Saturday, April 25, 2009

Upgraded to Kubuntu 9.04


I have just finished upgrading my computer to the 9.04 version of Kubuntu (Ubuntu with KDE as the default window manager).  I was looking forward to trying the new notification system and the new versiion of KDE.



I decided to do the upgrade online, instead of downloading the CD, and upgrading from it.  The I started the upgrade at 10pm on Thursday, and at 8am on Friday, the download finally finished.  I assume that the slow download was caused because of the number of people doing the upgrades at the same time.



Once the upgrade pretty much everything worked.  I did have to do a few things to make things work



  • Install  plasma-widget-network-manager with apt-get.  I needed this in order to get KDE to use my wireless network

  • Followed the steps on this page to make sound work well with PulseAudio

  • Reset permissions on /usr/lib/libaoss.so*.  I had done this before, but setting permissions fixes audio for VMware Workstation.

  • Uses this page as an example to reconfigure my trackpad.  It looks like now, trackpads are not configured in xorg.conf but are not configured with hal.  I was able to reapply my old configuration in the new way

5 comments:

  1. Have you taken a look at the CPU frequency scaling? I finished upgrading my netbook over the weekend, and am having issues with the frequency scaling -- I'm stuck at 800MHz unless I set the governor to "performance" which will kill the battery life.
    You can check the current state by running cupfreq-info (from package cpufrequtils).
    So, do it when idle, and see what the GHz is, and then load down the system with something like "cat /dev/urandom | hexdump -C > /dev/null" and then run cpufreq-info again and see if it's any better.
    See also https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/367739

    ReplyDelete
  2. CPU frequency scaling is working on my XPS M1530. It remains at 800MHz when idle, and goes up to 2.6GHz when there is load

    ReplyDelete
  3. Actually I am seeing the same thing as you when I am in battery mode.
    The CPU frequency scaling policy is set to "Dynamic (ondemand) in the Powersave profile

    ReplyDelete
  4. Man, I wish I could prove that this was 100% broken on laptops, but I'm just not sure how to go about doing so.
    Are you going to disable the ondemand governor, or what? Does your XPS perform okay when at 800MHz?
    Extra battery life is nice, but I'd like my netbook to be a bit more responsive.

    ReplyDelete
  5. I am probably going to leave the ondemand govenor. Battery life is too bad if I disable CPU frequency scaling. And performance is not that bad

    ReplyDelete

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