Your Problems Are Fixed in the Next Release: Mint 7

Back in January I posted about installing Ubuntu 8.10 on my dad's HP DV9000 laptop. There was also a followup to that post about DOSBOX .

At the end of the Ubuntu Install, and after using it for a few weeks, there were three issues:

1. Wifi: it worked, but with a work-around
2. DOSBOX was slower than DOSEMU, but DOSEMU required manual setup: Another workaround
3. On reboot, Dad had to hit enter about 30 times to get past various hangs being caused by the oddball ACPI on the DV9000. If I understood this correctly, it only showed up as a problem when the AMD CPU's were being used in the DV9000. Those are what Dad had of course...

I had tested the first two points at length with my research into Ubuntu 9.04: I knew that once I upgraded Dad's computer that those two issues would be resolved. I do not have an HP DV9000 though, so I had no way of verifying that the third point would be taken care of as well.

If you noticed the infrequency of my recent posting (both here and at BMC), you might have guessed I had been kidnapped by space aliens, but the truth is I was just working 70-90 hour weeks getting ready and implementing a data center migration. With that in the past, it was time to rest, and then to catch back up on all the other things I had been letting fall to the side.

In the mean time, not only had Ubuntu 9.04 GA'ed, but Mint 7 after that. I took both on USB fobs to Dad's house, and test booted both. Both worked fine: no ACPI hangs at all.

I talked about it with Dad, and we decided to put in Mint 7: Same as my brothers Linux system will be getting soon.

The install was straightforward, other than the install complaining about not having a swap partition. with 4GB of RAM, I just did not want to have to add an LVM to the boot disk in order to get the 5th partition on it. Dads disk already had 4 partitions: 2 NTFS (Vista and the recover partition) and 2 Linux: '/' and '/home'.

I set '/' to format, '/windows' as ntfs, and '/home' as ext3, and both to mount at boot. Once the gparted was done, it took about 4 or 5 minutes to install Mint 7.

Once up, we updated the packages, and installed DOSEMU.

DOSEMU, as delivered, configured the 'D' drive as /home/dad already, and the vbdos programs were already installed there, so it was a simple matter to cd to D, then to the programs, and then to run his NASA stuff.

What DOSBOX takes 30 seconds to run, DOSEMU takes 3. And it is graphical data, so Dad was interested in how to print it and screen capture it so it could be emailed. It turns out that this is easy under DOSEMU as well: Just full screen by clicking the center box on the upper right hand corner, and then fn-prtscrn, and Gnome pops up the screen, all captured and ready to save. A quick trip through GIMP to crop out the tool bars and the graphical display on the DOSEMU screen is ready to email or print to be added to a report.

One interesting thing: If we full screened the DOEMU window *before* we ran the program, then it would run more slowly: Maybe 20 seconds rather than 3. Faster than DOSBOX still, but much slower than EMU was normally. Dad made the easy decision to always run the programs first, then to full-screen them.

Everything works:

Display: Mint prompted for the install of the NVidia drivers, and we told it to go do it.

The Wireless stuff just works now.

We plugged in the HP printer, and Mint saw and configured it instantly. We also tried a Lexmark multifunction (resold by Dell), but that did not. I did not expect it to, since Lexmark printers are one of the few anymore that ship without Linux capabilities from the vendor.

Sound: The Altec Lansing speaker make all the right sounds: I am not sure that Altec Lansing should be claiming these speakers as theirs, but that is another story. They sound equally tinny on Vista. I fired up Rhythmbox and we listened to some Internet Radio for a bit.

Boot Speed: Fedora 11 is making a lot of noise about their new 20 second boot speed. I tested it, and on my desktop Dell 945, it is 30 seconds: Same as Mint 7 on Dad's DV9000.

Battery: This dv9000 is only 9 months old now, but Linux reported that its battery was only able to charge up to 80% of its design capacity: Something Vista was reporting as 100%.

And so forth: What a difference 6 months makes in Linux land. Dad was thrilled with the computer, and said that, other than to play a RealArcade game called WordSlinger, he did not see ever having to go back to Vista. I tried briefly to get that going under WINE, but it was acting very weird: Another thing to research!

