Friday, February 05, 2010

Score: Ubuntu 1, me 1

I recently updated the version of Ubuntu i run on one of my laptops. (Don't ask me why i have two laptops. Okay, here's a hint: I suck.) But I digress: I moved from version 9.04 (Jaunty Jackalope) to 9.10 (Karmic Koala).

First impressions were very solid: it's a slightly cleaner interface, it's considerably faster (though not in bootup the way many others seem to have experienced, and seemed relatively stable.

That is, until I took the bold step of unplugging my laptop while it was turned on. Which caused it to suspend automatically, and need to be awoken.

Well, I endured this irritation for a week or so while I poked around on the InformationSuperInfoBahn for fixes, and basically just read and re-read that the new power management package in Karmic, well, sucks.

Finally today I found a post deep in a bug reporting forum (see post #47.)

So while I can now happily unplug the laptop while using it to move it around the condo (this laptop serves as a primary podcast playing device while I'm cooking and brewing) I'm still enduring the semi-regular freezeups, where everything stops working except that you can move the mouse around in a futile, sad attempt to make it work, and which require a hard-restart.

On balance, knowing what I know now, I wouldn't have updated, but reverting to an older version is a big pain in the ass, so here I am. Fortunately, the ubuntu community is very, very good about patches and fixing things, so it shouldn't take long.

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