Score: Ubuntu 2, Me 2

The three faithful readers of my boring blog (love you guys!) might remember a post a while ago about the battle I'm fighting with my Ubuntu install on this very (Dell 700m) laptop, where the score was Ubuntu 1, Me 1. If not, you should go back and briefly review that post, so that this will make a little more sense.

In the intervening time since that last post, the Karmic install was getting more and more buggy: crashing, freezing, and the power management was just a complete fuckup. I had my best friend the computer genius try to fix it, and finally he asked if I really even need the power management function (e.g., to sleep or hibernate the computer after long periods of disuse.) I didn't, since when I'm using this laptop, I'm always using it, and then I pretty much always manually sleep it or shut it down. So he just turned off power management, which worked like a charm. For about an hour.

Fast forward to yesterday: I'm finally sufficiently unhappy with the bugginess and instability of Karmic that I decide to go the big ol' pain in the ass route, and regress to Ubuntu 9.04, Jaunty Jackalope. It's a big ol' pain in the ass because reverse-updating essentially means a full wipe of your hard drive and completely new install of the new version as if it's a new OS. Yeah, there are various ways of tricking your system into the downgrade, but many advise against them.

So I got out the external hard drive, and backed up all the data. (Well, I actually forgot the pictures, but that's okay, because I had minimal images on this machine.) Then I generated a bootable installation of Jaunty on a flash drive. Then installed it. Then installed the hundreds of updates that Ubuntu developers have released since Jaunty came out. Then installed all of the software I like.

So the score as of yesterday evening was Ubuntu 1, Me 2. HAH!

I just started up the computer this morning, and had to laugh out loud: I'm back to the bug that existed in my last go-round with Jaunty, which is particular to some models of laptops: the computer thinks I have a smaller screen or lower refresh rate than I do, and cannot be made to believe otherwise. So I have two black bands of empty screen running vertically on both sides of my display, wasting about two inches of screen real estate.

Ubuntu 2, Me 2. The battle rages on!