Tuesday 14 July 2009

Ubuntu 9.10 Karmic Koala Alpha Testing

Ubuntu 9.10 Karmic Koala is still in its early Alpha stage, but I bit the bullet over the weekend and did a clean install on my Lenovo 3000 N200 laptop. Although I've been running with a Karmic kernel on my laptop for several weeks and also upgraded my servers to Karmic very early on, it's only now that I decided it was time to go the whole hog and upgrade my laptop.

Rather than just do a rolling upgrade from Jaunty to Karmic, I backed up my home directories and some configs in /etc and then did a clean install from Alpha 2 and pulled in all the updates. Then I restored /home and did some minor tweaks to my configs.

Starting afresh is quite cathartic; I got rid of a load of old applications that I'd installed a while ago and don't use any more, and I also started afresh with ext4. Ext4 brings some more speed, especially when fsck'ing the drive on boot. Ext4 is noticeably faster when removing hundreds of files, for example rm -rf on kernel source trees.

Karmic also now uses the Grub2 boot loader; this is working well across a wide variety of machines, as can be seen from the Grub2 testing page.

With Karmic we also get Kernel Mode Setting (KMS) too. So far, this is working fine - you soon notice that there are less screen mode setting flickers on boot and suspend/resume is slicker. Audio works OK with the default audio player Rhythmbox and with proprietary software such as Skype - I've not yet noticed any audio dropping, so this is a good sign so far.

There's going to be a lot more changes made over the next months, hopefully we won't see many regressions on the kernel, but with all the change, stuff does occasionally get broken. So I encourage you to help us by testing the Alpha and Beta releases of Karmic so we can squish those bugs and get changes upstream good and early!

7 comments:

  1. Colin, to be clear, is this your day to day machine? How stable is it? I'm one of the people caught by Intel X driver problems with Jaunty and the only solution to have everything work is Karmic. JonP

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  2. Jon: This is my day to day machine. It gets used 10+ hours a day and gets hammered ;-) It may be worth waiting until Alpha 3 is out (23rd July) and running with the LiveCD to see if it addresses the Intel X issues.

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  3. I am using Karmic on my new Gateway LT3100 all day every day. There was no choice to use wlan. However, CPU frequency control does not seem to be working. Gets warm.

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  4. @Anonymous Gateway user. Have you filed any bugs against Karmic? The sooner we know about them then the quicker we can get them fixed before the final release.

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  5. @Anonymous Gateway user. I have a Gateway T-1623 that does the same thing. A temporary fix is to add the cpu frequency scaling applet to your gnome panel (right click the panel, click add, type cpu in the search box). For some reason it doesn't remember your settings like it did in Jaunty, but if you click that applet and set it to on-demand each time you boot, it will solve your overheating problem. I'm filing a bug on launchpad.

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  6. @Joe Chrysler: What was the LaunchPad Bug number?

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  7. Kernel setup for perfomance on default, you need to setup to ondemand.

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