Ubuntu 8.04 - Experience So Far
May 12, 2008
For the past 12 months I have been using Ubuntu as my main OS of choice, graduating through the upgrades from Feisty to Gutsy. So when Hardy hit the servers at Canonical, I was naturally eager to try it out.Ubuntu 8.04 has a lot of advantages over its predecessors, but unfortunately, the new kernel version seems to have a few problems too.
Installing Hardy was a little fiddly to begin with. My system is a Samsung X22 laptop with Intel Core2 Duo T7500 2.2Ghz, ATi Radeon HD2400, 2GiB DDR2 RAM, with a Pheonix BIOS.
I put the CD in the drive and booted up the system, loading the live version and encountered the first problem - the screen wouldn’t configure and all I got was a mish mash of vertical lines. OK, start again I thought. This time I booted into the llive version using the F4 option of Safe Graphics Mode. So far so good.
After a successful installation, Ubuntu correctly guessed I was using an ATi graphics card and prompted me to install the ATi binaries. Nice touch. After downloading and installing, the desktop was correctly configured and Compiz ran like a dream - much crisper than on my old Gutsy install. A quick sudo apt-get update followed by sudo apt-get dist-upgrade gave me all the needed updates and I was ready to go.
Then I started to notice something a bit wrong. The laptop was heating up like a furnace. Initially a little worried, I brought up System Monitor and looked for any out of the ordinary resource hungry app chewing through my HDD or RAM. Nothing. All appeared well. Still My laptop was getting noticeably hotter, and after about an hour of being switched on I was so concerned that I shut it down. Further exploration of the problem on the web brought up many other users with the same experience and the problem seemed to point at the indexing service, so I promptly shut it off and disabled Tracker from initialising at boot time. No better. The laptop seemed to be wanting to take over from my central heating. OK, I thought, maybe I’ll try fiddling with the power management features.
Since I was on a laptop, the first thing I did was to dim the screen brightness. Or at least I tried to. The function keys, which worked perfect on my Gutsy install, refused to respond. There was nothing I could do via the keyboard to reduce screen brightness. I loaded the Panel Brightness Gnome applet onto the panel and tried to reduce backlight from that - didn’t work, absolutely no response. Not good.
Again, further investigation reassured me that many other people were having the same problem and some had managed to hack the ACPI files in order to make it work. Never worked for me though.
I am currently writing this post from a laptop that appears to be in danger of melting with no apparent thing I can do to aid it.
I am assuming that it must be something to do with the new kernel that Hardy is using, but until a fix is released, I am seriously thinking of downgrading the system to Gutsy.
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