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Let me say at the outset that I use my Linux PC for productive purposes. Some of the things I do on a daily basis is work-work (as in income producing in the area of information management), supporting 2 public web sites and a fair amount of multi-media work. Saying all of that, I expect a reasonable amount of "tweaking" when I build a new version of the K-Ubuntu family of Linux operating systems. What I do expect after this initial effort is stability in the operating system so I can do all of the above.
My hardware that all of this is running on is modest by today's standards. The home built PC that I'm using is a P4 at about 2.4GhZ. There are two internal hd/s and a ATI Radeon 9200 video card. The combination of the video card and Linux has proven to be the most problematic since I started using the Ubuntu family of operating systems.
The Main Problem:
Ever since Kubuntu Ver 6.10, I have experienced ongoing and often times sporatic video related problems. For the most part after a fair amount of "kludging" about, I usually got things pretty well stabilized with each of the ops. This however has not been the case with Ubuntu 8.04. The native video driver will render at 1024 x 768 but it manages to clip the display at the top 1/4" or so. Vertically the display is not centered. Over time with U 8.04 I just accepted this as a state of existence after muddling about with ATI drivers etc.
About a month or so ago, Canonical rolled an upgrade to GTK. Shortly after this upgrade I started experiencing problems with apps using the GTK graphics interface. Specifically, at random timing, the app would suddenly go into bizzare mode and the viewable area of the screen would far exceed the 1024 px x-dimension of the screen. It was not possible to "scroll" to the off screen area. The net result was that the app was rendered useless for getting any additional work done.
Within a couple of weeks of this GTK "upgrade" another version was pushed in the repositories. Good I thought, this should package the resolution to my app problem. Well, this past weekend I was knee-deep into some multi-media work and things suddenly went bizarre again. The app this time was k3b which I needed to burn something to a CD. OK I said to the "pooch" and me, we'll go to plan B and just use Brasero to do the burning since k3b was rendered useless, Kicked off Brasero and it wouldn't even launch! Needless to say, I was a bit put off by all of this goofiness going on. I made the command decision that I had to do something proactive to achieve stabilty within my primary operating system.
The Solution:
I usually have between 3-5 different versions of Linux available on my PC. As stated above, one serves as the work horse of my computing time. The other systems are either blazing technology that I want to explore or old versions that I keep around. Well, for some strange reason I still had a Kubuntu ver 6.10 that was active. Honestly, it had been a year plus since I seriously booted into it. On a lark I booted it and lo and behold... I had a full screen 1024 x 768 resolution. I re-acquainted myself a bit with the ops and was pleasantly surprised... things actually worked!
With Ubuntu 8.04 frustrations in hand, I made the command decision to move my workhorse ops back to 6.10. This would entail a fair amount of work primarily in rebuilding my LAMP server and some other configuration work. I viewed this as a minimal cost to have stabilty in the primary ops.
The Experience:
As I write this article, I'm well along in the rebuilding process in Kubuntu 6.10. The server reloading is going well thanks in large part to the extensive backups I run on a weekly basis. Besides the LAMP stuff, another big concern I had was with GIMP. In Ubuntu 8.04 we are running GIMP ver 2.6. With Kubuntu 6.10 the GIMP version is at 2.2. In the Ubuntu system I had acquired/built an extensive Script-Fu library of routines of which I use quite a few on a regular basis. I didn't know how these scripts would play in a 2,2 environment. After mounting and copying the scripts from the Ubuntu partition to the Kubuntu partition I was almost excited to find out that the scripts were working fine in 2.2.
So far, I haven't found any show stoppers in Kubuntu 6.10. I can honestly say, it is nice to have all of the apps that I need and use available and fully functional whenever I need them. At some point in the future I will upgrade my video card to a non-ATI chipset. At that point, I will try re-installing the latest version of either Kubuntu or Ubuntu and see how they play in the new video environment. I will also continue to probe on other Linux versions and distro's as time permits.
My sage advice for Canonical or other distro agents is to be mindful of your user base. Before upgrades are rolled, it would be adviseable to make sure the changes play nicely in some slightly older technologies also. There are a whole wrath of individuals out there that may not have the latest monster cpu's and giga-byte video drivers in their operating systems... for whatever it's worth.
-Tim aka IndyTim
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