… or, how I spent the last 6 months trying to get a brand new laptop to suspend / resume correctly … and am still trying.
In a previous post I talked about my initial experiences in choosing an operating system for my laptop; the saga is far from over. I’m trying to be pragmatic, but my unreasonable interest in the underdog OS keeps urging me on. Perhaps it’s my dislike for Microsoft’s decades of overwhelming dominance; why should 6 billion people have only one choice in operating system? Anyway, 100+ subscribers later, and growing, my ubuntu bug report has gathered noticeable community interest but garnered ZERO attention from Canonical or anyone else who could actually help. Over on the Linux Kernel bug report we’ve had far more commitment from Tejun, but even he has his limits.
To be fair to the Ubuntu’s bug reporting system, Launchpad.net, it has acted a focal point for sufferers of the dv5’s refusal to suspend / resume properly under Linux. Aside from a community effort in spamming the HP support teams we’ve also been able to make a small but noticeable protest on the HP forum. But the big question remains, will a fix present itself within the useful life of my laptop?
There is this notion, out there in Linux land, that there are these crack, benevolent developers floating around, just spoiling for a chance to fix someone’s hardware woes. Sadly, I’m yet to meet such coding superheroes. The truth is I’m running Vista and wishing I’d just bought a Mac. Fortunately, I see most of my computing life through the window of Google Chrome, which gives me a sense of having chosen an Open Source-friendly corporate overlord, but it’s not the same. I miss GNOME’s minimalism, the value of F-Spot, the native stability of GIMP and that beautiful, eminently useful, Bash shell.
A laptop is just not a laptop without suspend and resume.
Some time ago I purchased an M-Audio Transit USB sound card, and it’s actually pretty cool but it has caused me some angst. At first I was using it solely under Mac OS X 10.4, and without incident, but then I was forced to buy a regular laptop and the love ended there, somewhat.
I run both Windows Vista Business and Ubuntu 8.10 on my laptop, Ubuntu for day-to-day and Vista for games and audio production (Ableton Live). I thought as though Vista has been around for a while, like my Tranist, it should be a good fit, unfortunately I was wrong. Firstly, a little magic is required when installing the Transit Vista driver and making it function. Secondly, the Vista driver for Transit itself is still just the first release beta and has not been updated since it’s release in July 2007. As a result there are some problems with it and led me to question whether or not Transit Vista driver is abandonware. Mercifully an M-Audio support technician was at least able to confirm that Vista users have not yet been completely ignored by M-Audio, but there are no guarantees that we’ll see something more substantial before Windows 7 arrives.
I also bit the bullet and had a go at getting my Transit USB to work under Ubuntu 8.10. The initial instructions I read just about put the fear of God in me, but thankfully it’s not that miserable for Ubuntu users. One can easily install the Linux Transit drivers by using Synaptic is selecting the “madfu” package. This beats the pants off compiling it yourself and is almost easier than the Vista approach - except for one small hitch: there’s a bug. Oh why, why? Once again, as with the Vista driver, it’s to do with the driver being out of touch with a newer release of the Operating System. I was able to fix it with some Googling and just a few small tweaks. Now my Transit driver loads immediately on connection under Ubuntu, unless I plug it into a USB port different to the previous (yes, this steams from the bug) but I have not the inclination to go further with it at this time. Nor is there any control panel available under Linux and this the fault of M-Audio as they refuse to even simply devulge device specifications, let alone write a driver themselves. Come guys, use the power of the Open Source community to your advantage!
My next adventure will probably be to see how well the Transit and Ableton Live run on a virtualized instance of Windows XP in VirtualBox under Ubuntu. This could hopefully be a nice compromise. On the bright side, at least I can use it, somewhat, under any OS I like and it is a wonderful little sound card.
I recently bought a new laptop, a HP Pavilion dv5, mostly out of desperation as I was not able to acquire the new Macbook I really desired. Nonetheless, I’m quite happy with my purchase and have proceeded to play around with both Vista and Ubuntu 8.10 on it. Surprisingly, Ubuntu was significantly easier to install and configure from scratch; the Broadcom Wireless card and the NVIDIA 8600M GT were both detected and drivers installed after my first login. Vista was a different story, it did come with Vista Home but it was the Russian version (as I’m living in Ukraine) so I pulled out the propoganda version that I received at QUT and spent a couple of nights trying to find all the drivers for those pesky unrecognised devices.
So far I’ve been quite happy with Ubuntu 8.10 (Intrepid Ibex) with the exception of one big party-pooper: resume from suspend is broken on my dv5. Hopefully the very active user community will be able to get this resolved. But Vista doesn’t get off cleanly either. I’m really not impressed with how Vista deals with updates, it seems every second or third time I boot up I’m asked to reboot. In fact, at one point I was rudely rebooted whilst playing Call of Duty 4 on account of an update, needless to say I’ve since clipped the wings of Windows Update.