Intrepid Ibex

So the next version of Ubuntu, 8.10 'Intrepid Ibex' will be out next month, has anyone tried it on the A1 yet?
(except for this person who didn't get on very well with it).

Personally I'm going to hold off until the Beta, and someone else with more linux knowledge has checked it out.

 

I was going to write this in a separate topic but this seems to follow on nicely, long post.

I purchased an AA1 the other day and the first thing I did was to install the latest Intrepid Ibex alpha, I didn't even boot up Linpus to test it!

I'm a KDE person so used Kubuntu alpha 5 but things are pretty much the same for Ubuntu/GNOME with respect to hardware support. Alpha 5 is big step up from Alpha 4, the new kernel, 2.6.27, includes built-in support for Wifi and sound. The wifi worked straight away in KDE (although KNetworkManager is broken in the Alpha and you must use Gnome NetworkManager to control the interface, slight annoyance), and the mic/headphones/etc. work perfectly. All hardware, such as the webcam, 3D hardware, works fine, sleep/suspend works with no issues, although the card readers are not hot-swappable.

I def recommend using Alpha 5 over any other Ubuntu derivative, far less issues than install and patching Hardy. I installed from alternate install method, this involved copying just the network alternate installer to a usb which retrieves all the files from the internet, far far easier that extracting the ISO onto USB. The netboot install kernel can be found on the install ISO or maybe on the (K)Ubuntu website.

KDE 4.1.1 is actually pretty amazing on a netbook, especially with native compositing and effects, plus most apps include a full-screen mode to really make the most of it. When customised correctly I think it is a better platform than Ubuntu Netbook Remix.

 

looks interesting, shall wait for the beta's or possibly the rc to be released and give it a proper spin.
kde 4.1.1 is a vast improvement though isn't it?

 

Looks promising but I love my Netbook Remix!

Have you tried the internal microphone? There was a fix posted that involved setting up a new input config but I have had troubles with it in Gnome due to contention between apps and system trying to use the speaker. Hopefully KDE's sound architecture handles sharing better.

 

Yeah, it's probably worth waiting for the beta to be safe, I've had a few software and driver issues that I'm sure will be resolved soon.

KDE 4.1.1 is definitely an improvement, especially if you ever tried the KDE 4.0 series, most things from KDE 3.5 have now been ported across along with many new features. I'm yet to try Ubuntu Netbook Remix extensively as I really like the integration you get with the KDE components.

As for the mic, I've used it for long Skype sessions with no issues having tweaked the mixer settings. Sound sharing works fine with the new Phonon architecture in KDE 4.

All in all everything works in Ibex with no major issues, very happy with my AA1.

 

Do you remember what the mixer tweaks were?

 

This sounds like it could be ideal for the One....

Any comments on time to boot, battery life etc?

 

This does look very tempting, once the RC is available I might give this a whirl.

 

Yeah, I've attched a screenshot of the mixer. Then within Skype I just set the input to the (hw:Intel, 0), it didn't work with Default.

As for boot time, it seems to take around 20secs from turning on to the login screen, and another 5 seconds to a usable desktop. Battery life is around 2:50 or so I think, pretty good but I haven't timed it exactly.

Being an Alpha there are updates on a daily basis, some of which can mess up the system (yesterday the update hosed my wireless!), but most problems sort themselves out within a day or so.

 

does scrolling in firefox still lag if you have compiz enabled?

 

Hello!

I decide to try 8.10 instead of Kubuntu 8.04 (yes, I love KDE).

It mostly works. Unfortunately, my A1's wireless doesn't work, although I installed gnome networkmanager as suggested by Mandeepg (thanks for all of the info Mandeep!) and a number of things are largely broken. Various parts of Adept are missing. Something that I love about Konqueror is the ability to easily open SMB shares instantly and browse. That's broken right now.

The KDE 4.1.1 setup is absolutely beautiful. However, I will wait until the end of October to start using Intrepid, after it's released as finished.

 

That's a very impressive boot time. It is in fact better than most people seem to be getting with kernels modified for the AA1.

Has Ubuntu/Kubuntu improved the boot process that much in 8.10?

 

No, scrolling seems the same with or without kwin compositing. Actually, EXA is enabled by default now in the Intel driver so window rendering and scrolling should be faster overall.

Jeff, glad you gave it a try, KDE 4.1.1 certainly looks great on the A1. Not sure why your wireless isn't working, you could check dmesg to see if it was detected as mine wasn't picked by the kernel once so I turned it off and removed the battery, has worked fine since. Also could try iwconfig and nm-tool to test the wireless setup. I tend to use apt-get so didn't realise Adept was so broken.

Actually I had just installed 8.10 on a previous 8.04 desktop and it definitely seems quicker to startup and even snappier in usage so the release is certainly looking promising.

 

I just threw in the ubuntu 8.10 A5 Live CD (tried Kubuntu as well, and even first, of course).
Hmm, my WiFi is NOT working out of the box. I wonder how this could happen, does Acer really throw in different WiFi modules or what? I mean, I used (probably) exactly the same code-base as mandeepg, and for him/her it works, for me it doesn't. Strange.
@mandeepg: You wrote "... as mine wasn't picked by the kernel once so I turned it off and removed the battery".
Why should that help in any way? Not that I wouldn't be willing to give it a try, I'm just curious.

 

I don't remember off the top of my head, but you *might* have to do an upgrade to get the 2.6.27 kernel, the one that supports the card.

WARNING--I really don't remember, so I might be giving you completely incorrect advice.

When you have the liveCD in, you can always check with
uname -r

 

Well, I was the one with the problems in ubuntu forum. I am also using kubuntu, and now most stuff works. The microfone didn't work in skype the last time I tried, but I'll check using other inputs than default (I now have 4 HDA intel choices -hw:0, plughw:0, hw:4, and plughw:4; and one hdmi). Wifi works out of the box, the cam works, only the card reader still doesn't work. And kde4 really does look great!

The one thing that doesn't work is suspend. When I close the lid, the laptop just hangs and needs a power off (remove battery or looong press on the power button).

 

Ok, now the mic is working. Once I changed the input from "front mic" to "mic" I managed to get sound in skype.

 

Right, I installed using the netboot installer (can be found in /installer/netboot/ubuntu-installer/i386/ on the ISO), this picks up the latest Ibex code from the servers whilst installing. I guess the wifi fix must be in the latest code and not on the Alpha 5 CD. Try doing

Code:

apt-get update && apt-get upgrade.

Yeah I couldn't get sleep to work from the KDE shutdown menu, but the script

Code:

/etc/acpi/sleep.sh

seems to work fine, so I just set up script on the desktop that just calls it.

 

I installed Alpha 5 from the CD, and had no WiFi (the strange thing though, the Hardware section shown that I had the wifi driver loaded).
Anyway, I followed mandeepg's advice and ran: sudo apt-get update && apt-get upgrade
2 hours later, the system was updated and WiFi works out of the box, so thanks for the great advice.

It is late at night now, so I didn't test the rest, but will do more tests tomorrow (especially Skype), and let you know if I find any issue.

 

Is it just me? I tried a fresh intrepid installation, then upgraded to latest available packages, but no luck with wifi..
Kernel is 2.6.27-3, and modules probed are ath5k.
I tried to rmmod ath5k and modprobe ath_pci but still no wifi!