GSoC 2008, Hardy Heron, Sick Computer, A place to live!

GSoC this year is looking very good.  I have so scheet ideas in mind that I will reveal later.  Most of them I will have to admit come from the new brainstorm feature on the ubuntu site.  It’s sure is a great way to get involved in Ubuntu and Linux.  I have been working closely with PCulture/Miro for there GSoC ideas too.  They are very nice, let just hope they can get accepted for GSoC this year.  They were turned down (why!?) last year.

Speaking of my internship, I found the perfect place to live.  A nice place someone is leaving with everything furnished because it’s a pain to move.  It’s cheap enough that I can pay all the rent at once and just not have to worry about it after that.  I think the renter is very excited about it too.  The location is perfect; right down town Worcester.  Next to the main bus station so we can get anywhere in town very quickly.  What a blessing.  And here we were, worried we would have to pay 6 or 12 month leases.  My family feels like the luckiest one in the world.

Hardy Heron, boy they have made a lot of changes here, I feel like it’s another testing release with all the new stuff.  I have installed it on my laptop to see what new drivers and features it has implemented.  My general impression is very good.  I love the new theme, it looks and feels very nice.  I like the default set of programs that have been selected.  And I am impressed at how well the installation went.  I love the new “strait to the install” option.  Spiffy for sure!

I have made the following to show improvements and regression.

Hardware compatibility:

Open drivers-  Not one item I have on this computer is closed.  That is amazing.

Webcam Support- Even my webcam working now.  (But the colors are wrong.  They compiled the driver with the wrong rgb setting.  Not Ubuntu’s fault.  The driver should detect and change accordingly.

Slow and Chopping Scrolling- In fact alot of the stuff in Compiz is now much slower.  What the heck!  I loved using the Compiz Environment and now I can’t do it. Let’s hope this can be fix.

Screen is dim at boot-  I thought it might be me, but it’s not.  If you boot the computer it goes to the lowest brightness setting.  Now pressing the dim button will bring the brightness to full, then start to dim it, and press the brighten button and it slowly brightens back to normal.  I also noticed that when I ran mplayer, ever time I started a new video/DVD it would go dim again.  Now this isn’t a show stopper for me, but I think it’s annoying.

Screen goes dim when I tell it not to- when the battery is on and I am unplugged, my screen keeps going dim even though I tell it not to in the gnome prefs.  I have to manually brighten it again and again if I wait for more than about a minute without using the computer.  A really bugger, I tell ya.

Bluetooth light on computer is on- This one is funny, I don’t have bluetooth, but for the first time I now see the bluetooth light on my computer on in all it’s glory.  I have checked my system with lspci and lsusb to see if Ihave it showing there but it’s not there.  I notice the light going on sometime before the hard drives are mounted at boot.  Now if this light is changable even without a blue tooth, can I use it for other things?  I would love to know when I have a new email with that light.

SCIM bugging me- It’s kind of annoying, sometime while typing, the keyboard layout will suddenly change.  I have a work around, just disable all the other layouts. ;

Hibernation: yes! Suspend: no - I can now hibernate the system without any problems, but still, the computer will act like it’s going into syspend.  Even has this pretty glowing and diming light on the computer when it’s in suspend. It’s coming out of it that gives the issues.  It turns on everything.  But I have a blank screen and I can’t get at the system at all.  No responses to terminal changes or sound playing.

No sidescrolling- My mighty mouse isn’t very mighty without a bunch of manual code in xorg. Guess I will have to do that.  Let’s hope that one day they will include evdev devices in the xorg file.

Lock screen no longer working- It worked before.  But not in hardy.  I get a response when I press the button and have acpi_listen running, so I know it’s possible.  Now to get it to do something.

Wireless doesn’t turn off and on – My wireless light doesn’t turn on and off anymore.  I used to be able to press the button and it would happen.  Now nothing.  The acpi event does happen so I don’t think it would be hard to fix. In addition, the switch on the side to manually turn it off has never worked.  But why would I need that?

Media Key works – but again, it’s not starting totem like it should.  Nor is it very setable right now… just the acpi event happens.

Sound works – with gutsy I had to reinstall alsa.  Thanks guys, glad it’s working now.

Software issue:

Smart tabing is lost- talk about annoying, I love the terminal, why can’t have I have smart tabbing?  sudo apt-get install ecli<tab> doesn’t work anymore.  Anyone know why?

Ejecting cd – sure it ejects them just fine.  The funny part is that it complains saying it can’t everytime. funny.

Keyboard Layout -When I select the keyboard layout in the bootup, can’t it know what layout I have while installing?  Apperantly I am thrown the US keyboard everytime.  It would be nice if the install was smarter then that.

SCIM bugging me- It’s kind of annoying, sometime while typing, the keyboard layout will suddenly change.  I have a work around, just disable all the other layouts.

I will be filing bugs for these soon.

My computer is randomly crashing.  It either just shuts off, or the screen get’s all garbled.  I don’t know what it is, but I am scared they will not cover it with the warranty, because, well, I REALLY use a computer.  I am careful, don’t get me wrong, but I buy laptops to use them as laptops.  I carry it with me everywhere I go.  I have a bag for it.  But I am sure it get’s bumps around.  If they don’t fix it, I am going to get hit with a 110€ cost just to get my broken computer back.  That sucks.BTW, My computer crashed twice while doing this.  So bare with the errors, I just want to get it published. >:(

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