Ubuntu 9.10 "Karmic" Alpha4 and the Intel video drivers...

[Michael Butash]

I just upgraded from ibex to jaunty and to Karmic on my laptop, and I've
been having some major issues with it.  No intel (thank goodness) to
deal with, so can't attest to it.  Suspend functions for me are now
broken, gnome power manager is buggy at best, and my screen saver
refuses to work.  For a laptop these are killing me...  VMware barely
works with some hackery, and some of the alsa devices get figured out
backward now.  Even going from ibex to jaunty, network manager simply
refused to adequately control the wireless hardware which was entirely a
deal breaker, forcing me to roll the dice on karmic.  This all from a
perfectly working install in hardy or ibex.  Otherwise, I am mostly
pleased with the overall performance of it, definitely improved from
Ibex.

I'm assuming you did a clean install that everything works ok for you?
Those typically work well for me too, but upgrades for me have been
entirely crapshoots, which is really disappointing as otherwise I'm
quite fond of ubuntu.  I'm curious what success others have had here
with upgrades, as the ubuntu forms tend to indicate it's a perpetual
kludge of a process with destruction and mayhem as a result.  I've
always had major cleanup and fixage after a dist-upgrade.

I long ago gave up on Fedora/RedHat when pretty much
installing/upgrading/compiling any software just led to dependency hell.
This has gotten somewhat better since yellowdog cloned apt with yum for
RH-ish distros, but I'm still not ready to bother trying fedora again
quite yet.  If ubuntu keeps annoying me, perhaps I might.

-mb


On Mon, 2009-08-17 at 23:39 -0700, Ryan Rix wrote:
> On Mon, Aug 17, 2009 at 9:48 PM, Jim March<1.jim.march at gmail.com> wrote:
> > Folks,
> >
> > I have a laptop with the mediocre Intel 965/X3100 chipset.  In Ubuntu
> > Jaunty it ran like a turd until major tweaks were applied, and the
> > results weren't 100% stable.  Jaunty came out right as the Intel video
> > support was in flux and Jaunty basically caught about half of what was
> > needed between the kernel, xorg, Intel driver, Mesa and Compiz.
> >
> > Karmic has the whole package.  I've been running it for five days now,
> > ever since alpha4 came out, and it's more solid (and FASTER) than I
> > ever got out of Jaunty.  I did a full re-install with the alternate
> > installer (as I use whole disk encryption) and I went with Ext4 - it's
> > working great.
> >
> > On a lark I loaded the 64bit Adobe Flash "alpha" and it's rock solid
> > too - best flash Linux experience I've ever had, period, end of
> > discussion.
> >
> > I think Karmic is going to be a really sweet Ubuntu flavor when it
> > ships and the improvements in Intel video support are so amazingly
> > vast I'd say anybody with at least moderate technical chops able to
> > cope with minor pre-release glitches should switch NOW.  I'm told the
> > fixes also apply perfectly to the Intel 4500 chipset found on the
> > newest el cheapo laptops.
> >
> > WARNING: this applies to all Intel video drivers except the GMA500
> > chipset.  That thing is a major turd and will remain so until the
> > Ubuntu distro post-Karmic at a minimum.  The most common GMA500
> > machine is the Dell "mini 10" I think it's called, and for some reason
> > that thing is an excellent Hackintosh candidate.  While I'm not
> > normally a proponent of running Apple OSX on non-Apple hardware (as
> > Apple is actively trying to stomp your install with updates!), the
> > difference in support for the GMA500 between Linux generally and OSX
> > is severe enough I'd consider it, at least until Intel helps get the
> > driver situation under control.  (The issue is, Intel recently bought
> > the GMA500 tech from another company that was very
> > Linux-hostile...Intel is getting it sorted out but it's just not done
> > yet.  That company did do some OSX drivers for Apple...)
> 
> Fedora never had these problems :)
> *ducks*
>