Date: 4 May 2010 Comments: 1

Time to upgrade…

This time I decided to do clean installation instead of upgrade of my Ubuntu. I had 2 simple reasons for that, 1. on my SONY VAIO VGN-SZ4VWN/X model I have got 2 G of memory and due to hardware limitations I cannot upgrade event though  system is 64 bit. What I did actually was to downgrade from 64bit OS to 32bit because of high memory consumption. Second reason is just practical, I did about 3 or 4 upgrades already so plain installation was just too long ago.

So this is how it went. I’ll tell you all good and bad stuff in order as I found it.

First steps are obvious download, burn, reboot from installation CD.

Booting from CD felt quite long to be honest,and very soon after booting to installer system first strange thing happened. I had laptop actually connected to external screen. Whilst on laptop LCD primary screen all was looking fine, on external I got some purplish noise going on, after while of looking at it I think it was boot splash screen distorted and jumping like old CRT monitor with resolution much over it can cope with.

Welcome dialog appeared and I chosen to install straight away. After few primary questions about language, keyboard, user info and so on I got installation running. During installation process you are being given information about new features, quite nice looking a bit windows installation style though but still something to have to look at meanwhile. I found out funny thing, in the information about this Ubuntu release in text there are URL links. If you click on them Firefox opens while installation is still happening. Sadly I couldn’t get to console in any way to get Internet working ;o) Would be quite nice if installer would enable network access if there is one with DHCP available. So one could browse Internet at least during installation.

Lets go to more important things. After installation first problem appeared, after clicking finish to reboot computer, CD automatically popped out but system started to throw a lot of unable to read from device messages and system halted. I had to hard reboot to carry on.

Booting time is just incredible, in something just about 10 seconds from boot loader to user login page.  This compares to about 20-30 seconds on previous version 9.10.

Another great thing happened, my external monitor was automatically recognized and same output was sent to it as to main laptop LCD. Also after logging in graphic went smoothly to native resolution of LCD. This has happened to me first time of any Ubuntu installation. I’ve got nVidia card inbuilt and always had to install proprietary driver to get anything above software 800×600 resolution.

Sadly, despite graphics working out of the box, monitor management tool lacks option to make external  display primary. More over the panels went all way long from left monitor to right and I couldn’t manage to make it on one side only. To get it nailed even more, enabling desktop effects which I can’t personally live without cos they are so great in Ubuntu requires to install proprietary driver from nVidia. So here we go again. Driver installation was automatic and very smooth. Just to note at this occasion with external monitors on laptops it’s always been hassle. There is no profiling and automatic external monitor detection in nVidia settings . If you want to have big screen main and even more if you are so nasty person I am and use different external monitor at home and at office and on top of it on different side due to sitting organization you are quite in trouble to manage this. either you do turn on external display and change settings to actual disposition manually every boot or you write own script to do it as I do. There is nice little command line app called Disper which works great for detection and configuration of monitors from command line.

Sadly once again, once you install proprietary graphic driver, splash screen gets somewhat screwed up. This is so frustrating, almost every release of Ubuntu changes splash system to something different. In last release it was impossible to customize it in any way despite the fact it was very nice. This time I have no idea how to sort this yet, I hope there will be solution for this released fast.

A great thing again, after while of working with 10.04 I have to say that sound is brilliant. I had (and many others as well) so much trouble with sound on my laptop. It got much better in Karmic in terms of managing headphones and internal speakers, but the internal speaker was giving strange noises all the time instead of system sounds. Not if works great out of the box. Thank you for that.

Another thing which wasn’t fixed since ever on my laptop is functional key for brightness. It does react, it shows on screen that is is changing it, but it doesn’t actually. This has never been working out of the box and I always had to fix it myself. I’ll have to explore it once again because I always forget what to do to make it work ;o)

Webcam does not work out of the box as in previous versions. There is only one driver which is working for this webcam as far as I know which is r5u87x. I had it working quite well on Jaunty but on Karmic it somehow couldn’t do right timing to load module at boot time and since then I have to load it manually every time I want to use it. This applies to Lucid as well. Webcam works quite well everywhere though.

Hibernation not working, has never been on my laptop properly, it used to be like working half of the times (really don;t know what the problem was I haven’t tried to solve it I don’t use hibernation often).  Hibernating went quite well in Lucid but restoring failed. I got just hdd and power leds flashing and thats quite bad system failure. Only way to get out of it is unplug power adapter and take out battery.

One little design thing I don’t like is moving window control buttons from right to left. This is individual of course but there should have been at least easy way to change it back to right somewhere maybe in appearance settings. But it is not and you have to find it and change it manually through gconf-editor have a look here for more info.

To conclude, I don’t see much progress on making it better for laptops at least not on mine however in general my personal feeling about Lucid is very good,  seems to be  faster and is more stylish. I hope more will get on after a bit longer usage.

Published by Stan Kuhn in: Off Topic