Ubuntu 10.04 LTS

I seem to have the problems on the laptop worked out about as
well as I expect to for the near future, so I’ll probably be
installing it on the desktop soon.

On the other hand, there were more of them than I would expect,
and there was less support for working through them than I would
have hoped for.

So I still recommend Ubuntu, on the grounds of the highly
supportive and large community, but if you hear of people
abandoning Ubuntu in droves for something else, you might want to
consider leaving with them.

Here’s the list of problems I hit with pointers to the
solutions:

• I installed an early beta version, and expected there to be
  some problems, but just as the things like the cursor going away
  when you closed the lid were starting to be fixed, they released
  a kernel version that caused my laptop to boot to a black
  screen. This is still not fixed in the official version — I’m
  working around it by using an unreleased kernel version. The
  details are <a
  href="here
  and <a
  href="”>here.
• I had been using wicd instead of network-manager, since I
  never figured out how to configure my wired connection with
  network-manager. On 10.04, there’s a problem with the wicd
  configuration. The symptom is that when you boot, although the
  networking is configured, dns doesn’t work. If you disconnect
  and then reconnect the wired configuration via the wicd GUI, it
  works fine. I never figured out
  how to fix it — I’m working around it by uninstalling
  both network-manager and wicd and writing
  /etc/network/interfaces the way I want it. This will be a
  nuisance if I ever take the laptop anywhere else and want to use
  a wireless configuration, but since the battery is dead, I
  probably won’t. If you just want to use DHCP and a wireless
  configuration, 10.04 seems to work exactly the way you want it
  to out of the box.
• A relatively minor problem was that the xmltv underpinnings
  of freeguide were incompatible with the freeguide distributed
  with 10.04. So a program that worked fine on 9.04 upstairs,
  wouldn’t download listings on the downstairs laptop. I’m
  working around this by installing the xmltv stuff from Debian
  unstable, as explained here.

So the upshot is that I seem to have a working laptop, over a
month after the official release of 10.04. But it’s by no means
by way of a completely standard install. And this is a system
that really doesn’t have to do much. So I’m still nervous about
putting it on my desktop. I’m sure I’ll get around to it before
they stop doing support for 9.04, but I’m going to be very wary
about installing another non-LTS version.