Apparently it just doesn’t work.
There’s a bug in the uvcvideo driver that kills the other USB ports, and causes suspend and hibernate to fail. You can apparently fix this by being ninja and hitting fn+f6 before it loads, but I’m not that good, so I just blacklisted uvcvideo. If you’re having the same problem, you can stop the driver from loading by blacklisting it.
sudo gedit /etc/modprobe.d/blacklist.conf
and add the line
blacklist uvcvideo
anywhere in the file (to the end would be easiest, so if there is a fix you’ll be able to find it & unblacklist it). Of course, this disables the webcam. On one hand I’d been using 8.04, which also lacked (native) driver support for the webcam, so I don’t feel like I’m missing anything really (after I reinstalled the OS I didn’t bother recompiling the driver, so I’ve been without it for a while). Still rather annoying, and I can’t tell if they’re working to fix it or not -but I certainly hope so.
The other main issue I had was a very, very annoying bug in the screen brightness. On startup, and whenever I adjusted the brightness, it would oscillate between the set brightness and a level or two below, making the screen flicker. There was apparently some magic where you could hold your right mouse button down for a while & it’d stop, but I’m not doing that every time. The fix mentioned in the release notes worked for me, which was to “edit /etc/default/grub and add nomodeset to GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX, then run sudo update-grub“. Restarted, and there was no flickering. I could change my brightness, and no flickering. What a relief. I have yet to figure out if doing this has any negative effects.
Other than that I really like this release. I have native wireless again! [after a glitch, I had downgraded from 9.04 to 8.04, which didn’t.] It does seem faster, though maybe not as fast as I’d heard. It also seems like my battery has slightly better life, not sure if that’s either true or related, however – I only installed it yesterday, after all. I’ve got a few screenshots, if anyone is interested. On a purely aesthetic note I’m very happy with the installed themes, it took very little tweaking for me to find something I liked. And usually I have to go an play with the panel backgrounds, edit the gtk config file…
 |
 |
 |
 |
| click to enlarge: 1024×600 | |||
Not sure if these are actually interesting to anyone, but… First is my empty desktop (well, the USB drive I was using to transfer the screenshots to this computer is there, but otherwise). Next is the file browser, a few changes but nothing amazing. Third is fake-using GIMP – obviously when I have a 1600×900 monitor I don’t really *want* to use GIMP on a netbook, but it’s not impossible at all. Finally, we have the Ubuntu Software Center, which I’m not that impressed with. I mean, I understand the reasoning behind consolidating package management and all, so I guess that’s cool. And not everything can be shiny. It is super easy to use, just like Add/Remove Applications. I guess I’ve crossed some sort of elitist line, or something, since I prefer command line. But I can say that about a few things (like command line twitter, that was odd).
So there’s my view on things. A bit of trouble to start with, but overall shiny. I’ve got Geany, Exaile, and a LAMP setup, so I’ll be happy.
No comments.