Anyone using Ubuntu 9.04?

[Mick T]

On Tue, 2009-04-28 at 19:55 -0400, David Kramer wrote:

> I was thinking of upgrading my laptop this weekend.  It sounds pretty
> stable.
> 
> If you're using it, did you do a fresh install or an upgrade from Ibex?

I upgraded to a pre-release about a month ago.

> 
> I read one disturbing thing from
> http://www.eweek.com/c/a/Linux-and-Open-Source/Ubuntu-904-the-Jaunty-Jackalope-Sports-Modest-Software-Improvements-But-Big-Plans-535187/?kc=EWKNLLIN04282009STR1
> 
> "Also along the lines of making its graphics configuration less arcane,
> 9.04 is the first Ubuntu release to do away with the Vulcan-death-grip
> Ctrl-Alt-Backspace key combination that you can use on most Linux
> distributions to dislodge misbehaving graphical applications by killing
> your X server session. Once upon a time, this came in handy fairly
> often, and the fact that it's become an anachronism is a mark of Linux's
> maturity."


I had problems with the ATI driver, and came across this (I couldn't
kill X and it would freeze up). It's pretty easy to solve, install the
dontzap package to enable or disable ctrl-alt-backspace, by running the
command like this:

sudo dontzap -d

Or add the following to your xorg.conf (which is what the dontzap command does).

Section "ServerFlags"
        Option  "DontZap"       "False"
EndSection


> 
> Huh??!!  WTF would they remove the ability to kill the X server?  I
> don't care how damn stable they say it is, sometimes you get a
> hard-to-kill process and you just want to nuke from orbit without a
> complete restart.  Sometimes when I lose sound and I don't know what's
> got a hold of the device, that's my only recourse.  Can someone confirm
> this blasphemy for me?
> 
> This article also says it breaks the ATI proprietary drivers, which
> doesn't affect me, but is too bad.

That's what I had problems with, and it should be resolved in the final
release. 

I actually documented dontzap and the ATI driver problem on my blog, and
disabling ctrl-alt-backspace really annoyed the heck out of me. I can
see how it may be useful for users new to Linux and/or Ubuntu, but I
don't like it! ;)

To summarise the ATI fix, you basically purge any existing ATI drivers
and install or reinstall the xserver-xorg-video-ati package, then
reconfigure X. And see the Ubuntu lists for more detail:
https://lists.ubuntu.com/archives/ubuntu-x/2009-March/000442.html



> 
> ext4 sounds too risky for me, though better handling of big files would
> be handy on my MythTV drives.

I haven't tried it so I can't comment. What really annoys me is the
removal of Xen from Ubuntu, which is tempting me to go with an all
Debian solution, instead of Debain on my Desktop, and Ubuntu on my
laptop. These days I don't have the time to build and debug kernels, so
using a distro that includes Xen enabled kernels is a big time savings
for me.

Cheers.

-- 
Mick Timony
http://timony.com/mickzblog/
---
Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter. Try Again. Fail again. Fail better.
-- S. Beckett
---