Displaying Category: Linux

I've been using Ubuntu on my EeePC 901 since I got it last summer. I started out with Hoary and soon migrated to Intrepid. It's served me well for my limited needs on this little machine. A couple days ago I upgraded to 9.04, Jaunty Jackalope and first wanted to point out something that immediately caught my attention right there on their homepage. You see, the copy says "Desktop Edition" except they are showing an image of a laptop. This may seem like nit-picking, but there is a difference. I actually see this more as evidence of how the perception of what a PC is has changed. I don't have the stats, but I expect we're getting to that point where more people have laptops than desktops, so now the "desktop" is actually a laptop. Crazy.

Anyway, after the upgrade to Jaunty, things were pretty solid. Boot time has been improved and everything that I care about seems to work out of the box... EXCEPT for the graphics driver. I use compiz effects and I like them. The problem is, the performance in Jaunty is completely unacceptable. After searching around I discovered several reports and bugs posted about this horrid performance in the pre-release versions. Now keeping in mind that one of the major selling points of this release is its excellent usability on netbooks (like the 901), except that most of these netbooks use some form of the Intel integrated graphics chipset, and performance in Jaunty on these chipsets is unusable. So yes, Ubuntu works wonderfully on netbooks as long as you don't use it on netbooks. They need to add that to the copy. People don't really read this crap anyway...

This little rant wouldn't be complete without a way to actually fix the problem, which I have found. You can find instructions in the wiki on how to install the Intel graphics driver from 8.10 Intrepid, which I have tested and seem to work just fine. Go get'em!

I have an Eee 901 and due to the slightly less than 4GB boot partition (which is almost entirely full) doing any sort of major upgrade to a new version (as now, from Hardy to Jaunty) will always fail due to lack of space.

The solution I found is to use either the SD card or a USB stick as the apt cache. My steps to do this (though there is likely a better path) is the following:

• Format your USB stick (or whatever) to ext2 or ext3, whatever you're using
• Copy the contents of /var/cache/apt to to the USB stick. You'll have to use sudo.
• Mount the stick as the apt cache: mount /dev/sdd1 /var/cache/apt
• Now running Update Manager should work fine, though very very very slowly. It'll probably take upwards of 3 to 5 hours to download the files.

I am actually still in the download process, so if anything doesn't work, I'll update.