Ubuntu 9.10 Experiences

I thought I would make a thread devoted to our adventures with Ubuntu 9.10.

So please, if you have any problems, fixes, or tweaks please submit them.

My experiences have been pretty good so far. I have noticed that it is a little slower than 9.04 graphically.
A have also noticed that the wifi speed is horrible and that as always the backlight never turns off to save power but I have always had that issue with every laptop that I have had run linux.

Does anyone know how to make the dragable area in the corner of the windows bigger? It hard to grab it to resize the windows especially on a trackpad.

 

I found out how to fix the slow web browsing. Seems it affects 9.10 itself and has nothing to do with hardware.

Here is how you fix it. You need to change the settings for your network cards, specifically the ipv4 dns settings.
You have to change the setting from "Automatic (DHCP)" to "Automatic (DHCP) addresses only" and then at the bottom enter any DNS server you would like.

I chose opendns 208.67.222.222.

I hope that helps anyone who has that issue.

 

I'm afraid after being a devotee of ubuntu I was more than a little disappointed with 9.10 (I need my mobile broadband to work).

Well to cut a long story short I decided to try opensuse 10.2 Guess wot everything works, boot up seems faster, screens seem much clearer and you can even run KDE4 with no noticable delays.

 

I am really pleased with 910 on my aspire. THe only question i have outstanding is can i use the vga port without booting the machine up with a monitor attached? I never did get this to work under 904 unless i started the one up with something attached to the vga port and it is a bit annoying.

Other than that, great so far.

 

Hi,

I've been testing Karmic on my AAO150 with here are the results:

- Webcam works
- Both card readers work and are hotpluggable (after adding pciehp to kernel options)
- Video seems to be slower (glxgears reports lower results)
- Sound works
- Wifi works
- Suspend/Hibernate work

The only issue is that everytime I suspend or hibernate I loose wireless connection and a reboot is necessary to get it working again. I'm using wicd by the way. Does anyone have the same problem? is there any workaround to fix that issue?

 

Error

 

Hi. Tryed today and found that hot pluging a monitor stales the system!!! Booting with it attached works, but it isn't easy to get a good combination of monitors (unless you just want a mirror desktop).

 

Nevermind, it's fixed now so everything is working flawlessly

 

TWO card readers on a 150? I only have one. Suspend/hibernate work for me with 9.04 if invoked manually, but not automatically when I close the lid. WiFi always works after waking up from suspend. If video isn't as fast (which comes as a complete surprise, given stated development goals of 9.10, I don't see a compelling need to upgrade, as everything but suspend on close works flawlessly with 9.04. I rarely reboot, so saving ~20 seconds means nothing, and I think the 9.04 Ubuntu boot screen is more attractive than 9.10.

 

Is power management/battery life improved with 9.10? Offhand, given equal power management choices, battery life seems like it should be entirely a hardware function, with nothing to do with software, but I could be missing something.

 

Yep, both the AAO 110 and 150 (hard disk version, not the D150) have two card readers. Well, wireless is not waking after suspend by default, but It can be fixed if you tweak wich modules are suspended. As for battery life I have not seen any improvement as is more or less the same it was on 9.04, 1:30-1:50 on a three cell stock battery.

 

I have a D150 with 160gb HDD, so I don't understand the reference to hard disk version, unless that was a typo, and should have read "SSD version."

I just finished another round of testing from the SD card installation. Suspend still isn't invoked by closing the lid. And, I found a new "feature" that I really dislike: plugging/unplugging the power invokes suspend, which of course shuts down the WiFi connection. Every portable I have ever used allowed me to plug/unplug the wall power at will without affecting anything other than screen brightness. Now I have a specific reason to avoid the 9.10 upgrade. Given Ubuntu's rapid updating process, I suspect I will wait until 2010 before looking again at 9.10, since 9.04 currently works better for me.

 

Still fairly poor battery life, eh? :/

Does anyone have any idea what might be causing the battery to be drained so much more quickly than on Windows 7/XP? The short battery life has actually driven me away from using Ubuntu on my machine, at least for the time being... not to mention it felt a little bit slower than XP when I dualbooted.

 

I have no complaints about battery life: ~2.5 hours with 3-cell and 5-6 hours with a 5200 mAh 6-cell. Still, more is always better.

 

Im also getting about 2.5 hours on battery on my one without any power tweaks at all. I dont think that is too bad at all from a 3 cell battery.

 

There are two models of the first AAO (8,9inch) the first one, the 110 which has SSD and the second one, the 150 that has HDD, that was I was trying to clarify... Apart from that the hardware on both models is exactly the same.

That surprises me! . I haven't tested a full battery discharge, but at least 1:30h is what the battery applet is reporting, just the same as others distros I have tested like Arch, Kuki, Gentoo and previous ubuntu's.

 

Time reported by battery applet is unreliable; I changed pref to report % charge remaining. 2+ hours of intermittent use is not an unrealistic expectation for a 3-cell 2200 mAh battery pack. If you are running a movie, maybe less.

 

First up, I did an upgrade from 9.04 on an AAO with the SSD. It took about 6 hours and the installation was very flakey and generated numerous bugs. So, I reformatted the SSD and went for a clean Ext2 install, which took about an hour including creating the boot USB drive. Things have been a good bit better since with only rhythmbox causing one crash.

The only thing I can't get working is suspending with a memory card in the LH slot. When I dismount the card, the machine suspends and resumes without any issues....

Everything else is great.

 

I've tested it and you are right, the battery applet reports unrealistic times. I can get 2+h of normal use without problems. Thanks for the advice!