A Week With Ubuntu Intrepid Alpha 2

27 July, 2008 at 1:59 pm Quintin 3 comments

Okay, so it is a week into my foray into Intrepidville, and it is not all good news. Since my entry last week on my experiences with Intrepid Ibex, two of my colleagues have also installed it on their machines.

They went the upgrade route – and while some things worked better, there was a lot of breakages. Both of them went back to Hardy, and it would seem that I am the only one soldiering on with Intrepid Ibex.

Here follows a short list of problems encountered this week:

Evolution Crashes the system.
Ubuntu Splash Screen absent on upgrade installations.
Error Messages have no text.
General instability.

Not bad for an Alpha release, but it would seem that Ubuntu plays nicer with older hardware than newer hardware. This is an ailment of Linux in general, so let us hope hardware support will improve soon.

Other than that not much else went wrong for me with Intrepid. I am actually impressed for now, although I have heard from people who are less happy. For now I’d say stay with Hardy if you use your machine for serious work, and leave the Alpha install for the tinkerers.

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Written by Jaco Kroon about 4 years ago.

Well, based on the wireless developments going into the kernel the last two or three releases I have to say that we should at least see some significant improvements in that area. I wonder whether we’ll ever “catch up” with Windows in that specific aspect, but all things considered I reckon Linux is doing pretty well. The only way we’ll ever “be in the lead” in terms of hardware is if more vendors provide in-mainline-kernel modules for their hardware – something which is relatively unlikely to happen due to hardware vendors seemingly believing that they’re protecting their Intellectual Property by not providing Linux drivers – which is really funny.

Consider the fact that by providing drivers you’re making your hardware available to a significantly larger group of users you’re enlarging your userbase, thus generating more (hopefully) sales, and bigger revenue – which is what business is about. If somebody copies your hardware – you sue them under your patents (which presumably you’ve filed for considering how “special” your hardware is, and you make another fortune). If others produce hardware which functions with your drivers, then they obviously created a hardware clone and they’re either licensed to do so or not (either way, again you make money). I really don’t want to go into the politics behind patents, it’s been treaded upon enough in various forms. Generally giants like MS is for it and OSS fundamentals is against it. Needless to say – my personal opinion is that if you produce hardware nowadays you should at least provide binary-only drivers for Linux and Windows, soon you’ll find that it’s impossible to keep up with both keeping your drivers compiling against a moving target and performing proper QA (with MSI, without, with 4K stacks, without, with HPET, without, with NOHZ, without), and you’ll realize the only sane way to proceed with Linux is to get your drivers in mainline, or one of the various other sub-trees – which means open-sourcing it.

Are you really protecting your IP? I doubt it. Consider the atheros chipsets which released a new revision relatively early in the year which is already in a working condition. No, it’s not mainline yet, but considering that the ath5k drivers didn’t exist at all in the 2.6.24 drivers, were in 2.6.25 (just not supporting my chipset), much better version in 2.6.26 (recognized, even initialize but no Rx/Tx) and functional drivers in linux-wireless at the moment – and I’m running these drivers. So I’m expecting full support in the 2.6.27 kernel (If I’m lucky).
Written by Juggernaut42 about 4 years ago.

For the very brief period that I used Intrepid I was impressed. I usually install the final version and look past the alpha’s and beta’s for the simplest reason. I want to feel the full kick of all the nice shiny features, all the tweaks and patches. To see the jump that the developers made from one version to the next.

But I could not resist the temptation of installing intrepid. After Quintin asked me to download the image for him. It bugged me until I upgraded my system to intrepid. That night I went to sleep with a smile while my notebook was upgrading to intrepid from hardy. The morning came and there was a few config files that needed my attention. When I was finished getting ready for work I rebooted my successfully upgraded notebook so that I could see the intrepid ibex…

On the first start-up of intrepid the usplash screen was gone and my notebook didn’t even boot into X or a terminal to fix the problems. I powered off the notebook and headed for work. at work I got the past the nasty usplash problem and logged normally into intrepid. everything seems perfect excluding the usplash problem. I even convinced one of my work collogues to try intrepid to solve his wireless problem.

But I was soon to discover the horror ahead. My wireless problem that I had with hardy was still there in intrepid. Same with the collogues wireless problem. It was stabler but not fixed. The evolution version that came with intrepid was bad very bad. But i got past all those small problems.

When I rebooted the machine the usplash problem got worse and on some occasions X didn’t want to start because of the usplash problem. then out of the blue my wireless at work started to give me problems as well.

It seemed that the longer I use intrepid the worse it got. by worse I mean unstable. And this was all in one day.

And before the day ended i was back on hardy with my old wireless problem…

I think if I took the time (if i had the time) I could have solved some of my problem, but the mountain was growing so fast I ran to safety.

So to finish tail. I can’t wait for the final release of intrepid so that I can upgrade again…
Written by Juggernaut42 about 4 years ago.

btw Jaco it seems that your commit can be a blog entry on its own. :P

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A Week With Ubuntu Intrepid Alpha 2

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