Ubuntu 8.10 Problems on T61 Thinkpad
I don’t often complain about the state of some OSS projects understanding that it is all part of the growth process. However, every once in a while a new version of our favorite product ends up being worse than the outgoing. My personal experience with Ubuntu 8.10 Intrepid Ibex is one such occurence. I upgraded my 8.04 install to 8.10 as soon as it came out. Whereas 8.04 was rock solid and functional (it is a LTS release after all) 8.10 is proving anything but. For the record, the aforementioned copy of Ubuntu is running on a T61 Thinkpad with NVidia graphics and Intel Wireless (pretty standard hardware).
Update: I recently updated the T61 to Ubuntu 9.04 and all of the problems mentioned below have disappeared. So, thumbs-up to canonical and all the OSS contributors involved in this (and any) distribution.
Update: Ubuntu 9.10 runs even better than 9.04 including a boot speedup from 1:35 down to 45 seconds!
Here is a list of the problems I am having with 8.10, ranging from annoying to wasteful to downright show stoppers:
Shortcut Keys Stopped Working
The T61 has a few shortcut keys along the top for adjusting volume, muting etc. While these worked in 8.04 out of the box, in 8.10 they are not recognized at all. Yes, there is probably something wrong with the X keyboard map that I could fix but that is annoying and I shouldn’t have to. This, after all, is fairly low on the priority list and I’ve already aliased the commands to other key combinations.
All your CPU are belong to us – klogd and dd
Every so often, even when idle, klogd and dd would fire up out of nowhere and start writing oodles of useless log messages. They happily split the two CPU cores between them and proceede to make a silicon bonfire out of them resulting in 2GB kern.log and syslog files. I’ve tried a few things to pacify this dynamic due including updating the wireless drivers and turning off ACPI but so far no luck. As a result I do not feel comfortable leaving my laptop on when I am not working on it since such rampant CPU abuse can only lead to something bad down the road (and a full disk). Again, this problem never appeared in 8.04.
Kernel Panic – BOOM!
Leaving the computer idle until it falls asleep results in a kernel panic from which there is no return other than a hard reboot. The kernel panic manifests itself with a blinking CAPS LOCK. This hurts, but at least it might prevent klogd and dd from burning my CPU to death. :-/
Cannot Shutdown
Every second or third shutdown event ends with the computer still on but the screen blank – fail.
Conclusion
I have installed 8.10 by upgrading from 8.04 and, perhaps that is where the problem lies. Recently if been preparing to re-install 8.10 cleanly and give that a shot. However, in the past I have upgraded between versions with no issues whatsoever. It is quite disappointing that this latest version of Ubuntu is so poor. Is it possible that their commitment to a six month release cycle has resulted in rushing out this release? The release schedule certainly seems like a boon compared to the multi-year waits for Debian but it can also present a problem in cases like this.
I can only hope that my problems with 8.10 are an isolated case with my machine, perhaps all related to one root cause (Intel wireless, I’m looking at you).
I would like to hear other opinions and experiences with 8.10, particularly anyone’s with a T61 Thinkpad.