Ubuntu 9.04 Alpha 3 First Impressions

With Linux making slow, tiny, incremental inroads all over the place: In Netbooks, phones, embedded appliances, in the BIOS, not to mention Splashtop, and being credited (over credited I think, but whatever) with the recent malaise at Microsoft (although I liked this interview with Jim Zemlin about the issue), it seemed time to have a look at see what Ubuntu was cooking up for its next major release.

I rarely start this early in a release, but there are a few things cooking at I am very curious about right now. Issues in the current Linux versions that I want to see fixed or software features I need added.

DOSEMU

First up is DOSEMU. In Ubuntu 8.10 it is busted, and the problem is not actually DOSEMU but they way in the Ubuntu 8.10 sets up security (SELinux strikes) for the application. DOSEMU. See bug 216398 for details.

I wanted DOSEMU to work, because according to my benchmarking it is far far faster at running VBDOS programs than DOSBOX. One of my dad's programs (see previous posts) takes 20 seconds in DOSBOX takes 3 in DOSEMU.

As of Alpha 3, DOSEMU is fixed!

HP DV9000 Boot Hangs

Next, there is my dad's HP DV9000 itself. It does not boot well under Ubuntu 8.10. Poorly in fact. It appears that the AMD 64 bit Turion processors, a high precision timer, and the HP BIOS all get together for a timeout party that requires keyboard interrupts to get past. Like about 24 of them to finish a boot. Ick. Appears to be this AMD C1E issue, as documented over at Kernel Trap. The workaround is to add noipic noirqdebug, irqpoll, and perhaps some other stuff to the boot line in Grub. Nice guide on changing all that here. This nastiness appears to have entered around kernel 2.6.19, and is still there in 8.10's 2.6.27. Right now 9.04 has 2.6.28, and so I am hoping it will fix some of this without having to do workarounds on the boot options. I will, but that is not the same thing as it working the way it should.

Quick aside here: This DV9000 appears to have been a particularly problematic model of computer for Linux. In point of fact, it was recalled (at least some models) for BIOS issues, so it was no great shakes for anyone for a while. I don't know why Vista does not hang on boot like Linux does, but I assume without any facts to support this that it is because Linux is seeing hardware features (like the high precision timer) and trying to use them, where Vista does not.

I do not yet know what will happen on the DV9000. I installed it on a Dell D620, and there it boots in under 30 seconds.

Netbooks and MAPI

Those are all reasons I wanted to see where Ubuntu 9.04 was going for my Dad's sake. I have another couple. Netbooks. and MAPI.

As noted here, I have an Acer Aspire One, running Mint 6 right now. I like Mint and all, but there are now and again some issues with certain Gnome dialogs being larger then 600 pixels in length. The account set up for Evolution is one of them. Rumor has it that the new version of Gnome, 2.26, that will ship with 9.04 is more Netbook friendly.

The MAPI thing is for work, and revolves around the fact that we are moving to MS Exchange 2007. I will be losing WebDAV access to email, which means I'm back to using IMAP. That is fine as far as it goes, but my calendar will only be on the so-called Outlook Web Interface. So far, Microsoft has not looked at any lightweight web mail clients and ported them to MS Exchange, meaning I have to use the heavy client they supply for calendaring. Double Ick.

Fortunately the EU has forced MS to publish information about MAPI, and the Evolution folks are working hard on making its namesake work against MS Exchange using the same protocol as Outlook. All this is supposed to ship in Ubuntu 9.04, but as of Alpha 3 Evolution is still back level at 2.24.3. 2.26 (same as the Gnome release number these days) is where the MAPI functionality should ship. There will more about all this over at TalkBMCin the near future.

Other General Impressions

It would not be fair to deeply judge Ubuntu 9.04's current state at Alpha three as being totally indicative of what it will be in April when it releases. Everything that is in is working, and smoothly. The boots seem faster. I'll give it a whirl on the Acer Aspire soon, and see how it works there, but I expect that it will be faster than the current Ubuntu 8.10 based Mint 6 is.

I was slightly disappointed when Ubuntu 8.10 shipped without OpenOffice 3.0, and that has been fixed in 9.04. Firefox, at 3.05 is current, but since FF 3.1 is at Beta 2, hopefully it will be at 3.1 by Ubuntu release day. This is probably less critical on Linux than on OS.X. I have not had any real issues with FF on Linux. The Mac is a whole other story, and a whole other post...