In doing upgrades recently, I have discovered machines with Intel video cards that lock up or loose video soon after starting. Here is my report card for Plymouth and the x drivers in Ubuntu.

1. ATI great
2. Nvidia ok if you stick with the built in driver.
3. Nvidia SUCKS if you go to the binary driver. The screen is black through the entire boot process.
4. Intel SUCKS, again black screens or unstable systems that often don’t boot.
5. Any-other-Video-Card ok, but results vary.

At this point it seems that Plymoth works properly less that 40% of the time, GDM 2 is ugly as sin. Ubuntu would have been better off sticking with the old boot system, GDM 1 with pretty graphics and jaunty style intel drivers. Let Fedora work out the bugs for another year.

Now lets discuss the reality. If there is soon a Point release on updateded intel or plymouth or GDM drivers, we will get them in Lucid. If they are more radical than point releases Lucid will never get them. So just like Hardy got Firefox 2.x when Firefox 3.0 came out a month later, and Hardy users never got Firefox 3 in the repos, EVEN AFTER MOZILLA STOPED SUPPORTING VERSION 2. I am afraid that Lucid users will always be stuck with broken Intel Drivers, ugly GDM 2.0 and a Plymouth that does not work quite right.

I have been using Ubuntu since 6.10 and have always been very excited when an upgrade comes around. With 10.04 being an LTS I was all the more confident to upgrade my system (hp tx2) to 10.04, and boy was I wrong.

After the upgrade, my system would not halt/power down after shutdown. The battery will drain real fast, boot will hang up on a blank screen. After trying all the suggestions I could find in Ubuntu forums, I gave up and decided to install from scratch (All the problems I listed are apparently well known).

The re-install didn’t go well either, I had all the problems that I had previously AND my wireless connection will no longer auto-connect. The track-pad gets auto-disabled, apparently because it expects input from the touch screen, however, the touch screen does not work using my fingers and is very iffy with the stylus. I have had no luck in being able to disable the touchscreen completely.

After mucking about in GRUB 2 for hours, I have finally set my laptop to boot directly to Windows 7. I have Lucid installed in a virtualbox, it still refuses to boot up at times and halt on shut down. Maybe I should wait for Ubuntu 10.10 or perhaps go back to using 9.10

Now I have files I cannot retrieve (very important files for my clients) that I recently did prior to my backup that I am going to loose. I really do not like Windows 7 but It looks like that’s where I am headed after this. Either that or back to 9.10. At least the wireless worked flawlessly. At this time I have 9.10 dual booting with the other OS instact that is not working in fear of loosing my files that I believe are still there just not readable (because of the part ion being ex4 or something or rather (i stated I was a newbie)

Argg.. I love Linux.(fast, smooth, great options, excellent open source market, innovative .But I am not going to love it to my death when it comes to usability or in this case in-usability.

10.04 no way .. First tried and I lost my TouchPad at home .
Scare to touch my Dell at office .

*looks for the download link / torrent….

love ubuntu used 8.04 first and then 8.10 my fraviorite now using 9.04 but even though I have a master cd of ubuntu 9.10 karmic koala I can’t use grub 2 theres no gui and Im no tech geek.
with grub 1 I used kgrub editor to manage my boot screen and even though it was designed for kde desktop it worked fine in gnome but there no editors for grub 2 why not editing cfg files with nutalius is a pain in the ass and all your changes are erased with new system updates so whats the point.

will not use ubuntu distros past 9.04 till theres a grub 2 editor capable of removing entries and changeing boot order and grub backgrounds all of which kgrub editor could do with grub 1 - legacy so make the editor already I’d do it my self if I was a better programmer.