The Linux Experiment

As of version 12.10, Ubuntu has upgraded the version of X.org they include to the latest and unfortunately it is no longer compatible with the official ATI Catalyst drivers for some cards, specifically the HD2xxx, 3xxx and 4xxx models. The open source driver is the only officially supported alternative and, while it is fine for most uses, it doesn’t support the advanced power settings that the ATI driver does. This means that on my laptop in particular the fan runs constantly as it tries to cool down the overheating card.

So… no Ubuntu 12.10+ then?

Thankfully someone has created a PPA that successfully downgrades the version of X.org to the maximum supported version for the official ATI driver. This step is obviously quite drastic and should not be used on production systems. However from the limited time that I have been running it things seem pretty stable. The PPA (and instructions) can be found at this link: AMD Catalyst Legacy

It’s easy. Simply throw “-o Acquire::http::Dl-Limit=X” in your apt-get command where X is the kb/s you wish to limit it to. So for example let’s say that you want to limit an apt-get upgrade command to roughly 50kb/s of bandwidth. Simply issue the following command:

sudo apt-get -o Acquire::http::Dl-Limit=50 upgrade

Simple right?

Just a quick update on my experience running the pre-release version of Ubuntu (this time upgraded to Ubuntu 12.10 Beta 1!). Not a whole lot new to report – Beta 1 is basically the same as Alpha 3 but with the addition of an option to connect to a Remote Server directly from the login screen. Unfortunately the bugs that I have filed so far have yet to be resolved, but I’m still hopeful someone has a chance to correct them prior to release.

It is already almost the end of September which means there are only a couple more weeks before the official 12.10 launch. From what I’ve seen so far this upgrade will be a pretty small, evolutionary update to the already good 12.04 release.

Previous posts in this series:

• Ubuntu 12.10 Alpha 3 (Report #2)
• Ubuntu 12.10 Alpha 3 (Report #1)
• Test driving the new Ubuntu (12.10)

Once again I’ve compiled some charts to show what the major, full desktop distributions look like while running on limited hardware. Just like before I’ve decided to re-run my previous tests this time using the following distributions:

• Fedora 17 (GNOME)
• Fedora 17 (KDE)
• Kubuntu 12.04 (KDE)
• Linux Mint 13 (Cinnamon)
• Linux Mint 13 (KDE)
• Linux Mint 13 (Mate)
• Linux Mint 13 (Xfce)
• Mageia (GNOME)
• Mageia (KDE)
• OpenSUSE 12.2 (GNOME)
• OpenSUSE 12.2 (KDE)
• Ubuntu 12.04 (Unity)
• Xubuntu 12.04 (Xfce)

I will be testing all of this within VirtualBox on ‘machines’ with the following specifications:

• Total RAM: 512MB
• Hard drive: 8GB
• CPU type: x86 with PAE/NX
• Graphics: 3D Acceleration enabled

The tests were all done using VirtualBox 4.1.22, and I did not install VirtualBox tools (although some distributions may have shipped with them). I also left the screen resolution at the default (whatever the distribution chose) and accepted the installation defaults. All tests were run between September 3rd, 2012 and September 14th, 2012 so your results may not be identical.

Results

Following in the tradition of my previous posts I have once again gone through the effort to bring you nothing but the most state of the art in picture graphs for your enjoyment.

Things to know before looking at the graphs

First off if your distribution of choice didn’t appear in the list above its probably not reasonably possible to installed (i.e. I don’t have hours to compile Gentoo) or I didn’t feel it was mainstream enough (pretty much anything with LXDE). Secondly there may be some distributions that don’t appear on all of the graphs, for example Mandriva (now replaced by Mageia). Finally I did not include Debian this time around because it is still at the same version as last time. As always feel free to run your own tests.

First boot memory (RAM) usage

This test was measured on the first startup after finishing a fresh install.

Memory (RAM) usage after updates

This test was performed after all updates were installed and a reboot was performed.

Memory (RAM) usage change after updates

The net growth or decline in RAM usage after applying all of the updates.

Install size after updates

The hard drive space used by the distribution after applying all of the updates.

Conclusion

As before I’m going to leave you to drawing your own conclusions.

Well it’s been a little while since I made the mistake (joking) of installing Ubuntu 12.10 Alpha 3. Here is what I’ve learned so far.

1. My laptop really does not like the open source ATI graphics driver – and there are no proprietary drivers for this release yet. It’s not that the driver doesn’t perform well enough graphically, its just that it causes my card to give off more heat than the proprietary driver. This in turn causes my laptop’s fan to run non-stop and drains my battery at a considerable rate.
   
2. Ubuntu has changed the way they do updates in this release. Instead of the old Update Manager there is a new application (maybe just a re-skinning of the old) that is much more refined and really quite simple. Interestingly enough the old hardware drivers application is also now gone, instead it is merged into the update manager. Overall I’m neutral on both changes.
   

   Updates are quite frequent when running an alpha release

3. There is a new Online Accounts application (part of the system settings) included in this release. This application seems to work like an extension of the GNOME keyring – saving passwords for your various online accounts (go figure). I haven’t really had a chance to play around with it too much yet but it seems to work well enough.
   

That’s it for now. I’m off to file a bug over this open source driver that is currently melting my computer. I’ll keep you posted on how that goes.

