual editing to try to make this happen; here it just works);
- Just by doing a
rsyncof~/.gaim*from the backup, I was able to bring up Gaim (installed by default) with no trouble at all; - everything, including bringing up Firefox to edit this post, goes really fast;
- the original install of XP wasn’t messed up (in part cuz of my selection of partition from the previous install of SuSE), but even better, the Ubuntu install of Grub automatically put it in the list of choices at boot-up;
- I have to do Ctrl-Alt-Left and Ctrl-Alt-Right to switch workspaces, instead of the Ctrl-Tab used by KDE to cycle thru them;
- Applications -> Add/Remove is so amazingly easy to install other stuff I want (like Thunderbird, Kaffeine, emacs, and Gnumeric).
I’m really impressed at how easy and seemingly effortless it was to install this.
B
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I have a TX1HP and have been so impressed with Dapper on it- been using Dapper since flight 2 with no major issues.
A couple of annoyances though-
- Volume up and down hard buttons on the front right do not work, although they do appear to alert the system when pressed.
- It would be nice if the hard cd-rom eject button worked.
- I continue to have interesting issues with OSS and ALSA sound levels- has anyone else esperienced this? I.e. not knowing which tract to use to control volume properly?
- When instaling 6.06 LTS I have noticed that the screen goes blank about two thirds way through the install, and a couple of white artifacts appear on the screen- eventually the install finishes, but it does throw you a bit when you can’t see whats going on. I never had this issue with flight 7 or before, but it did appear as soon as I installed 6.06 RC 1 as well as 6.06 LTS.
Comment by Tom Ranson — June 5, 2006 @ 10:46 GMT
Brendan, maybe you should of tried Kubuntu instead. I’m even thinking about Xubuntu on my P2 laptop.
Comment by sven — June 5, 2006 @ 20:46 GMT
OK. This is what gets me. The really cool features of XGL, Network Manager were developed by folks at Novell / SUSE (Rob Love and Dave Reveman. The powermanagement aka suspend and hibernate was part of a joint effort between SUSE and intel. Sadly all of the excitement has gone to Ubuntu. openSUSE 10.1 is rock solid, and has all of these features not to mention other cool Novell/SUSE apps like banshee, beagle and tomboy. Where’s the love?
Comment by Patrick — June 6, 2006 @ 11:05 GMT
Open Source can be a blessing and a curse.
To stray a bit, closed source is just a curse. I’ve got a duel G5 as my desk top, and all it does for me for work is allow me to test my work in Safari. Mac X11 kept crashing, X11 on Virtual PC @#$%s up the mouse, I can’t have one continous memory areas larger then 2G even with 4G of memory, the default Mac window manager has the motto of be user friendly my way or @#$% off. Plus it kills me that a Quicktime update requires a reboot. To continue, a UNIX style systems with case-insensitive files names can confuse CVS to no end. I do most of my work on a P3 running Debian via Chicken of the VNC. We are switiching some servers from MacOS X to Solaris, I wonder if I will have some Solaris bitches soon.
What’s good about the Mac? iTunes, and the Character Palette. Plus, unlike solaris, it comes with a rxvt terminfo entry.
Comment by Sven Heinicke — June 6, 2006 @ 15:04 GMT