« previous 1 2 3 4 5 next »

Installation Pitfalls

The problem, one which wasn't present on 8.04, seems to be down to the new easier to use X configuration management and its ability to get somewhat confused by the fact that our monitor had a 1680x1050 (22" widescreen Dell LCD) resolution. But dropping to a blank screen with no obvious route of recovery seems to be a flaw in the new display configuration management, and looking at the various reports out there, it appears to affect a whole class of monitors with that resolution.

The user hostile world map time zone selector One complaint with the installer, and something Ubuntu shares with other Linux distributions, is an overly clever and often unusable map based time zone selector. Showing a map and zooming in on it to select your city seems like a good idea, but the implementation can alternate, in use, between quick and efficient and irritating, especially if using a trackpad, as it zooms in on places you aren't interested in and refuses to scroll. As the first graphical UI component a new Linux user could well meet, this dialogue really needs to be better.

With Ubuntu 8.10 installed on the system, we looked at the new features in the system. Guest Sessions is a new feature where a user can lend their machine to someone else, to check their mail or browse a site, with a restricted guest account. Unfortunately, the first time we tried this, it rebooted the entire system, and investigating the issue pointed to the ATI proprietary driver as the problem. Removing it and running with the default driver did allow the guest mode to start up, but other problems, such as palette corruption when switching user, made the guest mode less than useful.

More critically though, suspend and hibernate did not work, dropping to a flashing cursor and keeping the machine powered up. Initial diagnosis showed no obvious problem but, for reference, Ubuntu 8.04 on the same system managed both operations happily. On the EEE PC, 8.10 managed to suspend and resume, suggesting that the problem is a regression on specific hardware combinations.

« previous 1 2 3 4 5 next »