zigg/journal

Wednesday, December 30, 2009

Taking Lucid for a spin

Back in September (I feel appropriate shame for letting the journal go for so long), I mused about the troubles I was having with Ubuntu Karmic.

I didn't end up skipping it; I left it installed. I felt ext4 was manageable with regular backups, ath9k was manageable by flat-out replacing it with ndiswrapper, and whatever else I could deal with as it came up. One thing I did have to do on a semi-regular basis was issue an Alt-F2 gksudo modprobe usbhid or usb-storage to get my mouse or USB drives working, but that wasn't such a big deal. Karmic did prove to be one of the worst Ubuntu releases I ever used, but it wasn't catastrophic. It wasn't enough trouble to bother going back to Jaunty.

But what I did get interested in the other day, though, was Lucid. A post on EeeUser's Ubuntu forum alerted me to its presence, and people sounded like they liked it, so—this time opting for a test release than a full-on upgrade—I wiped my never-used XP partition and stuck Lucid in its place.

They weren't kidding when they said removing hal sped things up a bit; this thing boots even more ridiculously quickly than I thought possible. (Which is a good thing right now, because suspending isn't a grand idea with a bug that makes the display flicker and go out post-suspend.) But even though Lucid doesn't have much more to it software-wise right now than Karmic did, it already feels more solid... if that makes any sense.

Lucid, due to its LTS status, is going to get a longer testing period and an extra beta, and it's going to be more conservative than a typical release. I think, too, in the wake of Karmic's (deserved) bad press, there's going to be consideration for concentrating more effort to make Lucid a solid release.

If all goes well, I might just make the jump full-time. We'll see how it goes.

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posted by zigg 7:53 PM 0 Comments

Tuesday, September 1, 2009

Maybe I'll skip Ubuntu Karmic

Ever since I originally discovered Ubuntu—I think it was in 2007—I've followed every release, many early on. While it's true I've had a handful of problems over the years with various things (though no more than using any other operating system), Ubuntu has simply been the best Linux experience I've had. So much just... works.

I've been testing the next version of Ubuntu, "Karmic Koala", since alpha 4. Of course I can expect an extra dose of issues testing alpha versions of software. But as of right now, I have three very worrying problems with Karmic (and, I should note, these appear to be problems with the Linux kernel itself, not necessarily Ubuntu) that I am not really confident will see a fix before release:
  1. My Asus Eee PC 1000HEB uses the ath9k driver for its wireless chip. Since Karmic (and apparently since Linux kernel 2.6.30), wireless has ranged from "okay" to "horribly unreliable". I'm using ndiswrapper in the meantime, but I remain unconvinced that this will be fixed.

  2. This one is far more severe: something happened to the visor module in the Linux kernel that is making PalmOS handhelds crash. Unlike the ath9k problem, I seem to be on my own here so far. I can use the same handhelds just fine by plugging them into my server running Hardy, and I don't recall having this problem under the last release I had on my netbook, Jaunty.

  3. Finally, I remain unconvinced of the reliability of the ext4 filesystem. My first experience with ext4 in Jaunty's own testing phase was a disaster; within 24 hours I'd somehow managed to totally destroy the filesystem simply by filling it up. I mean totally destroy, too. fsck had no hope. I've been running ext4 on Karmic with no problems personally, but I keep hearing isolated reports about similar disasters in various corners on the Internet.

    Now, this is something I don't need to bring along for the ride with Karmic; but since it seems going back to ext3 involves a reinstall anyway, I might as well go back to Jaunty at the same time.
So, what do I do? I'm not really at risk for data loss (got a good backup routine), so it's not terribly urgent that I make a decision. I suppose now that I've written it all down here, it doesn't sound quite so bad on balance; the Palm problem is the only real sore point, and Karmic does have its good points too—audio is now fixed on my 1000HEB, for example, where it used to crackle horribly; and the new short boot time is fantastic.

I guess I'll ride it out for now and see what happens. But I am genuinely concerned for Karmic, and by extension, other Linuxes that are slated to ship with 2.6.31. The quality question is troubling.

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posted by zigg 6:50 AM 1 Comments