Giving up on compiz

I’ve tried to get compiz fusion running on the m1330 but since this guy shipped with the Intel 965 graphics chipset, it looks like there will be no compiz for me for a while.  I’m hoping there is a fix for the next Ubuntu release in spring 2008, but I’m not holding my breath.  The eye candy would have been nice, but I’ll get over it.  After all, I just want an OS that boots fast, shuts down fast, and is generally stable.  Vista really isn’t any of those things.  I’ve found that booting up is not really faster than XP, shutting down is still horrendously slow, and stability is not its strong suit.  I’ve had all sorts of trouble playing video over my home network in Vista that magically do not happen in Ubuntu.  Chalk one up for the penguin.

Wireless workaround?

Well, streaming Pandora (and anything else for that matter) seems to keep the wireless connection alive. I think things go bad when we leave the wireless adapter idle. After reading more of the oreilly post mentioned in my previous post, I found that I have the exact same issue with the ndiswrapper (not exactly sure what that is, but sounds like something important). I’ve therefore initiated one of the few commands I know

sudo apt-get update

then I’ve run

sudo apt-get upgrade

and now I’m here…about an hour later, still online, still listening to Pandora (Nelly Furtado: Say It Right…man Timbaland knows how to get booties shaking), watching the sunset over the Free Speech Cafe at UC Berkeley, and waiting for the upgrade bits to arrive.

Wireless Update

So far so good. Congratulations, you’re reading my first official post from a linux machine. Underwhelming, I know. Anyway, I was digging around the whole wireless issue and decided to try a fun way to figure out when my wifi connection drops. I am streaming Pandora in the background whilst I compose this post. I’m through my third song and it’s still going strong.

Anyway, a bit more digging and I found a post over at the linux dev center over at oreilly that sort of talks about this issue. You can see it here

In the mean time, I’m going to try to figure out what the heck the post is saying and see if I can get the wifi to drop out on while I’m streaming some tunes.

Wireless not so Gutsy

Holy cow have I had a rough morning with Ubuntu. The wireless connection seems to fail if I leave it idle for a minute or two on my Dell XPS m1330. I wanted to make my first official post FROM Ubuntu this morning (I’m camped out with my work and personal laptop right now in the Anthropology library at UC Berkeley), but have been unable to keep a connection long enough to get it completed. Oh well, I’ve booted back into Vista to post this. I was trying to debug this, but don’t have much more time to dedicate to figuring it out at the moment. Here’s what I’ve found thus far:

a bug has been filed on this issue (#139832), there seems to be a dedicated laptop testing team that I may sacrifice my XPS m1330 to officially since I want Gutsy to “just work” on this really well designed machine. Plus it will give me a chance to learn how to debug things in Linux and really, isn’t that what it’s all about? I kid, I kid. Anyway, back to work (the real kind that pays me, not “WorkBuntu”)