L2 Viewfinder

Got the latest Ubuntu 9.10 running on my Thinkpad SL300 (ditched the Hasee Q310N now that my wife got the HP dv3 Pavilion Notebook). Some remarks:

1. Boot up time is noticeably faster.

2. Nice GUI during login. This is a welcome change.

3. Everything works well out of the box. The Ubuntu One service is a welcome addition, however more should have been done to introduce new users. As it is, it leaves many clueless on what to do.

4. Seems like we don’t have to use the Thinkpad SL series patch for the special keys – the brightness and the volume keys are fixed. The only key combination that does not work is the Fn+F8 key.

5. Disk Utility (Palimpsest) is installed. Takes advantage of the S.M.A.R.T. capabilities of the hard disk and warn you in advance if there are pending failures.

Some things which I think regressed:

1. I am able to happily connect to my office’s Windows shares in Jaunty, but with Karmic, it is broken. My usual edits on /etc/nsswitch.conf do not work anymore. I am currently monitoring the forums if someone has also encountered the same problem. Could it be Gnome related problem?

2. Network Manager does not connect you properly with ADSL. As a workaround, I use “pppoeconf” on the terminal to set my username and password, and then launch the service from there or type in the terminal “sudo pon dsl-provider”.

3. Empathy looks nice, but I still like the old and reliable Pidgin. There are some conveniences that were not carried on to Empathy from Pidgin, for instance, the ability to show to your contacts in Empathy about your status when you set it in the indicator applet.

4. ibus is cool, but for a major release do we really have to set things right on our bash file? Totally uncool…

5. Opera cannot take advantage of ibus input unless you make changes in /usr/bin/opera:

At the top of the file, find the following lines:

#!/bin/sh
# Location of the Opera binaries
OPERA_BINARYDIR=/usr/lib/opera

die () {
    for arg
    do echo “$arg”
    done >&2
    exit 1
}

On the next line immediately following the last character, insert the following lines:

#For ibus compatibility
export QT_IM_MODULE=XIM

That should do the trick.

6. Suspend to RAM does not work. Update: Remove/unmount any external storage devices first

7. Suspend to Disk does not work. The forums report that I should have a swap space in my hard disk equivalent to my system’s RAM (I’m running 64 bit and my RAM is 4GB – their telling me to sacrifice 4GB of disk space for my swap). I don’t find it good – my previous setup in Jaunty had a swap space of 2GB and it works pretty darn well.

Overall though, it is a solid release. I will update this section when I encounter something unusual.