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February 28, 2006

Dapper Drake Flight CD 4

I tested the LiveCD version of Ubuntu 6.04 Flight CD 3, due to release in April. It's close enough now for horseshoes and hand grenades, so I've actually installed Flight CD 4 on this laptop.

My first impression is that the install went more smoothly for 5.04 and for 5.10, but then I did wait until those were fully baked before trying to install.

• What's with the huge pause after the kernel gets loaded and the installer starts?
  Was Ubuntu trying to start an X-based installer and couldn't get X configured for the laptop?
• How did I so easily manage to perform an OEM install?
  I didn't notice anything was amiss until it asked me for a user password without allowing me to provide a username. It just seemed like the install was bugged. Then I got out of that, ran sudo oem-config-prepare after updating 233 packages (!).
  This left me in a state where I had to go to failsafe install. I couldn't get my user added with the right groups to do any administration. It's not clear to me whether that's a bug, or something I was supposed to know since I installed as an OEM. But installing as an OEM was pure accident.
• Has Evolution gotten good enough to give it a chance?
  Thunderbird should at least be a default option for the mailer.
• Ekiga Softphone (the program formerly known as GnomeMeeting) now helps me get signed up with a SIP address at the associated website. Very nice.
• Sound setup still does not seem to work.
  Had to killall esd before ekiga could get configured.
• Although I had to identify the trident driver in xorg.conf using a text editor, at least the default vesa driver worked fine. No weird colors on the laptop screen when X starts.
• Whereami and a wizard to configure should be there by default if anything looking like a laptop is detected.
  If I had the energy I'd do the work myself.

If I had the energy, I'd get to work on Matt's idea of network-based configuration settings. One should not have to set up one's browser and emailer each time one changes systems.

Update: It wasn't enough to add the trident driver in the appropriate section. I had to make the Device section in xorg.conf look like this:

Section "Device"
        Identifier      "Generic Video Card"
        Driver          "trident"
        BusID           "PCI:1:0:0"
        Option          "ShadowFB"      "true"
        Option          "accel"
EndSection

Otherwise the windows get repainted very slowly when scrolling or being displaced.

Posted by Mark at February 28, 2006 11:24 PM

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