Just finished upgrading my laptop from Ubuntu 8.10 to 9.04.
I started this process when I did because I was trying to pair my Bluetooth GPS to my laptop. Simplest tool on Ubuntu for that--at the moment--is their Bluetooth configuration applet through their GNOME desktop. So I booted into GNOME, launched X-Chat so I could hang out online during the process, and started using the applet. Suddenly, my wifi drops, and I can't get it working again despite fighting with wpa_supplicant for two hours. Run lspci, and discover that the madwifi driver was misidentifying my Atheros chipset again as an older abg-capable chipset. I'm used to this; Atheros reused a PCIID when they released my chipset, and the PCIID databases and drivers tend to misidentify it. I keep the source for a modded version of the driver on-hand because I'm used to having to reinstall it every time I upgrade. I rebuilt the driver and installed it, and had the same problem. So I figured, "9.04 is out, let's give that a try."
First fail: Defaulting to a resolution of 640x480 on reboot. Makes it hard to navigate a display settings dialog when you can't see half of it...
Second fail: Providing a max resolution of 1024x768, when the LCD screen's native resolution is 1280x960. One might think this is a problem of a too-high vertical refresh rate, but reducing that via the dialog doesn't open up any additional resolution options.
And that's just in the first ten minutes after booting up.
I switched to Ubuntu from Debian years ago because Debian had hardware compatibility problems that were tricky to work around, while Ubuntu Just Worked. There's no real good reason to switch back to Debian at this point; Ubuntu has a better release rate, and maintains a current release that's typically more-current and more-stable than Debian/testing ever was. And I like that...
But if keeping Ubuntu working on this hardware is going to be this much work as a matter of course, I may as well switch to something else. I don't have any particular love for Fedora, Red Hat, SuSE or Slackware, and I'm not looking for a tiny-footprint distribution. Additionally, I frequently find myself needing to build my own packages. So it might just be worthwhile learning Gentoo.
Conveniently, there's nothing on this laptop that isn't backed up, so I can just toast the install and replace it with something else. May as well...
I started this process when I did because I was trying to pair my Bluetooth GPS to my laptop. Simplest tool on Ubuntu for that--at the moment--is their Bluetooth configuration applet through their GNOME desktop. So I booted into GNOME, launched X-Chat so I could hang out online during the process, and started using the applet. Suddenly, my wifi drops, and I can't get it working again despite fighting with wpa_supplicant for two hours. Run lspci, and discover that the madwifi driver was misidentifying my Atheros chipset again as an older abg-capable chipset. I'm used to this; Atheros reused a PCIID when they released my chipset, and the PCIID databases and drivers tend to misidentify it. I keep the source for a modded version of the driver on-hand because I'm used to having to reinstall it every time I upgrade. I rebuilt the driver and installed it, and had the same problem. So I figured, "9.04 is out, let's give that a try."
First fail: Defaulting to a resolution of 640x480 on reboot. Makes it hard to navigate a display settings dialog when you can't see half of it...
Second fail: Providing a max resolution of 1024x768, when the LCD screen's native resolution is 1280x960. One might think this is a problem of a too-high vertical refresh rate, but reducing that via the dialog doesn't open up any additional resolution options.
And that's just in the first ten minutes after booting up.
I switched to Ubuntu from Debian years ago because Debian had hardware compatibility problems that were tricky to work around, while Ubuntu Just Worked. There's no real good reason to switch back to Debian at this point; Ubuntu has a better release rate, and maintains a current release that's typically more-current and more-stable than Debian/testing ever was. And I like that...
But if keeping Ubuntu working on this hardware is going to be this much work as a matter of course, I may as well switch to something else. I don't have any particular love for Fedora, Red Hat, SuSE or Slackware, and I'm not looking for a tiny-footprint distribution. Additionally, I frequently find myself needing to build my own packages. So it might just be worthwhile learning Gentoo.
Conveniently, there's nothing on this laptop that isn't backed up, so I can just toast the install and replace it with something else. May as well...
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