Update: Ubuntu 10.04 Lucid Lynx beta 2release candidate - it's pretty not terribly snappy on the desktop

I've been writing about such cockle-warming subjects as how Ubuntu 10.04 Lucid Lynx beta 2 and its 2.6.32 kernel handles such things as turning off kernel mode setting for Intel video that can't deal with said mode-setting, as well as the ever-moving buttons on application windows, and how the new gthumb is the best damn Linux/Unix photo-editing program for journalists.

But I haven't said much about exactly how well Ubuntu Lucid runs on my old hardware.

Pretty darn well Slowly. And with all the things that Lucid brings to the desktop in terms of the back end of the social media and cloud integration features, a commensurate bite is taken out of RAM.

As you have no doubt committed to memory if you're read the previous 500 or so entries in this blog, my main machine right now is a circa-2002 Toshiba Satellite 1100-S101 laptop with a 1.2-GHz Intel Celeron CPU, 1 GB of RAM (the maximum the machine will take; you should max out whatever machine you have, too), the original 20 GB hard drive (it's just not easy to swap out a drive on this poorly designed and built laptop, or I'd have done it already) and a USB mouse (touchpad is dead), plus USB Headphone Set $2 sound module (dead internal sound module — yes it does come out and I do have a second "working" internal sound module but am too lazy to do anything about it now that the el-cheapo USB thing is working) ... plus a Linksys powered USB hub because my Toshiba USB backup drive doesn't get enough power from the Satellite's USB ports.

So it's not a power-user machine. But the 1 GB is nice.

However, in Ubuntu 10.04, things are appreciably snappy in the GNOME desktop. What else can I say? Everything runs well. I'm not missing any extra speed from Debian Lenny - this Ubuntu build seems just as good.

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Update on April 25, 2010: OK, it's 10 days later than I originally wrote this entry, and after a long night of production at Dailynews.com on the Ubuntu 10.04 laptop, I was a bit surprised (although I'm not sure why I was "surprised") by the overall sluggishness of the machine running Firefox and gthumb.

While moving between windows on the GNOME desktop was extremely quick (perhaps causing me to believe the whole Lucid experience was one of snappiness rather than sluggishness), in Firefox itself things weren't going so well. There were waits between tabs, waits for pages to render, huge CPU spikes in the system as a whole (I had a terminal with top open so I could watch CPU, RAM and swap use).

While using Firefox, the CPU was straining, and much to my dismay, by the time I had been using the system a couple of hours, I was using about 2 MB of swap. Not that using swap is so bad, but with 1 GB of RAM and running basically a Web browser, a light photo viewer/editor and a terminal, I've never used that much swap before. The machine was clearly straining. I could see the various processes having to do with things like gwibber (which I wasn't "actively" running at the time, but which was using quite a bit of CPU in the background) that I sort of understand, as well as those I'm a bit dodgy on, such as desktopcouch.

I added the Chromium browser - basically Google Chrome, and I can say that so far it performs quite well and uses a whole lot less CPU than Firefox. However, my Web-based CMS requires that I use Firefox, which means an environment that runs Firefox well with 1.2 GHz of CPU and 1 GB of RAM is essential. If Ubuntu is "tuned," i.e. is enough of a hog, to run well on "modern" systems, perhaps starting with 3 GHz Pentium 4 or the various and sundry dual-core CPUs out there with a minimum of 2 GB RAM (and I have no reason to either believe or doubt this scenario other than my own experience), then I'll really have to look elsewhere for a usable operating system for my two remaining 2002-era laptops (the Toshiba and the Gateway Solo 1450, the latter which has only 512 MB of RAM with a 1.3 GHz Celeron CPU).

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I have an encrypted home directory, set up that way in the Ubuntu installer, and I'm using ext4 for my filesystems. (In my last Debian Lenny setup on this hardware, I used ext3 with full LVM encryption.)

Looks-wise, I guess the purple, the dark windows and the button shenanigans is something you either love, hate or don't care about. For me, it's mostly the latter, although for now I'm enjoying some of the design elements.

One problem I'm having in 10.04 beta 2 is with Totem, which didn't work at all during my recent FreeBSD test.

In Ubuntu 10.04, if I want to watch a video and click on that video to open it in Totem, I get sound but no image. I can see the image if I move the window around or use full-screen mode.

However, if I open Totem first and then navigate to the video through the application, everything looks and works fine.

Video in the Firefox Web browser is fine in all cases.

I need to file a bug on this ... and I will.