I haven't managed to get Karmic running properly

Story: My Upgrade to Karmic KoalaTotal Replies: 24
Author Content
tracyanne

Oct 05, 2009
7:01 PM EDT
on any of my hardware, not since Alpha 2 or 3, and the Beta I tried yesterday seems a dismal failure on my VM and the hardware I've tried it on, including the hardware where the early Alpha versions worked almost perfectly (and in the process fixed issues I had with Jaunty).

Any install I do on my test machine, an MSI netbook, which had considerable problem with wireless and Suspend/Hibernate with Jaunty, and which worked perfectly in those areas when I installed the early Alphas of Karmic, won't even boot after an install of the Beta of Karmic. Over the weekend and last night I tried several downloads of Karmic inclusing FTP (wget), HTTP and Bittorrent downloads, just in case there were issues with the download. None of them produced the expected results. I get the same results on a Pioneer netbook.

Installing to a VirtualBox VM no longer works either.

Instead, in both cases I get screens full of IO errors.
montezuma

Oct 05, 2009
9:01 PM EDT
Obligatory curmudgeons response: Well it works perfectly on my main desktop!

YMMV
azerthoth

Oct 05, 2009
9:31 PM EDT
Obligatory anti-Ubuntu rant:

None of them have ever worked properly for me.

:)
caitlyn

Oct 05, 2009
11:37 PM EDT
I've generally found Ubuntu releases since Feisty to be buggy. Hardy 8.04 LTS is stable and works well nowadays. A beta? I expect them to be problematic. File bug reports and hope that things get fixed by release time.
tracyanne

Oct 05, 2009
11:41 PM EDT
The thing is, for me, at least, the Alphas were almost perfect. I filed a few bug reports on various applications, but they were pretty much what I would have expected of a Beta release. The Beta release is, for me, not even up to Alpha standard.
jacog

Oct 06, 2009
4:14 AM EDT
I am back on Mandriva... yeah it's bloated... yeah you may hate the KDE... yeah all kinds of stuff... but it works!

OS: "May I take your order, sir?"

Me: "Why yes, thank you. I'd like an order of usable USB devices, like this gamepad here."

OS: "Here you go, sir, would there be anything else?"

Me: "I am sure there will, Jeeves."
Sander_Marechal

Oct 06, 2009
4:55 AM EDT
@montezuma: How did you install? Fresh? Or upgraded from an older version?
montezuma

Oct 06, 2009
9:18 AM EDT
Sander, I have a continual update on one file system so it has been incrementally upgraded for 3 years now. I find this enables me to pick up and report bugs quickly that effect me personally. As an average rule the more time you give the devs to fix a bug the better. Doesn't always work but it is optimal.
herzeleid

Oct 06, 2009
3:58 PM EDT
I'm running the karmic betas on 2 test machines - one with nvidia and one with intel graphics. While there are naturally glitches of the sort one would expect in a beta, and updates come at a rapid pace, I'm using it for social networking and other web functions with no problem, and in fact it's quite pleasant to use.

My old intel i945 powered machine was basically unusable under 9.04 due to sluggish intel video drivers, but with the 9.10 beta, the graphics performance is quite satisfactory - the compiz cube and all the effects are working smoothly, and openarena is quite snappy to play.

gus3

Oct 06, 2009
5:17 PM EDT
@herzeleid:

The bug for that is reported here:

[url=https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/ source/linux/ bug/349314]https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/ source/linux/ bug/349314[/url]

There's a 3rd party candidate package to fix the Intel video performance bug:

http://people.ubuntu.com/~apw/lp349314-jaunty/

Success reports are mixed, but it worked for me.
herzeleid

Oct 07, 2009
12:47 AM EDT
@gus3 -

I applied that intel graphics fix when I was running jaunty, and it helped a lot - but the stock 9.10 test versions are even better.
caitlyn

Oct 07, 2009
12:59 AM EDT
I did try a few of the Karmic alphas on the Sylvania netbook before it died and the problems with the Intel drivers did appear to be fixed, at least with the 945 chipset in that machine. We'll see how it does with the 950 chipset in the new HP netbook when it arrives.

I should also say that the last X.org and Intel driver updates to Pardus 2009 seemed to fix the last remaining problems as well. The 2.80 driver shipped with Slackware 13.0 also worked well.
Steven_Rosenber

Oct 07, 2009
1:04 AM EDT
I've got 9.04 running great; I upgraded about a week ago (ran 8.04 for about a year). As you can see by my timetable, I won't be installing Karmic the first week (or month) it's out.
Sander_Marechal

Oct 07, 2009
3:16 AM EDT
I have 9.04 running on my EeePC 900 with a custom eee kernel from array.org. After install, Intel performance was abysmal. After installing all updates it's "merely" bad. My fix was easy: I threw out the window manager and installed Awesome WM. No compositing and much better use of screen real estate. And no need to use the tiny RSI inducing touchpad :-)
caitlyn

