ubuntu is starting to annoy me

[Oron Peled]

On 20.05.2009 Gabor Szabo wrote:
> On Wed, May 20, 2009 at 10:49 AM, Boaz Rymland <boaz at rymland.com> wrote:
> > On Wed, 20 May 2009 10:33:15 +0300, Gabor Szabo <szabgab at gmail.com> wrote:
> >>
> >> 1) the dual screen stopped working correctly, and actually I cannot
> >> set the screen resolution to high enough.
> >>
> >> Does anyone know /etc/X11/xorg.conf does not seem to change when I
> >> change the configuration via the
> >> GUI. So how can I reconfigure the X ?
> >
> > What's your GPU chipset?
> 
> Err, I am not sure.
> I am guess you want to know the line VGA in the output of lspci ?
> 
> 00:02.0 VGA compatible controller: Intel Corporation Mobile
> 945GM/GMS/940GML Express Integrated Graphics Controller (rev 03)

While I personally don't use Ubuntu, many of these changes are not specific
to this distribution -- I'd like to defend them a bit:

 - Upstream X developers suggest not having xorg.conf for almost a year as
   most controller features are autodetected these days.

 - As mentioned, the Alt-Ctrl-Backspace is a new (mis?)feature of X and is
   documented for the next update of my distribution (Fedora).

 - Intel graphics chipsets which were the best supported so far are going
   through a major revision in the last 6 months or so (both the kernel
   parts and the X.org drivers). This caused a lot of breakage at first
   (Few months ago I had total lock-ups on some computers, especially
   with KDE/plasma which pushed these drivers to their limits).

   Since Fedora pushes continuous updates until EOL, the situation improved
   a lot in the last month or two. I eagerly wait for F11 (2/6)
   as it should ship with xorg-1.6 which should further clean up the mess.

   So Ubuntu wasn't lucky this time due to their release date (about a
   month earlier than F11 -- too early for xorg-1.6, OO.o-3.1, etc).

 - Another (unrelated) example raised by someone else -- network configuration
   from the UI only: This is actually the fault of shifting from old
   configuration scripts to NetworkManager. While the gripe about
   missing command-line front end is valid, it is not Ubuntu's fault.

   BTW: Since NetworkManager-0.7 (about a year ago), it has distribution
        specific plugins to prevent it from messing with network interfaces
        that appear in the distribution legacy config files. I've tested
        with Fedora and it works. So theoretically, if your Debian/Ubuntu
        interfaces(5) config file refers to a specific interface, than
        NM should ignore it and the legacy/command-line methods apply to it.

Of course this shouldn't deter you from trying Fedora-11 in two weeks ;-)

-- 
Oron Peled                                 Voice: +972-4-8228492
oron at actcom.co.il                  http://www.actcom.co.il/~oron
"Normal people ... believe that if it ain't broke, don't fix it.
Engineers believe that if it ain't broke, it doesn't have enough
features ... yet." -- Scott Adams