07/11 (K)Ubuntu Edgy

Like many people, I experienced considerable pain trying to upgrade from Ubuntu 6.06 ("Dapper Drake") to 6.10 ("Edgy Eft"). KNetworkManager stopped connecting to WPA-secured networks (filling the logs with cryptic wpa_supplicant messages), VMWare Player refused to do anything but hang, and hibernate rather tediously trashed my swap partition, requiring me to re-run mkswapfs manually.

I finally bit the bullet and reinstalled from the Kubuntu 6.10 LiveCD, and I have to say, not only have all the problems gone, but Edgy is a major step forward on my particular machine (a Dell Latitude X1). The following problems were trivial to fix on Edgy:

• Dell messed up the video BIOS settings on the X1 such that the LCD's native resolution isn't among the modes supported by the on-board i915 video chipset. A little tool called 915resolution fixes things up temporarily, but needs to be run every time the laptop is booted. On Dapper, you could install a packaged version of the tool from the Ubuntu (universe) repository, but you had to add it to your init scripts and write a config file manually. In Edgy, this is all done for you. It Just Works.


• The "hibernate" support on Dapper refused to resume, so you had to install a non-standard kernel and use suspend2 if you wanted suspend-to-disk support. On Edgy, It Just Works. Personally I'd still prefer suspend2 for the nicer UI and better performance, but it's the Just Working that really matters...


• The laptop's built-in SD card reader works! Except when inserting a card causes a system-wide lock-up. Which only seems to be the case for SD cards that I know are faulty.

Nice distribution, shame about the upgrade...