Ubuntu 7.10 Gutsy -- first impressions on the $0 Laptop

Gutsy is running fine -- at times -- on the $0 Laptop (Gateway Solo 1450, 256 MB RAM, 1.3 GHz Celeron).

I say "at times" because sometimes power management works, sometimes it doesn't. That part is a bit troubling. It was going fine for awhile, but then I ran a couple of live CDs, some successful, some not (Mepis 6.5, Ubuntu 6.06, Damn Small Linux 3.3). None of the live CDs ran as well as Ubuntu 7.10, which offers superior hardware detection. But after running Mepis (and the live CD probably has nothing to do with it), I rebooted into Ubuntu 7.10 and the fan kept on running. I put the laptop into suspend mode, and when it came out of it, the fan stopped. A good sign.

So yes, suspend works -- but sometimes not -- on this Gateway. Among the nice new features in Ubuntu 7.10 is the ability for someone to come by while the PC is in suspend and write you a little note that will come up on the screen when you enter your password to end suspend and return to normal operation.

I might have mentioned before that on the Gateway Solo 1450, you have to hit the power button to get out of suspend. I'm spoiled by the Mac iBook G4, where you just hit the space bar.

As to the intermittent power management in Gutsy, it's a bit of a mystery. There are two kernel choices in the GRUB menu: 2.6.22-14 and 2.6.20-16. I initially thought that the power-management problem only occurred in the newer kernel, but I've been able to run 2.6.22-14 with perfect power management. Not all the time. But every time I load 2.6.20-16, I have a flawless session in terms of power management.

When it comes to out-of-the-box power management on the Gateway Solo 1450, Ubuntu 6.06 is way behind. It didn't offer suspend at all, and the fan ran constantly. Ubuntu 7.04 was better -- it managed the fan fine, and suspend sometimes worked. Mepis 6.5 didn't silence the fan, either. DSL 3.3 wouldn't boot at all, no matter how hard I tried.

Back to Ubuntu. The screen color is more dramatic than that in 7.04. It looks more like 6.06, actually. Since this is the kind of thing that's easily changed, there's not much of a point in talking about it.

Other things that I'm happy about with 7.10: Mouse and touchpad detection is better than anything I've seen. This is the first Linux distro I've tried that offers GUI configuration of the Alps touchpad. I was actually able to turn off the tap-to-left-click option -- something I've been unable to accomplish either in a GUI or by hacking at xorg.conf since I began using this laptop. The hardware detection of most distros see the touchpad as the more common Synaptics touchpad. This works only up to a point. If you want to modify the way your Alps touchpad reacts, good luck. The Synaptics utility doesn't work at all.

Until I booted Ubuntu 7.10 for the first time, I thought I'd never get such good control of touchpad function. It may be a small thing if you aren't running this particular hardware, but if you are, it's huge.

I'm still dual-booting Debian, and I fired up Etch just for comparison's sake. I tried to slow down the mouse (I have the touchpad and a USB wheel mouse connected) with the xset m command in a terminal. It slowed it down some, but not nearly enough. And I also discovered that Etch does not support suspend, at least on this laptop, and the screensaver isn't working, either. I do like the many additional apps that come in the standard Etch install (I even use Epiphany), and Etch is just than much quicker than Ubuntu, but so far Ubuntu is pulling even further ahead with the 7.10 release.

One thing that irked me was Gutsy's printer configuration utility. I thought it was going to be somehow upgraded in Ubuntu 7.10, but it looks just as lame. In order to find my favorite network printer, I had to open a browser and go to localhost:631 to start CUPS in order to find it at all. While in the CUPS interface, I generally go to Administration, then hit something like "find more printers." My printer showed up, but I couldn't add it without a password. I've never seen that before, and I doubt that password protection has been added to the internal network, so I'll chalk that up to an Ubuntu or CUPS bug. Again, if I didn't make this clear enough, I find the CUPS Web interface easier to use than the Ubuntu printers utility. Still, I had plenty of network printers to choose from, just not the one I wanted. So I don't see any big improvement in printer configuration.

Other new things (or at least new to me) are the Hardware Information menu under System-Preferences. It had a lot of information, that's for sure. From CPU to every peripheral and chipset you have, it's all there. As I mention above, the additional mouse/touchpad control available in the Mouse menu is very much appreciated, and it is pretty much spoiling me for any other distro where this laptop is concerned.

When I first booted 7.10, the upper panel opened up a small window telling me that restricted drivers were available. Turns out it was a single driver for the Gateway's internal modem. I loaded it, but I don't have a dialup account, so I can't really test it.

Another thing: On the lower panel, another small window opened up telling me that my battery, though fully charged, was only at 21 percent of capacity, and is probably in need of replacement. That's not news to me, but it's nice that this new version of GNOME is keeping track of it.

As part of the upgrade, Ubuntu 7.10 created a bunch of new folders in my /home directory: Documents, Music, Pictures and Videos. It's not like creating folders is a huge chore, but I didn't mind the system doing it for me.

The cheap Airlink101 AWLL3028 USB wireless adapter that I picked up a few weeks back hasn't worked in any Linux distro I've tried. I know that the older AWLL3026 is supposed to work -- in Feisty anyway, but I don't think the 3028 is close at all in terms of chipset. I didn't expect Gutsy to surprise me, and it didn't.

I think I'm going to pick up a refurbished Netgear USB adapter from Tiger Direct -- those are supposed to work. I'd use my Orinoco WaveLAN Silver PCMCIA card, but I haven't yet fully straightened out the bent pins in the laptop to try that. Hey -- you get what you pay for, right?

The thing I'm most eager to try in 7.10 is Gnash -- the open-source alternative to Flash. But I have no idea how to do it, or how to access Ubuntu's supposed new management utility for Firefox extensions. I'll have to investigate. Flash functionality without Adobe's closed-source plug-in would indeed be sweet.

As you might have read previously, the Gutsy install took more than 9 hours due to the slowness of the mirrors on day 1 of the upgrade. If I were you, I'd wait a week or two until things calm down.

I haven't had time to run many other apps besides Firefox, but I was surprised to find that the GIMP in 7.10 is a release candidate. It still ran fine. OpenOffice is version 2.3, but I've been pretty happy with 2.0 in Etch, so I could've stayed with 7.04's version 2.2 and been just as happy. For me, if my "smart" quotes face the right way, I'm good. If I ever figure out how to change the case of letters from upper to lower and back again with a keyboard command, I'll be even more happy. All the problems I've had lately with KOffice have had the effect of making my loyalty swing ever so much toward OpenOffice. We'll see how that holds when the next version of KOffice is released.

Conclusion: I have a feeling that the power-management issues regarding my Gateway Solo 1450 and Gutsy will solve themselves. Either the hardware will stop freaking out at times with the 2.6.22-14 kernel, or I'll just use 2.6.20-16 (and reverse the GRUB entries so the older kernel boots first). After additional testing, I'm not so sure about suspend. But even without that capability, the Gateway is doing well enough with 7.10.

So even with a couple of glitches, Ubuntu 7.10 performs better than its predecessors (7.04 and 6.06) on the test hardware -- and better than anything else I've ever run on it. For other distros that pride themselves on hardware detection and out-of-the-box functionality without heavy hacking, Ubuntu 7.10 raises the bar considerably.