I’ve tagged this post as a ‘BitOfAWhinge’ because…it is. But bear with me; it’s got some random praise in it too.

I run Ubuntu Hardy on my Thinkpad T61p but (as I mentioned in a previous post) I use the proprietary NVIDIA graphics drivers so that I can have a decent resolution and use Desktop Effects. This works fine most of the time. Unfortunately, however, most times that I install updates that include kernel updates, the NVIDIA graphics modules become incompatible with the new kernel.

I guess that, were I running them, the Ubuntu graphics driver would be upgraded along with the kernel and this wouldn’t be a problem. As it is, though, after installing the kernel updates and rebooting, X (the graphics environment) takes some effort to load (on the computer’s part – not sure quite what it’s doing but it seems to be straining a little) before loading into a low, non-widescreen, resolution (bit like Windows safe mode). It also seems to revert to US keyboard settings so that certain non-alphnumeric keys are in the wrong place – awkward when entering a password that might contain them.

From there, I have to re-run EnvyNG (the nifty little app that goes away and installs the appropriate NVIDIA graphics drivers – or, in this case, probably just recompiles the modules or something), then reboot. And then everything’s fine. Today was about the third time this has happened. It’s not a major problem now that I know how to fix it but it is irritating and slow. The first time it happened it was quite concerning until I realised that running EnvyNG would fix it all.

So not very user-friendly. Better would be if the kernel update would recognise that there are other modules that are now incompatible (at this point you might be able to tell that I don’t really know how it works but that’s not the point) and, after installing but before rebooting, prompts the user that you’ll need to update them too (ideally with ‘and how to do that’).

VMWare have now cottoned on to this (yes, another proprietory app). Usually after a kernel update, you click VMWare Workstation to start and it just doesn’t do anything (again, rather concerning; if you know how to run it from the command line, you at least get a message that tells you to re-run the VMWare config script). Today, however, I got a little message pop-up saying that I needed to update the modules (or something like that) and I could press a button to do just that. It did it all for me and just worked.

So, some random praise for both EnvyNG and VMWare for making things easy to update. Minus points to Ubuntu Update Manager for not at least warning me that that would be necessary. I understand that by using proprietary software on Ubuntu, Ubuntu probably can’t (or shouldn’t) be held responsible for updating it, but it would be nice to be warned that I would need to run the updates myself.

Okay, not the most riveting blog post in the world but a start on my quest to have software developers (all developers; not just Ubuntu or even just open source) think a little and put in what might seem (to them) like niceties but which make all the difference to the user’s experience. Afterall, it’s for the user that this software exists at all.

Of course, just the thought of manually editing xorg.conf in this day and age shouldn’t even have crossed my mind. Especially on Ubuntu. But (as my Twitter followers might have observed) I recently acquired a new Lenovo Thinkpad at work–specifically, a T61p widescreen Thinkpad which, unfortunately, has an NVIDIA graphics card (really really bad open source support under Linux because NVIDIA won’t open up their drivers). NVIDIA, however, do provide proprietary Linux drivers which are far far better than the ATI drivers of my previous Thinkpad T41p (under either Linux or Windows).

Fortunately, while not a freedom-hater, I’m not averse to using proprietary drivers if I can’t make my laptop work any other way. And as this is my work machine, I need it to Just Work (or as close to as I can). So I installed EnvyNG (envyng-core, envyng-gtk) and ran that to install the proprietary NVIDIA graphics drivers. Incidentally, enabling the NVIDIA proprietary drivers listed in System > Administration > Hardware Drivers screwed up my graphics – I assume the drivers that Ubuntu thinks are right for my graphics card aren’t actually the right ones. EnvyNG, however, got it spot on–the widescreen display resolution (1920×1200) was automatically detected and worked straight off.

Ubuntu Desktop Effects (aka compiz)

This works pretty well. I had to look up how to enable, for example, the rotating cube (which is the ultimate desktop bling) which seemed to me to be a pretty bad Out of Box Experience (OoBE) – before installing Ubuntu on the Thinkpad, I’d booted once into Vista to check that the memory I’d installed was detected. In my brief visit, I noticed that things like the pretty semi-transparent sidebar and thought it’d be nice if Ubuntu did that without any effort on the user’s part (though, to be fair, someone else had installed Vista and, presumably, ensured it worked before shipping the Thinkpad – it would be possible to do the same for a pre-installed Ubuntu machine).

Rotating cube

My general opinion of the Desktop Effects is that while the effects themselves are amazing and a real step-up for Linux desktops, the Advanced Desktop Effects Manager, where you enable/disable the effects you want, is not incredibly easy to use. It’s often not clear what a given effect will do if you enable it. Nor is it clear what all the many many options for each effect will achieve. Really, we need a much simpler interface that has advanced options hidden away – something I’ll take a look at at some point…

The effects that I’ve enabled for now, and found useful/interesting/pointless-but-fun are:

By the way, Wobbly Windows are enabled by default. If you’re interested in knowing more about how Wobbly Windows came to be, here’s an interview with Red Hat’s Senior Interaction Designer (in 2005), Seth Nickell (PDF).

Enabling an external projector/monitor

Coming soon (as soon as I get round to taking some screenshots)…

That’s right! They’ve made it to the second episode of the Ubuntu UK podcast (a.k.a. UUPC).

I was privy to a pre-release airing last night and I was very impressed, having sat through hours of recording time on Saturday…

The show now has its own Twitter ID (@uupc) so that you can follow its progress from recording, through editing, to release.

Enjoy!

This is me with my early birthday pressie from the lovely Tony:

Perfect for travelling to geeky conferences.

The title says it all really.

Some of the guys in the Ubuntu-UK community have released a podcast. And Episode 1 of, hopefully, many more is now available.

Okay, it’s not just ‘some guys’. One of them is my other half, Tony (a.k.a. TonyTiger), I know the others, and I was actually present for  part of one of the interviews on there. So my pimping the podcast here is probably slightly predictable. On the other hand, it really is rather good!

So give it a go.

You can download it from the podcast’s funky new site at podcast.ubuntu-uk.org.