I installed Ubuntu 7.10, “Gutsy Gibbon”, last week when it was officially released. I have to say, that this is the most impressive Linux distro that I’ve ever worked with. While it has its rough spots, like any OS, I have not booted back into Windows since the install. I’ve been using Ubuntu off-and-on since Dapper Drake in mid-2005. I would end up using it for a few days on my laptop, but then I’d simply end up booting back into Windows because something simply didn’t work the way I wanted. Back then, I had a hard time getting WPA, Standby, Hibernation, and other power management features working properly. However, with Gutsy, I’ve finally been able to solve my power management dilemmas and I’ve not looked back.
When I first booted to the live install CD and started the (very quick) install process, I was amazed at how much better WPA support was in Gutsy. I was able to see my wireless network and connect: No problems. So, during the 10 minute install process, I was able to browse Slashdot in Firefox. I’m pretty sure your mind would explode if you tried to do something like that with the Windows installer.
My power management problems, however, were a little harder to take care of. It turns out that my weird standby and hibernation issues could be traced to two things: the Nvidia binary driver, and my lack of a swap partition. The Nvidia driver sucks when it comes to ACPI. I found a few lines in /etc/default/acpi-defaults.conf that I had to comment out and…presto! Standby worked! Ubuntu could finally be a viable Windows replacement. Then, after trolling trough the Ubuntu forums for about an hour, I discovered that I was a little too quick to dismiss the installer’s dialog that insisted: “You NEED a swap partition, dummy!” I thought, it’s 2007, I’ve got 2GB of RAM, why would I need a swap partition? Oh, what’s that? That’s where your memory contents get dumped on hibernation? Oops, I can see why it didn’t work. I simply created a new partition with Gpartd on the handy live CD, and upon reboot hibernation worked flawlessly.
I’m pretty happy about Ubuntu as my new OS, but I still have a few gripes:
- Battery life just isn’t as long. After running powertop and disabling a whole bunch of services, I still can’t get the same battery life as I got in Windows. Progress has been made, but my laptop is still a little fireball while running Linux.
- I can’t seem to get Azureus to work. I read some comments about having to use gcj instead of the Java JRE. I’ll get it working, but it was just something that I wanted to work out of the box.
- Copying files between to SMB servers using Gnome’s VFS is sloooooooow and it just eats CPU power. I’m not sure why this is the case.
Well, there’s my two cents.