Oct 07, 2009
1:08 PM EDT
THere were/are 2D problems in the Intel drivers as well. When I wrote about the Intel issues for DistroWatch I noted that the results do depend on the model and revision of chipset as well as the configuration used. There are a lot of variables. What works for you, Sander, may not work for others.
Steven_Rosenber

Oct 07, 2009
4:18 PM EDT
I'm running Ubuntu 9.04 with the Intel 82830 CGC (the Intel 830M chipset), and performance is as good as it ever was.
herzeleid

Oct 07, 2009
4:22 PM EDT
Quoting:I'm running Ubuntu 9.04 with the Intel 82830 CGC (the Intel 830M chipset), and performance is as good as it ever was.
So, video performance was always bad?
softwarejanitor

Oct 07, 2009
5:35 PM EDT
@herzeleid Video performance is generally bad if you've got a non-nVidia chipset.
tracyanne

Oct 07, 2009
5:39 PM EDT
I do now have Karmic NBR running on the MSI.
herzeleid

Oct 07, 2009
5:42 PM EDT
Quoting:Video performance is generally bad if you've got a non-nVidia chipset.
That's not as true as it once was. Recently I've seen some acceptable performance from ATI cards. I'm quite happy with the improvements in the intel drivers too.

Of course, the original voodoo graphix video cards worked very well on linux with the in-kernel 3D drivers back in '00 or so, but if memory serves, that company was swallowed up by nvidia.
caitlyn

Oct 07, 2009
8:01 PM EDT
I had generally good experience with Trident and Cirrus Logic chipsets back in the day. Of course, that was then and this was now. The old Toshiba laptop I put back into service while the netbook return is proceeding has a Trident CyberBlade XPi chipset.
herzeleid

Oct 08, 2009
6:37 AM EDT
Back in '93 the trident was a decent linux video card and 1024x768 was a high end resolution - but not so much now. Of others like tseng and number 9 I haven't heard anything in years...
tracyanne

Oct 08, 2009
9:36 AM EDT
Well Karmic is now running on the MSI, it's looking very good, and everything seems to be working properly. Suspend/Hibernate, 802.11 Wireless, and BlueTooth. I can set up Compiz to my liking (it will run the cube but I no longer bother with it).

Start up seems a little rough, and I don't see that it starts noticeably faster than the BenQ running Jaunty. Mind you I'm using ReiserFS which was always very fast anyway.

I don't see that there are a bunch of new themes, the basic colour scheme is certainly changed from Jaunty, but other than a selection of background images, I don't see that there is anything noticeably different in the theme department.

On the other hand the basic NBR desktop is different from the Jaunty one, it does look somewhat more polished, but I've switched to the classic desktop, and set it up in my own way, which gets some good comments when I show it to people.

Ah, i do see a difference with respect to the themes, there is now a link on the 'Appearance" window that takes you to the Gnome-Art website at art.gnome.org/themes. Personally I'd rather it offered to install the gnome-art application, with it you can view and install from a desktop application, the going to a webpage option seems a little cumbersome to me.

tracyanne

Oct 08, 2009
5:26 PM EDT
I was just reading this http://blogs.zdnet.com/BTL/?p=25612 on ZDNet, and it reminded me of a question I've been asked by a number of people after showing them the netbooks with the Netbook Remix desktop.

The question was, "can I have that on my computer?" the my computer being variously a full desktop with 17 or 19 inch monitor, or a full size laptop with 13 to 15 inch monitor.

It occured to me that one of the issues that many non technical people have with most operating systems these days is the bling, which the geekerati get excessively excited about., but which I've noticed most non technical people see as "that's far too complicated for me." So I'm wondering if we aren't in danger of simply alienating a lot of non technical people, and taking away the fun of using a computer for them by building ever more "clever" bling based systems, when a paradigm that might garner more friends might be something more simplistic, like the Netbook remix desktop.
jdixon

Oct 08, 2009
6:20 PM EDT
> ...when a paradigm that might garner more friends might be something more simplistic, like the Netbook remix desktop.

Computer users have always divided between a complex flashy interface and a minimal yet functional interface. One of the advantages Linux has over Windows is that it allows for either. Most users, however, take whatever they're given and learn to work with it.

Two comments in the article you linked to struck me:

> Testers seemed to like Windows Vista before it bombed.

Larry must be projecting his own experience unto others. I never read a good review of Vista; Everyone pretty much agreed that it sucked. There was only the occasional "Well, I've got 4 GB of memory, a top end Intel processor, and a 500 GB SATA 2 hard drive and it works fine for me" post.

The reviews of Windows 7, in contrast, have been mostly positive. As it should be for a service pack 3 release of an OS.

> Mossberg says Windows 7 is as good as Apple’s Snow Leopard in places.

Microsoft's latest and greatest, and the best someone can say is "is as good .. in places"? I can see Ballmer reaching for a chair as I type the words. :)

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