Ubuntu 9.10 Netbook Performance

After taking the plunge and upgrading both my laptops to ubuntu 9.10 release candidate, I'm glad I did.

I no longer need the fglrx binary blob from ATI - I have full 3D acceleration and desktop effects with the included radeon driver. The visual style of 9.10 is much more subtle and nicer looking than any previous ubuntu release. I also noticed that the laptop suspends automatically when the lid is closed - in earlier releases, I had to explicitly tell it to suspend.

All in all, a nice upgrade. No downside yet, and this is not even the official release yet.

I knew it was too good to be true. My internal microphone doesn't work due to a pulseaudio bug. Alsa can see it but pulse cannot. Grrr....

@monte:

Are you saying it has no Pulse? *rimshot*

montezuma: Not too late to report the bug. I was surprised by a fix between beta and rc. You may be surprised too :)

Somthing funny is going on my 9.04 install, my production machine, has become somewhat unstable since the last update. I've had to turn the gnome-power-manager off, otherwise the machine seems to power down the monitor after a short period of time, and the only way to recover, short of restarting, is to put the machine into suspend, then bring it back out of suspend.

It's quite strange.

On my Toshiba (Satellite 1100, made in 2002), if you leave it at the login screen long enough for the screensaver to engage, you can't get it back without cycling the power button. Used to be that ctrl-alt-backspace was enough, and I should probably just re-implement that (I've seen more than a few Web pages with two different hacks to get ctrl-alt-backspace working again).

This is in 9.04, and I had the same problem in 8.04. And suspend-resume has never worked on this particular laptop. It'll suspend, but that's the end of it (no resume) ... making the "feature" less than useful.

I used to spend a lot of time on my many 2001-2 laptops trying to get suspend/resume to work, but I gave up awhile back. I'd rather it work, but a) seems impossible unless out of the box and b) I've got bigger fish.

I think the rule is: suspend/resume works on machines owned by developers ... doesn't work on the rest.

Morale: Use what the developers use (hence mad rush to Thinkpads ...)

I don't run *buntu on my 2002 Toshiba because it's just too darned slow for that. Vector Linux suspend/resume does work but... it doesn't use the hardware suspend/resume the way Toshiba designed it and therefore doesn't use the hibernation partition. It doesn't require a reboot, though :)

@Steven, instead of reinstating the Ctrl-Alt-Backspace hack, you could also simply disable suspend :-)

I already turned suspend off ... I still want ctrl-alt-backspace

There is a new keysequence that replaces CTRL-ALT-BKSP but I honestly forget what it is. That's an upstream X.org change so we're going to have to live with it in pretty much all distros :(

Clearly the Xorg developers hate me. Personally.

Then they must hate me too.

I can still suspend resume, I just have to do it manually, that is press the power button to bring up the menu and select suspend, and press the power button to resume.

Caitlyn,

The bug has been in launchpad for a while and went upstream to gnome and then up to pulseaudio developers. So it is out of Ubuntu's hands until the pulse dev patches...

Here's an interesting patch to a HAL policy. Not knowing enough about HAL, I'm not sure how to use it:

http://www.mail-archive.com/pld-cvs-commit@lists.pld-linux.o... (note that is NOT an email, the link still works)

But I like the commit log: "shove Ctrl-Alt-Backspace down xorg's throat".

I may have to see what versions that patch works with and if it works with my favorite distros :) Yeah, that was one unpopular change. Nice find, gus3.

No need for patches. There's a simple application called "dontzap" that you can use to enable/disable Ctrl-Alt-Backspace: http://www.ubuntugeek.com/howto-enable-ctrl-alt-backspace-in...

@Sander:

... Good Lord, those comments are such a swampland ...

I tried the latest Karmic live CD on my laptop. It has Broadcom wireless, which didn't work immediately. I told it to activate the Broadcom driver. It told me to reboot, but I couldn't see how that was going to work on a Live CD, so I tried the network instead. Now it worked, but the computer started to lock up for a couple of shorter periods, then completely. The same happened after a reboot and another try. I'm not 100% sure if it is because of the Broadcom driver, but it looks like it. Could things like this happen because I started using the driver without rebooting?

The problem seems to be gone after installing it to the hard disk.