A good friend of mine leapfrogged one of the Ubuntu releases after sticking with the prior one for an additional six months because it was unusable on his machine yet the later release worked fine. I had never experienced similar problems until now. Allow me to go into a little detail about the problems I’ve encountered.

Major regression in Intel drivers performance

I always read the release candidate technical overview before installing a new version of Ubuntu. Unfortunately complete unusability on Intel graphics cards isn’t mentioned in the known issues. You have to check the bottom of a seperate set of release notes. Given that 22% of GNU/Linux users use Intel graphics along with all of the Ubuntu machines sold by Dell you would think Canonical would think that the regression is a bigger deal.

So I installed an older driver following instructions linked to in the bug listing. Whilst this did originally seem to provide an enhancement graphical performance has since returned to it’s original Jaunty hell. Why would someone decide to include alpha drivers in an Ubuntu release?

Settings in Power Management are ignored.

The Power Management options in Jaunty sure behave weirdly for me. I disabled the display sleeping and dimming when on AC power and set nothing to happen when the laptop lid is closed. However my display still decides to sleep and closing the laptop lid:

• Turns the display off on the screen.
• Turns the display off on my external monitor.
• Turns my two screen setup into a single screen that, when I reopen the lid, is mirrored on both screens.

Needless to say I’ve configured my display settings correctly and I’ve even settled for the external screen being primary when the laptop one should be. So, anyway, I tried changing the battery power options to the same as the AC power ones and then my display stopped sleeping. I’m on AC power so this shouldn’t be resolving it! This still doesn’t resolve the closing laptop lid problem which means watching a movie on my external screen involves me keeping my laptop open (and bright).

Rhythmbox refuses to play WMA files even with w32codecs installed.

Sadly I still have some WMA files from back in the day when I used Windows. I’ve tried countless programs to convert them but nothing has successfully converted them without intermittent audio issues. Thus I’ve kept them in WMA format and, until Jaunty, have been able to play them back in Ubuntu. I hate to say it but it looks like Canonical has taken steps to prevent people from playing back WMA unless they purchase the codecs from their store. My reasoning for this conclusion is that Rhythmbox refuses to play WMA files yet every other gstreamer based application on my system handles them fine. This is especially a shame as the application I’m now using to play music, Songbird, doesn’t like OGG format. As the only OGG format music I have is the Ubuntu podcasts I figured it’s a sacrifice I have to make – I’ll listen to those in a seperate application.

Other Minor Annoyances

• indicator-applet – It appears that this is meant to hold all of the programs that should be in the notification area. Firstly this is completely unwanted behaviour – I want easy access to Pidgin and other programs. Secondly, it doesn’t work properly as the only tray program it actually shows is Pidgin and, furthermore, Pidgin is also shown as an additional separate icon.
• update-manager – Apparently there’s some people out there… somewhere… that don’t see the update icon in the notification area and use it to update their software. I’ve not met anyone who isn’t aware of it and my grandmother who is in her late sixties is able to use it fine this way. Removing it now means that she won’t ever update her machine, ever. Fortunately it can be re-enabled with a command in the terminal but I worry about people out there that, without this icon, won’t ever update their machine.
• VLC media player – Now VLC displays video inside a seperate window to the rest of the program despite whatever settings are used in its preferences.
• Poor performance – Jaunty gives me generally poor performance. It lags constantly. I’ve listed this as a minor annoyance as I believe it’s probably caused by the lack of proper support for Intel graphics but it makes the OS pretty difficult to use.
• GNOME panel regression – I am no longer able to drag panels around on my desktop. I can change the orientation of each panel but this doesn’t allow me to move them from one monitor to another. This especially poses a problem when the wrong monitor is automagically chosen as primary.

Improvements

Okay. I’ve spent plenty of time listing all the problems that have crept into Jaunty, both minor and major, but now I believe it’s time to list the enhancements that relate to me and how.

