Installed Ubuntu on an HP Mini 110 I had lying around, figuring it’d be a good cheap system to take on the road I wouldn’t mind losing. The short version is that everything mostly works, except the stuff that doesn’t. I’m more used to OpenBSD, but I’m trying to separate difficulties that come from familiarity issues and real problems.

The install went smoothly enough, but took forever. See other post. On the plus side, it was very easy to encrypt the whole hard drive, but on the minus side, it required an alternate iso image. A whole new ISO just to add one menu option. I wonder what menu option had to be removed to make room for it.

Unity

I’m using the new default Unity interface, which marks a major Linux desktop shift from cloning Windows UI design to cloning OS X UI design. It’s actually quite nice when it works since my screen is only 600 pixels high, and getting the window title and menu up top sharing space with the little taskbar icons keeps it usable. Of course, it doesn’t work in every app. Most obviously, it doesn’t work with LibreOffice which is one of the default apps in the launcher. An obscure app, I could see that not working yet. But the default desktop suite? Not baked.

About the second or third thing I did after installing was change the color scheme. The one I picked used a black on black text for menus. Oops. Guess I’ll stick with the default. Other config options seem really hard to find or even require installing new packages. The only way to prevent the useless chat icon from showing seems to be guessing the package name and uninstalling it.

I’ve gotten used to it now, but at first the behavior of hiding menus until the mouse hovers over the top of the screen was annoying. I had a Firefox extension window open. The top of the screen was, I thought, the menu for the main application, so it took quite a bit of frustrated searching trying to find the option I was looking for. Instead, the top menu changes as necessary. Something that only takes a little while to adapt to, but very strange the first time around.

Hardware

Ubuntu does seem to support the crappy Broadcom wireless with the binary driver, but it required some manual frobbing to get it working. The wireless icon showed up, but claimed the firmware was missing, but the device manager wasn’t willing to download it. Apparently, that message is code to apt-get bcmwl-kernel-source, which then prods the system into downloading and installing the rest of the driver parts. Other devices seem to work as expected out of the box.

The battery icon is broken. Sadly, a year old known regression has still not been unregressed because it sounds like nobody wants to take the blame for the bug, preferring to point at somebody else. On OpenBSD, I had to manually run the apm command on the command line to find out how much life was left, but at least it worked. No matter how pretty the icon and its statistics and shiny graphs are, “how long until dead?” is really the only question I need answered. Double sadly, the oft recommended workaround for this issue is to add some dude’s apt repo to my sources list. Yeah, that sounds safe.

Other

Not much else to say. It’s basically as expected. The jillions of tiny packages deal has always pissed me off, but just the same Ubuntu’s always been like that.

Upgrade to 11.10

The upgrade succeeded without eating any important data. It did reset a bunch of preferences, though. The most immediately obvious would be my wallpaper is now the default again, but little things like taskbar icons and whatnot are changed too. I could probably spend days discovering little tweaks I made that have been unmade. I died the death of a thousand paper cuts when I installed the first time thinking that would be enough, but if we’re going to play this game every six months for each upgrade, no thanks.

On the bright side the battery meter is finally showing a time. Alas, it’s a preposterous time, but I guess we can’t have everything.