In the interests of laziness, I formatted my desktop (was running Slackware 11), and installed Ubuntu 7.04 x86_64. Lately I’ve cared less about handling low-level administration of my desktop, so it seemed like a good idea.
Things that went good
- Installation (minus one issue, see below)
- Suspend-to-ram works pretty darn well after some tweaking
- Installing flash from a guide on the interwebs
- Keeping my gnome profile, other settings
- Non-free codec and driver installation
- Nearly everything else
Things that went bad
- The graphical live CD couldn’t get X started in a sane manner
- X after the install was absolutely hosed.
- That’s about it
Over all that’s pretty good, but WTF on X not working. I have a plane old NVIDIA 6200 pci-e card. There’s nothing odd about it at all. When X came up on the live CD, it just displayed garbage. So, I dropped back to the console, fired up vim, and changed xorg.conf to use vesa instead of nv. After a quick jump to runlevel 3, going back to runlevel 4 got me to a nice gnome desktop.
When I rebooted into my minty fresh installation, whatever Ubuntu crapped out in the form of xorg.conf didn’t play well with my 4:3 LCD’s h-sync and vertical refresh. I had this problem when I first got the monitor (the image got shoved over to the right half of the monitor, and the monitor displayed a ‘Unsupported Mode’ warning). I figured nvidia-settings would make life better when I got the nvidia driver installed. No dice. I eventually tracked down an old backup of my xorg.conf, and copied the relevant monitor, device, and screen sections to get proper settings for both my monitors and twinview set up. Honestly this isn’t too much of a problem for a person who has been running Slackware for a while, but I thought Ubuntu would do a much better job handling X than it did.
Getting flash installed was pretty simple. I just googled “ubuntu amd64 flash”, and came up with a forum topic which had instructions for installing necessary 32bit libs flash needs and a neat little wrapper to make a 64bit firefox embed flash nicely.
Suspend to ram worked out of the box decently, with a couple of snags. First off, the network didn’t come back up. By default Ubuntu thinks the forcedeth module for my ethernet card should be unloaded, and since forcedeth is a reverse-engineered driver the hardware ends up in a wonky state when that happens. The module didn’t get loaded back in the kernel after waking the machine up, and when manually modprobe’d the device got a different MAC address. That’s not a big deal except I have static IP assignments with dns names associated with them on my home network, and I like to have that working. Adding forcedeth to MODULES_WHITELIST in /etc/default/acpi-support fixed that, and now the network plays nicely with suspending. Secondly, I’d get graphical glitches, non-working ttys, and vbetool pegging the crap out of one of my cores after resuming. Commenting out SAVE_VBE_STATE and POST_VIDEO fixed that, and video comes back nicely now. Other than those two things and something (gnome-power-manager or hal?) thinking that my machine didn’t suspend correctly when it did and giving me a notification about it, suspend works really well on this machine and allows me to save a ballpark $9 on my electric bill each month.
On the codec front, after remembering that Ubuntu doesn’t ship mp3, wma/v, or ac3 support out of the box, I opened up a few of these files in Totem. This brought up a dialog asking me if I wanted to download something to decode that file format, warning me about legal issues with such non-free and horribly patent-encumbered software. Installing them got me support for them for all my gstreamer-based applications (Totem and Rhythmbox are all I care about). Dropline Gnome never shipped totem-gstreamer, or decoders for wmv and ac3. Heck, I tried to get ac3 decoding going in gstreamer myself, and I couldn’t find anything outside of a €7 plug-in offered by Fluendo that I’m not going to pay for to decode the one ac3 album I have. The decoder that Ubuntu knew about doesn’t seek in the files, but I can live with that. Windows media files play decently; the decoder is better in some respects than the hackish wine-wrappered mplayer solution I had gotten working back a few years ago with Windows dlls. So, I’m pretty pleased with the media situation.
Anyway after a few hours of poking at issues, I’ve got a desktop working better than I had after two years of maintaining a Slackware installation on this machine, and I get to be lazier than before! I do have to give up the great dev environment that Slackware gives me, and that sucks, but them’s the breaks. I still plan on keeping Slack on my laptop for the time being, as it works better with getting Linux to consume little power. Otherwise, Ubuntu seems quite nice for my needs.
I’m keeping my Slackware case badge though.
