Ubuntu 9.10 released - Oct 2009

Well I forgot to post anything about the release of this fine new distro of Ubuntu, but never fear - something is here now.

I installed Ubuntu 9.10 when it was at Alpha 3 stat many months back from October. This is something I do on a separate partition and I never point it to my current user folder in /home, just in case the Alpha rubbed off on my files. Alphas tend to have a very unstable existance and can burn you if you are not careful. If you want to live on the wild side, then be my guest. So far, so good has been my luck with Ubuntu Alphas.

I was happy to run the Alpha and did so on my Inspiron 8600 during Atlanta Linux Fest. I even ran the Ubuntu hardware tests they wanted people to do. They do these tests to get the bugs worked out before the final product is released. I even submitted a bug that I knew about - an issue with Nvidia graphics chips and suspend/resume. It was fun and even more fun to show the developers all the boot garbage that popped up everytime I rebooted…. another known issue they were working on resolving.

Sometime later in October I got my new laptop from a contest. Yes, I won it! I immediately installed Ubuntu, but made the mistake of putting 32-bit Ubuntu onto it. And of course, I had to reinstall with the 64-bit version as I knew it was way faster. I installed at that point the first beta version of Ubuntu 9.10.

I continued to upgrade and patch daily until I past the release date without many issues. YMMV! Ubuntu works very well on my Dell Studio 1555 laptop and starts up fast as well as suspends and resumes quite well. Of course there are some issues, but overall they boil down to just one that irks me into a shutdown and reboot - brightness adjustment.

See, this laptop has an LED backlit screen, making power consumption extreme when at full brightness. Sure its bright, but sitting in a darkened room with a 200watt light shining directly into your eyes is not an easy thing to handle. A reboot often does not reset the controls and sometimes can reset my entire set of Function keys to be initially multimedia keys. This is an issue with Dell’s BIOS that has not been resolved. Yes its their fault!! How do I know? Well, even when this system is in Windows 7 or Fedora 12, the buttons act flakey that way and often switch over to multimedia mode. I’ve upgraded the BIOS to the latest, but the only thing it really fixed was a flicker issue when brightness was set quite low.

enough posting for today…

nomasteryoda