Trouble Free Karmic Koala

The last time I blogged about Ubuntu Desktop, either I didn't explain the problems I was having sufficiently, or people just don't get it and react.  I try to make what I write clear enough for those new to Linux, but that may make it seem like I'm not very experienced with Linux, even though I have been actively abusing it since 1995.  I have decided to just keep on writing and let the chips fall where they may.

This post shouldn't raise the ire of most people though, because unlike many Ubuntu veterans and rookies alike, I have had very little, if any, problems with Karmic Koala, much to my delight.  Though I should point out, even with the problems I had with Jaunty, I still ran it on all of the systems I'm mentioning here.  I also manage twenty Sun workstations that have been happily running Jaunty with none of the problems I had with my home system.  My home system is a Dell XPS 420 with an ATI graphics card.  I first upgraded, rather installed Ubuntu 9.10, and restored my data backup from 9.04.  I created user accounts and the previous fix to the gnome-system-tools made this uneventful.  Installing the multimedia and third-party software is incredibly easy now.  The best guide for multimedia and add-on software I have found is over at my-guides.net. Once I had everything running smoothly I decided to take a chance and install the proprietary ATI drivers.  I had nothing but problems with the ATI drivers in 9.04.  This time however, it all worked without a hitch.  I have full eye-candy and VLC plays videos smoothly with no problems.  The final big test was Brasero, which was a giant headache with Jaunty.  I burned an audio CD with the Normalize Plug-in and it worked like a charm.  Well over a month later, Karmic Koala has been trouble free.

Karmic Koala Eye Candy

The next test was my netbook, an Acer Aspire One with a 160 gigabyte hard drive.  This system started out life with Windows XP being immediately replaced with Fedora 10 XFCE Respin, then Easy Peasy, which I was happy with.  Then with the delays of Easy Peasy 2.0, I decide to try Ubuntu Netbook Remix (UNR) 9.04, which I was satisfied with.  Again, with a completely new install, I upgraded to UNR 9.10.  The install was trouble free and the new interface has improved a great deal.  The only downside is the built-in web cam still doesn't record video very well, making it essentially unusable.  Not needing the web cam, I haven't spent any time troubleshooting it, and is a non-issue for me.  The one manual tweak that needed to be done was configuring the Acer fan control kernel module, acerhdf, which was loaded on boot but not enabled.

The last system to be converted was my work desktop, a Dell Optiplex 755 with Intel graphics.  It was a dual boot system with Windows Vista Business and Ubuntu 9.04.  Two problems made me upgrade this system sooner than the winter break I had planned on.  The anti-virus that I was using brought Vista to its knees.  Though the version of the anti-virus was not the latest, it was a supported version for Vista.  Luckily I was able to boot into Ubuntu to complete the work I needed to do, accessing the NTFS volume.  Then I started having problems with Firefox on Ubuntu locking up and I had to repeatedly kill Firefox and restart it.  I didn't have the patience to isolate the problem so I decided that I needed to wipe out Vista anyway, and installed Karmic for a third time.  Again, trouble free and this time no dual booting.  Instead, I have Windows 7 running in VirtualBox.  Since this is a work machine, I have no advanced graphics installed and can manage both my Windows servers and Linux servers.

Three different systems with three different uses, all worked splendidly well with Karmic Koala.  All of my previous issues fixed and no new ones have raised their ugly heads.  Not being an LTS version of Ubuntu, this version has worked very well.  There are many reasons why a particular distribution version works error free on some systems and dies a miserable death on others.  Hardware compatibility is probably the major reason followed by specific software bugs.  I recently purchased a notebook computer and it will dual boot Windows 7 and Ubuntu, mainly because the consulting work I occasionally do requires Windows.  Due to the Windows requirement and running multiple virtual machines for Linux servers, Windows servers and Windows clients for testing, along with network and monitoring tools, a netbook isn't up to the task.  When I purchased the laptop, I did exactly what I tell clients and friends not to do.  I purchased the system without first researching hardware compatibility.  After the machine arrived I then decided to see what problems were in store.  I did find out that there is a bug in the X.org driver that can be worked around and the wireless card isn't supported out of the box.  At least I know what I have to look forward to, and nothing that is insurmountable.  I should have Karmic running soon on a fourth machine.