Moving to Ubuntu 10.04 (Lucid) on my Macbook 2,1

I'm the happy owner/user of a Macbook (a 2,1 to be exact) since a few years. Actually it is company property, but since I'm the only user they let me run whatever I like. Which happens to be Ubuntu.

It was really Willem who set me on to this; I don't think I would have had the guts to do this to my Mac if he hadn't been adamant that it would work. And it does! It did require quite a few tweaks, though, as the Ubuntu community page testifies.

But overall I was happily running 9.10 (Karmic); I learned to live with the few quirks, like having to log off every time I came into work and attached the external monitor (it would crash the video driver if I didn't). And suspend/resume was just really slow.

Now that Lucid is just around the corner, and after my previous success with installing it on my wife's new desktop, I got feisty and tried it on the Mac. First, I used the live CD and that worked so splendidly that I just had to do the actual upgrade. It lasted all night, but in the end it worked like a charm.

So it's worth at this point to make a few notes.

• The new theme did not appear the first time I booted. This was to be expected because I did an upgrade, not a fresh install. Most things should preferably stay as they were.
• The ssh-agent environment variables were gone from my terminal shells. Why? I don't know, but a somewhat related bug report suggests the use of the keychain package.
• Thunderbird 3.0 is chugging away on indexing all my mail. I could turn it off but I think I'll let it run for a while and check out the new search capability.
• Sound didn't immediately work on the live CD but this was resolved by killing the pulseaudio daemon. Sound does work after the upgrade.
• The volume and brightness buttons work too. Very nice.
• Attaching the external monitor turns off the desktop effects. This may be related to the crash bug I mentioned earlier. But you can turn it back on right after.
  

That's it for now, more news later!

My new inspiron 560

(Sorry, this is not really about software but still something I'd like to share)

I decided to go all-in and finally buy myself (and my wife) a new desktop machine. It replaces a machine that I got for a token fee, an old box that my company was going to recycle. At the time I thought it would be good enough for running Linux, even though it was slow, didn't have a big disk and little memory; Linux is frugal, right? Well, the Linux desktop has grown up considerably in the last decade and the combined memory footprint of Evolution, Gnome and Firefox combined rivals that of mainstream systems.

So the new machine which now proudly hums away on my desk (more on the humming later) is an all-black, all-shiny, DELL Inspiron 560. The cheapest DELL has to offer through their website, for just over 400 euros including delivery to my home. Even though it is cheap, it is a step up from what I had: it has a dual-core 2.7 GHz CPU, 4 GB memory, 320 GB disk. Funny detail: black was the cheapest color. Reminds me of the Ford model T days.

My wife is the principal user of the desktop, since I do most of my work on a laptop that I carry everywhere. To save myself from a support nightmare, I switched to Ubuntu LTS releases some time ago. Just mid 2009, we made the switch to Ubuntu 8.04. So Ubuntu 8.04 was the first and most logical choice for the new box; the smoothest possible transition I could imagine.

After popping in a fresh Ubuntu 8.04.4 CD and starting up, most things looked alright. Except there was no network. This puzzled me somewhat as a device clearly showed up in the output of ifconfig; there were just no packets coming through at all. A quick search for the precise hardware spec revealed a known issue with the driver, and the workaround to download and use the Realtek provided (open-source) driver. I was worried that this problem would just keep coming back with every kernel update, but it fixed the immediate issue.

Meanwhile, my attention was drawn to another, quite severe problem. The machine was making quite a bit more noise than I expected, to the point of being irritating. There was clearly a fan spinning loud and hard in there. My first suspicion went to the case fan near the rear of the box, but this turned out to be wrong. To make matters worse, the loud fan had a bearing problem and started to make horrible rumbling sounds.

Since I had already done away with Windows completely I had no chance to verify that this was caused by some software defect. It started as soon as the computer was turned on, so in any case it wasn't due to something Linux did. It was such a depressing conclusion that I bought a lemon. Just the thought of having to spend time and energy getting this fixed (imagine explaining a support person over the phone that you run Linux, not Windows...) caused agony.

Luckily DELL shipped a bootable diagnostics CD with the computer, and it allows you to run several tests to verify the correct workings of the machine. Two tests were especially interesting: a CPU fan test and a case fan test. Both tests drive up the fans to a high RPM, and then down again. I should explain that while I was running from the diagnostics disc, the terrible noise persisted.

The CPU fan test revealed that the CPU does indeed have a fan (or maybe more than one) and that it can be heard, but only at high RPM. At low settings (normally, if the CPU is not under load) it can hardly be made out (1700 RPM or so). The case fan was even lower; it's a big one so it runs only at 500 RPM nominally, but can be stepped up to 1500 or so if the case runs hot. Bot tests produced different sounds, and the noisy fan stayed noisy. It could only mean one thing: the video card fan. The card is an Nvidia GeForce 310.

The Ubuntu 8.04 system worked, but not very smoothly. The network driver was a kludge, I couldn't get anything but the VESA driver working for video (or I didn't try hard enough) and the noise made the whole thing just unworkable. I decided that maybe, just maybe, the upcoming LTS release, Ubuntu 10.4, would be a better option. This proved to be sheer lucidity.

Ubuntu 10.4 is not even out, but you can get beta 2 already and this is actually encouraged as the experience of more people trying the system at this stage will help iron out the remaining wrinkles. From the moment I popped in the CD and started, I was amazed by the ground they've covered since the last release (I'm running 9.10 on my laptop so I'm close to cutting-edge there). The installation was smooth, very few questions asked and in no time at all I had a new OS running plus network. (Still, noise.) I logged on, clicked around appreciatively, and then I selected 'maximum visual effects'. This triggered the system to prompt me whether I wanted to install the proprietary Nvidia drivers (of course, you silly!). After the installation there was some hiccup about not being able to switch or load drivers (somekind of fb kernel driver got in the way? I couldn't tell), but a reboot set things straight. And how! As soon as the Nvidia driver loaded, the computer became silent (relatively speaking). And this makes all the difference. First I had regretted my choice for this particular desktop machine, and now I find it very good value for money. I should probably still chase up DELL about the resonance in the video card fan, but it no longer prevents me from enjoying the new computer. It's funny that during startup and shutdown the noise can still be heard, that is before loading and after unloading the Nvidia driver.

And Ubuntu 10.4 is just fine, even at beta 2. I was so confident that I replaced my old desktop with the new one just the day I had to leave for four days to visit the last EGEE User Forum, after I rsync'd all user data and tested that my wife could still read her e-mail.