• Faster boot time – Jaunty boots faster than Intrepid. It also includes a nice, new bootup screen. This is definitely a good thing although I wonder if, really, what people need is the base installation on a SSD for fast bootup (~7 seconds) and then the data stored on a HDD inside the same laptop/desktop for price factor. It’s also a shame that I have to wait for my desktop to load after entering my username and password. On a one person machine like mine it would be much better if it preloaded the desktop and displayed it once I’d logged in.
• New notification system – A new notification system is bundled with Jaunty. The new notifications look pretty cool and you can try it out yourself with the following command: notify-send “Hey” “Jai is awesome”
• gEdit – A nice new theme is included called Cobalt. The document’s language can easily be changed via the bottom of the text editor although there are a LOT of entries here (perhaps it would be better to let users choose which languages to display as the average user probably only uses a small selection of the ones gEdit supports).
• Open Office 3 – It’s definitely a good thing that this is now included with Ubuntu but, of course, I installed it on Intrepid ages ago using a third party repository.
• Updated software – Most software has been updated to the latest versions in the repositories

After creating my new profile and migrating the passwords, bookmarks, history and cookies (I left everything else as that was, no doubt, causing the problem) I installed a few essential extensions and that led me to wondering, what extensions does everyone else use in Firefox? Feel free to reply in comment to this post or post your own similar entry.

• Brief – Built-in RSS reader. I used to use Tiny Tiny RSS but found it too slow
• Cookie Whitelist – Makes blocking tracking cookies easy
• Google Gears – So I can download my GMail and read it later
• Greasemonkey – I currently only use this for Facebook Fixer but have used it for lots of other things in the past.
• NoScript – Stops JavaScript and Flash adverts as well as preventing sites from doing nasty things with JavaScript (think of those sites where they open 100 popups when you visit them).
• ScrapBook – Store snippets of the web forever.
• Tiny Menu – Reclaim my screen by removing the entire menu bar toolbar in Firefox.
• Tree Style Tab – Modern wide-screen laptops have extra space when browsing websites which is best used to display a longer list of open tabs.

Program Design: 90%
Study Skills and Professional Practice : 70%
Discrete Structures: 70%
Computer Systems: 45%

I did no revision for Computer Systems, Program Design or Study Skills and Professional Practise. I realise now that I should have probably done somefor Computer Systems.

At this time last year I decided to make and follow four new year’s resolutions with varying degrees of success. I opted to be more physically active so as to get into better shape – unfortunately something that I don’t feel I’ve achieved to a significant standard. As such it is something that I would like to further this year by either taking up a sport or involving myself in regular workouts in the local gym.

Since I reached university I spend a lot more time socially and out in bars and clubs – a resolution from 2008 successfully met. I’d like to think that I take more chances now than I have before which is ultimately something that I will improve on further with time. I never completed a single entry in my 101 things to do before you die book. I think that perhaps I’d be more suited with my own self-crafted “bucket list“.

This year I aim on fulfilling the following and would appreciate it if friends and family can keep me on track:

• Select and train in a sport to a high standard (e.g. running a half marathon).
• Spend reading hours for every module at University so as to achieve my potential.
• Try something new: regularly engage in new activities and try new things that I otherwise might never have.

I am going to record my efforts, successes and all on my personal website. I would like to invite everyone to follow and also remind me of them if it looks like I may have been led astray. If you have suggestions for what new things I should try this year then please share them – I’ll never find out about them if you don’t tell me.

Happy New Year!

This leaves me wondering as to whether there is something like Lifehacker out there geared specifically at GNU/Linux users. I’ve seen a few GNU/Linux market websites but they don’t have the finesse that Lifehacker has. Can anyone tell me if I’m missing anything significant out there?

I’m a little late for the post-installation craze that was happening on the Ubuntu-UK Planet just under a month ago but I would still like to participate so here goes. With every new release of Ubuntu I always perform a clean installation and these are the packages and changes that I made with Intrepid:

1. Install the following packages: wine, xchat, gnome do, filezilla, notecase, vlc, eclipse, virtualbox ose, unrar, flashplugin-nonfree, java, pidgin-libnotify, handbrake, crossover, gmountiso
   

The proprietary components I installed are CrossOver, Java, Flash and Unrar.

• CrossOver – They offered a freeware version temporarily and so I figured I’d take a look – I haven’t used it since experimenting with it. Since removed.
• Java – Required as part of one of my modules on my Computer Science course (hence I installed eclipse was to make development using it easier).
• Flash – Sadly it seems to be pretty essential on the internet
• Unrar – For the less educated that choose to package files in RAR format

I also installed a proprietary Windows application, ImgBurn, to handle burning specific ISOs and ripping specific discs that the Ubuntu tools seem to think are broken.

Furthermore to clean the system up a little I remove a lot of the applets from the top GNOME bar along with the shortcuts (as I use Gnome Do to launch applications) and I reorganise my home directory like so:

~/Documents
~/Documents/Public
~/Documents/Templates
~/Multimedia
~/Multimedia/Examples
~/Multimedia/Music
~/Multimedia/Pictures
~/Multimedia/Video

Feel free to post any comments or criticism.