Another Opinion Among Many

RT Cunningham recently wrote about his woes with Windows and his desire to kick Microsoft and its encumbered software to the curb. He is going to try and replace Windows with Ubuntu Linux.

I think that this is great, sort of.

You see, I’ve been using some form of GNU and Linux (or *Bsd) on my desktop compute since I first tried that Storm Linux 2000 disk that a neighbor gave me to play with. I had a hard time with it, as I couldn’t get my Wintel modem to connect to the internet.

Lately, although I am still a true distro-hopper, I have been using Ubuntu as my desktop of choice. The computer I currently have has not had Windows installed on it since I put the parts together. My hard drive was not new when I acquired it and has developed a few bad sectors, so I replaced it. I was running Ubuntu 8.04 LTS, the long term support stable release, on my computer, which had bee upgraded from 6.10 or 7.04, as the releases arrived.

On the new hard drive, I put on Ubuntu 9.04 (Jaunty Jackalope), which was sometime around September or October. This was just before the release of 9.10 in November. All of the bugs that had presented themselves in the early months seemed to have been ironed out, except for a sound/video issue in which the sound would totally crap out on me for no apparent reason, freezing up .avi videos. I resolved that by changing a configuration file to not choose the frequency (44,100 or 48,000) and set it at one. Taking the auto off seemed to fix the problem.

9.04 had Firefox 3.0, though, and I really prefer Firefox 3.5, so for that reason alone, I “upgraded” to 9.10 (Karmic Koala). I don’t know why I did this, as I had already tried to install Karmic on its own partition to test it, along about beta 1 or so. It began with sound, but now it has no sound. The desktop is stunning and the themes are improving. Everything seems to work with a nice, fluid flow, but it has no sound. This time I can’t fix it.

The “upgrade” had preserved the sound, but I’ve found a few little glitches that I don’t like at all and, even with diligent googling for the cure, I cannot solve these issues.

• sound and video skip, hiccup, and race or freeze at random times
• flash is unplayable on it
• logging out so another user can log in can cause X to produce a black screen that requires a REISUB or reset to get out of.

This is unacceptable, so my 9.10 spare test distro is now being upgraded to the alpha of 10.4 Lucid Lynx so that I can see if it can be repaired by “progress”. Its happening underneath this browser, as I type. I hope nothing breaks too badly before I submit the article. So far, its down to “about 4 minutes remaining”. I began this about 1/2 hour ago. That is amazing. The time that I upgraded to 8.04, it took all night (as in many hours). Of course, the new policy on upgrades is to disable 3rd party repositories during the upgrade, which likely makes it a lot tidier.

We’ll see. Hopefully, this experiment bears the fruit that I am looking for. Then I might be able to watch a video from beginning to end again.

Update: This didn’t work at all. Lucid Lynx totally broke and now kernel panics when booting into multi user mode. I’ve been updating, hoping that there will be some fix that will miraculously fix it, but I don’t have much hope.

What I did to work around it

After coming up against a stumbling block, such as it was, I looked elsewhere as a temporary fix. I must say that the newest Mepis is well-appointed, sporting a KDE4 desktop that is beginning to show the shine that we once saw in the older versions. I can view and hear video well and outputting the video to my TV set is resolve in a slightly nicer way, with a “widened” desktop, like Twinview did, but without fullscreen windows stretching across both screens.

Ubuntu did do a kernel update with 9.10 and it didn’t seem to have made any difference.  Video seemed to play a bit longer before the sound got lost, but that is all.  What did make a difference, though, was removing pulse audio from my system. Now, without that buggy piece of crap on my machine, video plays from beginning to end without problem.  There’s still an issue with Flash freezing up the browser, but Flash is buggy and a resource hog anyways.