Bagel Belly Blog

A whole bunch of Ibex stuff

Let's just say that getting Ubuntu 8.10 Intrepid Ibex completely happy on this Dell Latitude D630 has been less than straightforward.

Out-of-the-box installation is pretty straightforward, with the wrinkle that I had to use manual partitioning in order to overwrite my previous test Ubuntu install - there's seemingly no "Overwrite old installation" option.

I had to do some work to get dual monitor support working properly. The laptop has an NVIDIA graphics chipset, and so I installed the proprietary binary drivers (bad me). Unfortunately there's a bug in the NVIDIA X Server Settings application that can cause it to crash instead of writing out your current settings to the /etc/X11/xorg.conf file. The workaround I took was pretty simple: I moved my existing /etc/X11/xorg.conf file to /etc/X11/xorg.conf.orig before clicking the "Save to X Configuration File" button. This allowed me to save my dual monitor configuration and it now works, and is retained across reboots. It's still a bit flakey - Ubuntu doesn't seem to recognise when the external display is removed, so I end up disabling it in the server settings app before disconnecting from the docking station. That makes undocking a tedious chore.

Next up is the strange decision by TPTB to make the wifi LED blink on activity. It's a horrendous usability snafu, incredibly annoying, and unless you know better you tend to wonder if there's a problem with the wifi connection. Theoretically you can disable the wifi LED blinking; after creating the script I ran it (sudo /etc/network/if-up.d/iwl-no-blink) and the blinking stopped. Briefly. It's back to blinking again... I'm still looking for a resolution.

Another problem that's plaguing me is occasional complete hangs, with caps lock and shift lock lights flashing and the machine frozen. Nothing even gets into the logs - so I can't easily diagnose it. More on that as and when I've figured out what's going on.

I still find it frustrating that Firefox looks abysmal out of the box on Ubuntu. In order to make it remotely pleasant to work with, I had to:

• Go to System -> Preferences -> Appearance -> Fonts and select Subpixel smoothing


• In Firefox, go to Edit -> Preferences -> Content -> in Fonts & Colours Advanced -> and select Serif/Bitstream Vera Serif / Bitstream Vera Sans / Bitstream Vera Sans Mono and set default sizes to 14 and 12.

I also installed the msttcorefonts package to get nicer fonts elsewhere.

Next up: syncing, the woeful state of calendaring, and hibernation.

Posted by savs at November 6, 2008 6:26 PM