Call it crazy but I’ve decided to actually install an Ubuntu Alpha release, specifically Ubuntu 12.10 Alpha 3. Why would anyone in their right mind install an operating system that is bound to be full of bugs and likely destroy all of my data? My reasons are twofold:

1. I regularly use Ubuntu or Ubuntu derivatives and would like to help in the process of making them better
2. There are still a few quirks with my particular laptop that I would like to help iron out once and for all, hopefully correcting them in a more universal sense for Linux as a whole

So join me over the next few posts as I relate my most recent experiences running… shall we say, less than production code.

It’s that time again. Like before I’ve decided to re-run my previous tests this time using the following distributions:

• Debian 6.0 (GNOME)
• Kubuntu 11.10 (KDE)
• Linux Mint 12 (GNOME)
• Linux Mint 201109 LXDE (GNOME)
• Mandriva 2011 (KDE)
• OpenSUSE 12.1 (GNOME)
• OpenSUSE 12.1 (KDE)
• Sabayon 8 (GNOME)
• Sabayon 8 (KDE)
• Sabayon 8 (Xfce)
• Ubuntu 11.10 (Unity)
• Ubuntu 12.04 Beta 2 (Unity)
• Xubuntu 11.10 (Xfce)

I will be testing all of this within VirtualBox on ‘machines’ with the following specifications:

• Total RAM: 512MB
• Hard drive: 8GB
• CPU type: x86 with PAE/NX
• Graphics: 3D Acceleration enabled

The tests were all done using VirtualBox 4.1.0 on Windows 7, and I did not install VirtualBox tools (although some distributions may have shipped with them). I also left the screen resolution at the default (whatever the distribution chose) and accepted the installation defaults. All tests were run between April 2nd, 2012 and April 9th, 2012 so your results may not be identical.

Results

Following in the tradition of my previous posts I have once again gone through the effort to bring you nothing but the most state of the art in picture graphs for your enjoyment.

Things to know before looking at the graphs

First off if your distribution of choice didn’t appear in the list above its probably not reasonably possible to installed (i.e. Fedora 16 which requires 768MB of RAM) or I didn’t feel it was mainstream enough (pretty much anything with LXDE). Secondly there may be some distributions that don’t appear on all of the graphs, for example Mandriva. In the case of Mandriva the distribution would not allow me to successfully install the updates and so I only have its first boot RAM usage available. Finally when I tested Debian I was unable to test before / after applying updates because it seemed to have applied the updates during install. As always feel free to run your own tests.

First boot memory (RAM) usage

This test was measured on the first startup after finishing a fresh install.

Memory (RAM) usage after updates

This test was performed after all updates were installed and a reboot was performed.

Memory (RAM) usage change after updates

The net growth or decline in RAM usage after applying all of the updates.

Install size after updates

The hard drive space used by the distribution after applying all of the updates.

Conclusion

As before I’m going to leave you to drawing your own conclusions.

No seriously, it does. Whenever it makes a connection to the router it causes it to enter some bad state wherein it refuses to allow any connections to occur. This also has the effect of booting all other machines from the network. Apparently I’m not the only one to have this problem either.

I did manage to find a bit of a work around though:

1. Set your wireless router to Mixed B/G mode only (yes I know, you lose out on N by doing this…)
2. Enter the following into a terminal:
   echo "options iwlagn 11n_disable=1" | tee /etc/modprobe.d/iwlagn.confg
sudo modprobe -rf iwlagn
sudo modprobe -v iwlagn
sudo service network-manager restart
3. Maybe reboot?

I’ve also heard of some people getting it to work by enabling this instead of disabling it. To do so simply change the 11n_disable=1 line above to 11n_disable=0.

Hopefully they will have this annoying bug fixed soon.

If you’ve recently upgraded to Ubuntu 11.10 and are a developer you may notice some things missing. For one there is no longer an option to install the sun-java6-jdk or JRE from the repositories. Worse they also removed the Netbeans IDE. Apparently this had something to do with licenses but if you’re going to offer MP3 support the least you could do is make software like this available for those who are willing to look for it.

Anyway with that rant out of the way I did manage to find a way to install both.

Install sun-java6-jdk

Following the instructions on this excellent post I was able to successfully install sun-java6-jdk using the following commands:

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:ferramroberto/java
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install sun-java6-jdk sun-java6-plugin

There are alternative instructions for installing Java 7 as well.

Install Netbeans

My first attempt at installing both was to head to the official Oracle Java website and download the Netbeans + JDK installer. Unfortunately the installer seems to crash in this version of Ubuntu. However since the above process had installed the JRE I was able to simply grab the Netbeans only installer from Oracle which ended up working surprisingly well. Just remember to run it using sudo if you want other users to be able to use it as well.

So I decided to take a go at Ubuntu 11.04 in a virtual machine before taking the leap and installing it for real. As I understand it, the new Unity desktop is a pretty major departure from the Gnome 2.x desktop that I’m used to, and I want to see if it’s as bad as it looks in the screenshots.

Unfortunately, I’ve yet to make it to the desktop, as Ubuntu has decided that it will take 42 minutes to download some language packs that I neither want or need.

Didn’t I tell it what language I speak as the first step of the install process? Surely this can be done later.