On occasion, when this happens, Chrome actually kills some of the offending tabs after a few minutes of me trying to unsuccessfully interact with them.

I certainly hope that this gets fixed as Chrome runs quite well on weak hardware, like me EEE notebook. However, I don’t appreciate overheating one of my cores all night long for doing nothing.

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.

For this we will use the CentOS testing repository:

cd /etc/yum.repos.d/
sudo wget http://dev.centos.org/centos/5/CentOS-Testing.repo
sudo rpm --import http://dev.centos.org/centos/RPM-GPG-KEY-CentOS-testing


Now we can fetch package information about PHP using the new repository:

yum --enablerepo=c5-testing info php


Check the version number. If it is what you need you can go ahead and install it using yum:

sudo  yum --enablerepo=c5-testing update php


Assuming that worked, you can now restart Apache and be on your way:

sudo /etc/init.d/httpd restart


Memcache

If, like me, you were using memcache you might run into a problem where memcache never got updated to the proper version because it did not exist in the CentOS testing repository. The memcache module on the system ends up with a different PHP API version than is required by the new version of PHP you just installed.

Upon starting PHP you might see a warning similar to this:

Module compiled with API 20040429
PHP compiled with API 20060613


Again, we will add a new repository from Remi Collet. The steps should be as follows:

cd /etc/yum.repos.d/
wget http://rpms.famillecollet.com/remi-enterprise.repo
wget http://download.fedora.redhat.com/pub/epel/5/i386/epel-release-5-3.noarch.rpm
wget http://rpms.famillecollet.com/enterprise/remi-release-5.rpm
rpm -Uvh remi-release-5*.rpm epel-release-5*.rpm


Now we can install the newest memcache library:

sudo yum --enablerepo=remi install libmemcached\*


Build the PHP module using Pecl (you might have to install php-devel packages for this):

pecl install memcache


Edit /etc/php.d/memcache.ini and add:

extension=memcache.so


Restart Apache:

sudo /etc/init.d/httpd restart


With a little bit of luck you will now have PHP 5.2.x and Memcache!