dwasifar's daily gripe

I give up.

I’ve been struggling with moving to Ubuntu Hardy Heron for almost a week. The aforementioned random-freeze problem has become more and more of an issue, and as I said previously, this is a deal-breaker.

It’s not for lack of trying to fix it, either.

I changed to the -rt kernel on the advice of some forum postings; I thought that was working but now the problem is still with me. So I tried moving to the 2.6.22-14 kernel (the Gutsy kernel). That works, but I can’t get compositing to work. Obviously it’s a video driver issue, and I can’t get the right version of the video driver to install. I think it’s installing for the Hardy kernel, and not the older kernel I have installed. Every time I try to boot with compositing enabled, I get the white screen of death: plain white screen with a working mouse pointer but nothing to point at. I can only run successfully if I log in to a failsafe session with metacity instead of compiz. The forum posts on the issue are full of guesses. It’s apparently a widespread problem but nobody can pinpoint its source. Some people blame the video drivers (both ATI and Nvidia); some blame wireless cards (obviously not the problem for me); some blame Firefox; some blame other things. No one knows for sure, and although the kernel maintainers are aware of it, they don’t have much to go on until someone can give them a consistent way to reproduce the problem.

So for the time being I am back on Gutsy. I’ll just have to keep an eye on the forums and see if a kernel update or something eventually comes through. If that happens before June 19, I’ll try it again. If not, I think I’ll move to OpenSUSE 11 for a while and see how that is.

What bothers me most about this is that I’ve trusted Ubuntu to do things right since I started with it back at Hoary, and now I feel let down. It was bad enough when Feisty came out with broken sound support for Intel chipsets, and we all had to wait a month or so for that to be fixed; the forum workarounds worked for some people and not for others. But this is a lot more serious. A kernel bug, and in an LTS release yet. Apparently this bug has been crashing systems all through the beta cycles, and yet it went out the door with the bug unfixed. I’m not a kernel expert, but I don’t see why the developer team didn’t at some point decide to switch back to the 2.6.22 kernel until this bug could be killed.

In the meantime, at least I will have a cool new video card tomorrow to play with.

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