Ubuntu 7.04 Feisty Fawn
The Dell D610 laptop was upgraded from Ubuntu 6.06 “Dapper Drake” to 7.04 “Feisty Fawn” over the weekend. It was a two stage process, with 6.10 “Edgy Eft” being intermediate step. Unfortunately, that step didn’t go too well.
Halfway through the upgrade process the user interface stopped responding. Input required to complete the install could not be provided. Rebooting left a lot of broken packages which took several hours to fix, manually. This was also new territory.
The second upgrade, from Edgy to Feisty (the “what the hell, no guts, no glory”, upgrade), went a lot smoother. That was followed by several hours mucking around with ATI graphics drivers to get 3D acceleration working again.
At this point the system is operational. Skype no longer steals 100% of the CPU for 10 seconds when a new message is received. The digital USB headset is still working. The user interface is prettier. Life is good, but more tweaks are still required.
- The touchpad is overly sensitive. Adding Alps touchpad configurations to xorg.conf seems to have helped, but it’s not quite right yet.
- Sound quality on external speakers is worse than it used to be. Strangely, headphones are
VMware Workstation Unsupported
Only after finishing the upgrade was it realised that VMware Workstation 5.5.3 is not supported on either 6.10 Edgy Eft or 7.04 Feisty Fawn as the host operating system. This forum post provided an unsupported workaround. Phew, should have checked that first.
It Should Just Work
Sure, the Ubuntu upgrade wasn’t really necessary, but it’s nice to have the latest versions of OpenOffice, Firefox and friends available via the package manager. It also fixed an annoying horizontal line that kept appearing under the mouse cursor, which much research and tweaking had never managed to eradicate.
Linux is interesting, and is usually rock solid. It’s the less refined stuff around the edges of the operating system that has a negative impact on the user experience. When you need to delve into configuration files, or install dodgy drivers, the result is more browsing of forums (often with conflicting solutions), more tweaking, and no guarantee of a positive result. That’s OK if Linux is a hobby, but for most of us time is money. If you are tweaking Linux you aren’t doing other things.
Linux is getting better, but contrast this experience with the family iMac G5. The operating system has been very low maintenance since we got it over two years ago. A single hardware fault was fixed under warranty. The only issues we’ve had have been with a few third party games.
Apple gear commands a premium price, and the Apple empire also likes to lock you in. If that’s the only price of “it just works” then a MacBook will be a strong contender when the D610 needs replacing. It will also be interesting to see how much Ubuntu has improved at that point in time.
Update: It took another three hours of fiddling to get sound working properly. sigh
mark berry — 24 April 2007, 09:48
Yeah, I was too chicken to do a clean install. I wasn't confident that I knew where all the settings were for individual applications. As it was, all my wireless network settings, except home (strangely), all disappeared during the upgrade.
Ubuntu is getting better. The main issue I've found is hardware compatibility. If the hardware is too new it may not be supported by mature drivers. If it's too old, like my graphics card, you don't get the fancy stuff like Compiz. If you get a mix of too old and too new in one machine it could get ugly.
Andrew
Andrew Hallam — 24 April 2007, 22:50
I made the upgrade to Feisty on my Dell D610 recently as well. I must say my networking setup is working seemless compared to the problems I had in previous versions of Ubuntu. However, ever since I upgraded my hibernate has not been working and my close lid action no long puts the laptop in suspend. Did you run into either of these problems?
Michael
Michael — 6 May 2007, 14:45
Changes between network location profiles is definitely a lot faster. The only negative has been having to use the command line to run my wireless EVDO modem because I can no longer edit the AT string through the networking applet.
I've had one instance (out of a handful) of suspend not working when the lid was closed. The laptop was still running, and quite warm, when I took it out of my backpack. Haven't tested hibernate.
However, I am having lots of issues when running under battery (I have two batteries installed). Linux can take 5 minutes to boot (usually 1 minute), and applications take minutes to load. It seems to be some sort of power management issue, but I cannot find it.
When I manually choose to boot with 2.6.17 kernel image everything works as desired under battery power. Then again, I just rebooted using the 2.6.20 kernel and it's working fine!?
Andrew Hallam — 6 May 2007, 18:40
Andrew Hallam — 23 May 2007, 06:47