Solid Block of Ise

I really shouldn’t be sitting here blogging about Linux, but instead get my lazy ass into the kitchen and doing the damn dishes. I’m excellent at procrastinating, so sue me.

Last night I had bit of a hard time falling asleep, and as is fairly common these days my brain goes into a maelstrom of thoughts. One that slightly coherent thought was “I should blog about Hardy” and then my mind fell back into chaos for another twenty minutes before I finally fell under the spell of morpheus.

So, what are my thoughts on the upcoming version of Ubuntu? Mostly they can be summed up with “more of the good stuff, less of the bad stuff”.

I’ve been running Hardy as my current desktop since upgrading my machine. Right after the upgrade I modified my current Gutsy-install to work with the new hardware, but I think I broke something in it and it started acting funky after a while. It didn’t want to play nice with my new graphics-card (BFG Geforce 9600GT) since it’s so new that Nvidia still haven’t gotten their Linux-drivers for it out of beta. This meant I had to install the driver the manual way, and also meant surgically removing some bits of Gutsy that otherwise would’ve conflicted with the new driver. I suppose that somewhere along the line my wild flailing broke something, and after a quick backup I decided to start fresh.

The Gutsy live-cd wouldn’t play nice either, and I felt that it was kind of bass-ackwards to install Gutsy just to upgrade it in a month or so. Thus, I went for the then-current Alpha6 of Hardy. Since then it’s gone into beta, so if you download it now it will be of that quality from the start and then get updated as you go along.

Installation went fine, it used the VESA-driver for the live-cd portion. I also went for the 64-bit version since I now have a CPU capable of those extensions. I had heard that there would be some issues, but I forged ahead boldly and decided that I’d have to figure out those issues as I went along. What does not kill you instead makes you stronger, right?

After some minor tweaking it was up and running. Still no Ubuntu-support for the 9600GT so I installed the drivers manually from Nvidia. Pretty simple for me, but newbies will definitely get confused by this.

Let’s break down my experience of Hardy. Remember that I installed Alpha6 of it, and I’ve applied updates for it since then so now my installation is “beta-quality”.

* GDM would consume a lot of CPU (a lot, as in 100% of one of my four cores) after logging in, and generally the system would become jerky and somewhat unresponsive. Logging out and back in solved this, but it was definitely an irritation. It has now disappeared after several updates.

* PulseAudio would sometimes lock up and die. This would bring Rhythmbox down as well. Restarting the PA-daemon would solve this until it crashed once again. This is no longer an issue and PulseAudio plays well.

* Unlike Feisty and Gutsy my Soundblaster Audigy2 ZS is now capable of genuine 5.1 Dolby Digital-surround. For some reason this never worked under Feisty and Gutsy (but did under Edgy!) and I could never figure out why.

* Some of my regular apps aren’t supported under the 64-bit arch, but I simply compiled them from source instead. This might change in the future.

* Setting up evdev for complete support of my Logitech MX1000 proved to be futile. Apparently a lot of things regarding hotplug and evdev has changed since Gutsy, and most of it is unfortunately poorly documented. Previously I had set up my mouse with a pretty arcane mix of evdev and xbindkeys but this wouldn’t play well under Hardy. Instead I discovered btnx which is a lot smoother to set up. Again, I had to compile this from source since there was no native 64-bit binary in the repos. A nice side-effect of this was that I didn’t have to mess around with my xorg.conf since btnx has a GUI, albeit somewhat obtuse.

* Flash actually worked out of the box. I had previously heard horror-stories about having to install a 32-bit Firefox in order to get Flash working since Adobe doesn’t provide a 64-bit version of Flash. This worked out of the box, no funky installs needed or anything. I haven’t investigated why, if Adobe decided to release a 64-bit version of Flash (highly doubtful) or if Canonical/Ubuntu does some impressive voodoo to get it all working (much more likely).

* Firefox 3 is faaaaast. At first I found it confusing and annoying, and most of my extensions wouldn’t work. Beta 4 of FF3 is included in the current Hardy, and it’s actually quite nice now that I’ve gotten used to it. Some extensions I like worked, others could be hacked to fool them into working. Some that got hacked made FF3 kinda funky and had to be uninstalled. Never the less, FF3 is very, very fast compared to FF2 .

* For whatever reasons Conky refuses to read sensor-readings from LM-sensors. Even though they’re set up correctly and reporting values Conky refuses to display them. I have no idea why, Conky doesn’t give any errors or anything. This led to me doing a bit of soul-searching and ultimately deciding that I didn’t like Conky any more, since it didn’t give me any information I couldn’t find out through a terminal (which I always keep open) and also it forces me to minimize whatever windows I have open. So bye-bye Conky, it was fun while it lasted.

* Gnome 2.22 is a much nicer experience due to myriads of minor touch-ups. The file/open/save/whetever dialogs are much nicer. Click on a picture and it automatically displays a thumbnail of that picture, rather than forcing you to remember a filename. Panels slide into view after login, and when dragging icons they are now completely alpha-transparent so you can actually see where you’re dragging and dropping them. Nautilus now detects the contents of memory-cards and give well-meaning suggestions as to what to do with it. There are no huge differences, but there’s several minor and they make Gnome so much nicer to work with.

* Compiz Fusion 0.7.whatever is included and there’s a few new neat effects to dazzle your friends with. Some of them are pure eyecandy, some of them are quite useful, a lot of them are both or neither. It’s all up to you to decide what you want to enable.

* Several minor touches such as a prettier login-screen and a slightly fresher default theme help to make Hardy a bit more polished. First I thought it was a bit sad that the brand-new theme got delayed until Ubuntu 8.10 but since I’ve never used the default Ubuntu theme it was a pretty minor point.

* Installing the Konica-Minolta color-laser we have was a bit less painful than before. It pretty much autodetected, but I had to install the m2300w package in order to get the proper driver, since it defaulted to text-only. Other things that get plugged into the computer is detected automagically and work just fine, this includes my Wacom-tablet.

* For whatever reason the splashscreen doesn’t work. This is no longer true, at least not for me. The other night I decided to see if it had changed (since among several updates then was included an update to usplash), enabled splash and rebooted. Lo and behold, it worked.

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Hardy gets released on April 24th and I think it will be interesting. I’m not going to proclaim any huge revolutionary inroads to the world of Windows, but I think Ubuntu is a pretty solid distribution. Sure, there were some issues with the Alpha6, but they’ve all disappeared with the updates and as far as I’m concerned my Hardy-installation is solid.

One thing though that constantly irks me with Linux is the sound-support. It’s nice seeing Hardy dropping the ancient ESD in favor of PulseAudio, but I still think that sound-support under Linux could use some serious cleaning-up. It’s a bit confusing with two different architectures (ALSA and the now obsolete OSS) providing the base, and then on top of that have to wonder about sound-daemons and sinks and such. Yeah, yeah, I know I’m essentially talking out of my ass since I’m not a developer and have no deep insights into the inner workings of the OS, but as a user I find it somewhat confusing - and I’m not a greenhorn! PulseAudio is neat, providing drop-in replacement for ESD (the Enlightened Sound Daemon, which hasn’t been developed since frickin’ 2001, so it was about time that it got shelved!) and also adding some neat tricks such as the ability to send sound over a network to another computer running PulseAudio.

If there’s any questions about Hardy I will do my best to try to answer them, but remember that I’m just a user and not a developer or in any way a part of the creation-process.

UPDATE 080331: I added a point of contention.

License

This work is published under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivs 2.5 Sweden License.