Solid Block of Ise

For the last week and a half I’ve been feeling very blue. I deleted my blog, then reinstated it again with the caveat that I wouldn’t write in it. This felt good for a while, but then I started feeling lost. I’m finding it more and more difficult to communicate my emotions with other people, and whenever I’m alone I get really blue.

There are good things in my life, but for the time being they’re quite distant. I feel a large lack of control in my life, and as always there’s plenty of factors to keep me down.

So, in an attempt to ventilate and get the frustration and anxiety out of my system I will try to find my passion for writing and blogging again. What better subject to start with than computers? I will start neutrally and maybe later I can find the voice to talk about my emotions.

—

It’s Monday today. Friday was the day that I just couldn’t take it any longer. I upgraded from Ubuntu 8.04 “Hardy Heron” to the new 8.10 “Intrepid Ibex”. Intrepid is still officially in beta, although it will get released this Thursday.

My upgrade went amazingly smooth and I only had to verify two files - both of which I had customized and this confused the upgrader. However, after verifying the changes and all that the upgrade was done.

But with less than a week left to release there’s still some amusing and some annoying issues left. This worries me a bit. First off it’s the I/O Scheduler which still behaves very sluggish on my computer. After changing the scheduler from the default CFQ scheduler to the Deadline scheduler things improved, but still performance is less than stellar. What worries me is that seemingly there’s no one who can tell me what this depends on and how to fix it. I’m not alone either, I’ve communicated with several other people who experience the same phenomenon. There’s no clear symptom - this appears on all kinds of hardware in all kinds of situations. This worries me, because this is typical of the Windows-world where no one knows anything and everyone is at the mercy of Microsoft. This is not Windows, we have access to the whole operating system and yet no one knows why this happens? I don’t like that.

But, I can deal with it and live with it. It’s a fairly minor issue in the long run, and I have faith that it’ll get sorted out eventually.

Two of the more amusing effects of upgrading is that my computer now uses less power and generates less heat. With Hardy my computer would consume about 185w when idling. When idling under Intrepid it uses about 162w. My CPU runs cooler as well, for some reason; this in turn means the CPU-fan doesn’t have to rotate as fast and that means my computer is quieter. With Hardy the CPU-fan would spin at around 1550rpm when idling. Now it spins at around 1350rpm when idling. Under full load on all four cores it will spin at around 1550rpm. This means a quieter computer and a less annoyed me.

UPDATE 081211: After some minor investigation this is because Ubuntu finally supports Cool’n'Quiet on Phenom-processors. Now it can scale them down and run them cooler. Hardy and previous versions didn’t have support for this on Phenom

Another of the less amusing effects is that bluetooth is essentially dead for me. A lot of people have experienced this problem as well, and this close to release I worry about it. Bluetooth worked flawlessly in Hardy (and all the versions previous as well) and suddenly in Intrepid it’s a no-go. If you tickle the service and restart it the icon pops up in the tray, but it doesn’t do anything. You can’t pair devices, can’t send anything, can’t receive anything. It’s a complete dud.

Finally, there’s a small bug in udev which causes CD/DVD-drives to close immediately after ejecting. Apparently this is caused by a change in the udev-rules which polls the optical drives immediately after ejecting, causing the drive to close. I hope it gets fixed.

EDIT: I applied a patch to the udev rules and now the funky open/close-bug has disappeared. As far as I know this patch is now applied in the repositories.

License

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