Arch on my laptop is flakey, considering switching

Judland · Post by **Judland** » Thu Mar 02, 2006 10:44 am

On my test box (a P3 450 MHz, with a measly 64MB of RAM) I upgraded to 3.5 from the Slackware/Current repository. Works great, from everything I've tested on it so far.

SeaMonkey is working quite well, too. It seems faster than the old Mozilla suite... at least to me, even on this lower resourced box.

coolfrood · Post by **coolfrood** » Thu Mar 02, 2006 10:59 am

Hey Pat,

I heard on yesterday's show that you are running Ubuntu Breezy Badger on your laptop. I have a recommendation for you: move to Dapper Drake. It is still in development but it has stabilised a lot. I have been running Dapper Drake at work and it has been relatively smooth. There was a phase where they were migrating to X.org 7 some time back, but all that has been sorted out. I'm convinced that anyone who has some knowledge about dealing with minor issues should run Dapper instead of Breezy.

It's fun being on the bleeding edge. The bootup is much snappier than Breezy. Gnome is much faster and best of all, I can use the Xgl eye-candy. Xgl blows away anything that OS X has and Vista will have. It's amazing and it runs very well on a decent graphics card. I have an NVidia at work that I'm running on a dual-screen Xinerama setup and I'm loving Xgl on it.

Cheers

Post by **Patrick** » Thu Mar 02, 2006 11:11 am

coolfrood wrote:Hey Pat,

I heard on yesterday's show that you are running Ubuntu Breezy Badger on your laptop. I have a recommendation for you: move to Dapper Drake. It is still in development but it has stabilised a lot. I have been running Dapper Drake at work and it has been relatively smooth. There was a phase where they were migrating to X.org 7 some time back, but all that has been sorted out. I'm convinced that anyone who has some knowledge about dealing with minor issues should run Dapper instead of Breezy.

I'm a little hesitant to go bleeding edge on my laptop since I'm starting to do some web development on it for work. I will upgrade once Dapper goes official though. What's involved, just pointing to the Dapper repositories and doing a 'apt-get dist-upgrade'? I should probably take out all the references to the extra stuff in my sources.list file as well. I'm not sure if I'll keep Gnome as the default desktop. I'll probably switch it back to KDE or maybe something lightwieght like XFCE.

coolfrood · Post by **coolfrood** » Thu Mar 02, 2006 11:22 am

Patrick wrote:
I'm a little hesitant to go bleeding edge on my laptop since I'm starting to do some web development on it for work. I will upgrade once Dapper goes official though. What's involved, just pointing to the Dapper repositories and doing a 'apt-get dist-upgrade'? I should probably take out all the references to the extra stuff in my sources.list file as well. I'm not sure if I'll keep Gnome as the default desktop. I'll probably switch it back to KDE or maybe something lightwieght like XFCE.

That is true. Bleeding edge on a laptop is a little riskier than bleeding edge on a desktop because the hardware on a laptop is usually more obscure. However, I would still recommend trying out an Ubuntu Dapper CD just to see how it handles your hardware. Maybe you might have better luck with the wireless card.

I upgraded from Breezy by changing my sources.list and just doing a dist-upgrade. It was pretty painless. What I like about Ubuntu is that I can the restricted kernel modules (the Nvidia drivers) through the universe repo, so every time the kernel gets upgraded, I don't have to recompile and reinstall the Nvidia drivers like I had to do with Fedora.

doublejoon · Post by **doublejoon** » Sun Mar 05, 2006 9:32 am

Hmmm my upgrades have been pretty painless (Arch). Xorg7.0's modularity is pretty sweet.

Post by **Patrick** » Sun Mar 05, 2006 9:56 am

doublejoon wrote:Hmmm my upgrades have been pretty painless (Arch). Xorg7.0's modularity is pretty sweet.

Glad to hear it. Not everyone has the same hardware/configuration as you. Check out Snarkout's thread about his issues. I haven't had the chance to upgrade on my main workstation yet. Hopefully it goes better than the laptop.

snarkout · Post by **snarkout** » Sun Mar 05, 2006 1:43 pm

Can you explain what you mean by "pretty sweet?" I understand that the move to modular xorg7 was inevitable, but IMO things are noticeably slower to redraw now. I've been through all of the threads on the board, am on the mailing list, and have read all through the wiki. I have to admit that I'm not exactly sure a) what it was supposed to accomplish or b) what it has accomplished. I've read a lot about how it's great because it's modular and it's an "inclusive" model now, but to me X is still the pig it has always been, but IME is even slower now.

doublejoon · Post by **doublejoon** » Mon Mar 06, 2006 9:48 am

I really don't know any other way to explain "pretty sweet" . I only download and use the modules for my hardware in /usr/lib/xorg/modules. In my eyes that makes it slimmer. Kinda the same concept as compiling your own custom modular kernel. Supposed to run faster with just the stuff that you need. Also I'm not using DRI (3d) or any other fancy options for my basic "sis" based driver on the laptop

I'm sure thats not the case for everyone's hardware. I was just stating that it works for "ME" just fine.

However I did lose 3D Accel on the desktop for my ATI 9600. I tried the symlinking /usr/X11R6/lib/modules with /usr/lib/xorg/modules. Still no worky. Not a big concern for me right now. Im sure ATI will have a supported driver for version 7.0 in a few months