[ltp] Ubuntu Dapper on a22p - 1 data pt.

[Harry Mangalam]

Hi All,

I previously posted my experiences with Breezy, mostly to the positive.  I 
recently upgraded 2 systems to Dapper and with one glaring exception, the old 
Thinkpad a22p works well with it.  

The exception is that of power management using the stock kernel.  
Hibernation, suspend, shutdown - nothing worked the way it's supposed to.  
The cure was to recompile a kernel with all the ACPI turned OFF and use the 
APM power management.  APM is compiled into the new kernels, but ACPI gets 
activated 1st and I found no way to turn it off.  Using APM, suspend works 
better than ever (even network comes back on after a long suspend), but 
suspending still kills sound (the sound daemon error indicates some kind of 
race condition and suicides) and I haven't been bothered enough to try to fix 
it yet.

Others have found ACPI works well with more recent machines, but I guess the 
a22 is too old to make use of it.

Removable devices work transparently for the first time (stick in a USB thumb 
drive or CF carrier and it gets mounted, Windows-like).  More of KDE works 
out of the box - kpilot picks up a USB Visor without problems, for example.  

Things also seem to be a bit speedier (except openoffice, which seems to be 
getting slower and buggier with each release - or is it just me?).  At least 
dapper gives you the option of replacing the ghastly OOo 'file open' dialog 
with KDE's much nicer one.

final IMHO: Ubuntu (and all debian-based systems) continue to demonstrate the 
superiority of apt over rpm/yum-based systems.  In comparison, administering 
FC4 and FC5-based systems makes my teeth hurt. apt- isn't perfect, but it's 
by far the best installation/maint tool I've ever used.

-- 
Harry Mangalam - NACS, E1127, Engineering Gateway, UC Irvine 92697
949 824 0084(o), 949 285 4487(c) harry.mangalam@uci.edu