ydal

Ear­lier this year, I swit­ched from Debian to Ubuntu on both my net­book and my desk­top machine, because it quite plea­sed me how well it worked. For the net­book, this was sort of appro­priate, when igno­ring the fact that a net­book is slow by prin­ciple, but with my desk­top, my choice might have been less than wise.

Jaunty, 9.04, left me with occa­sio­nal ran­dom cra­shing of my X ser­ver, and app­li­ca­ti­ons some­ti­mes only star­ting at the second try, if at all. You’d get situa­ti­ons like bans­hee firing up, dra­wing the win­dow on the desk­top, and then locking up — which my com­piz duly ack­now­ledged by shading the win­dow after about fif­teen seconds. You kill it, you restart it, ever­y­thing works.

Add to this some other app­li­ca­ti­ons (like Evo­lu­tion, Nau­ti­lus and Tom­boy), along with the fact that GNOME Do just seems to ran­domly eva­po­rate into digi­tal not­hing­ness in the course of my uptime, and voila, you have a sys­tem that works mostly well, but just some­ti­mes annoys the hell out of you, espe­cially when the X ser­ver cras­hed the sys­tem because you did some­thing like Alt-Tabbing while you had two app­li­ca­ti­ons run­ning full­screen on dif­fe­rent moni­tors. Yep, it happened.

So, alas and behold, comes the saviour: Ubuntu 9.10, Kar­mic Koala! It shi­nes, it glit­ters, and it saves kit­tens from trees! Ever­y­thing is so much bet­ter with it!

… not.

Kar­mic, in the vain hope to be so much grea­ter to the com­mon good, tries to opti­mize and dumb down things for the users. Which, accor­ding to others, seems to work sple­ndidly — but abso­lu­tely fai­led on my end.

My woes with the rare animal

odin (the desktop)

For the record: odin’s specs are some­thing along the line of a Core2 Duo, GeForce 260 lin­ked to two screens, a couple of tera­bytes of hard drive and a Sound­Blas­ter SB Live! 5.1, after the onbound sound­card star­ted acting up and being gene­rally retar­ded on the gaming OS.

1. Boot time has gone way … up. Even though it’s sup­po­sed to be opti­mi­zed for qui­cker boot and what­not, my pre­vious “less than ten seconds” boot time some­what dimi­nis­hed in the face of the opti­mi­zed boo­tup, which made my resol­v­conf (which I haven’t even tou­ched!) for no appa­rent rea­son, adding a 30 to 60s time­out on the top.
2. It sol­ved the cra­shing pro­blems … not at all. The only it actually mana­ged is to get bug-buddy to be all “It looks like nau­ti­lus cras­hed” with a nice dia­log say­ing I should report a bug to Ubuntu. Which I won’t, since there’s not­hing log­wor­thy to sub­mit, it just dies and that’s it.
3. The sound inter­face has been made super-easy! And, also, bloody hard to con­fi­gure cor­rectly. The new sound pre­fe­ren­ces eschew any kind of know­ledge about your sound card and just pre­sume to know bet­ter than you, which is exactly why it thinks it should fiddle with the Mas­ter volume of my Sound­blas­ter when on four way ste­reo mix up, which con­trols only two chan­nels, and not the PCM, which then regu­la­tes ever­y­thing. Jaunty allo­wed me to change the mixer con­trol to one I deemed best — no dice in Kar­mic. I now need to fire up alsa­mi­xer for that, and can’t use my key­board volume wheel wit­hout fiddling.
4. Speaking of sound, it has become even more annoy­ing to find a way to turn off the logon sounds with GDM, since gdmsetup has been repla­ced by some­thing which does quite about not­hing at all.
5. And, of course, hiber­nate doesn’t work any­more. As if any dis­tri­bu­tion would ever get that right.

baldr, the netbook

1. Boot time has gone way … up. Yes, even one the famed “we sooo lurv you” Atom note­books Kar­mic pre­tends to like so much, per­for­mance pretty much went down the drain.
2. Impro­ved exter­nal moni­tor sup­port! Plug in a second screen, get none of the real estate! As soon as I plug in the VGA dis­play while the lap­top is still run­ning, screens go irre­ver­si­bly blank until reboot. Having it plug­ged in while reboo­ting allows you to run 800×600 on both dis­plays, clo­ned, wit­hout the abi­lity to change the resolution.
3. Hiber­nate doesn’t work. Even though it did before.
4. And myriads of minor nui­san­ces like stut­ters and all that jazz.

May I note that this even hap­pens when being freshly instal­led from source on the net­book, so this is no tale of the com­mon upgrade blues.

Con­clu­sion

Well, I’ll pro­bably be chan­ging dis­tri­bu­tion soo­nish, yet again. Fedora might be a neat idea for the net­book, not yet sure if I will revert to Debian on odin.

The Kar­mic Koala is beco­m­ing incre­a­sin­gly extinct and fails to repro­duce appro­pria­tely even with an accep­ting mindset.

Ranting about the Karmic Koala.