Half a Page of Scribbled Linux

I’m still not happy with the new version of Ubuntu. It runs acceptably from boot-up, but if I suspend or hibernate, performance bogs down and little glitches happen, like the speaker occasionally clicking and the fingerprint reader not working.

Since I can live without it, I ran the uninstall for Fingerprint GUI to see if that was the culprit.

Next, I tried to locate some help with the volume buttons, which also don’t work. I found some advice on ubuntuforums for 11.10. This was the first Unity release, so it might also work with 12.04. …And it does!

After a few cycles of suspend, no issues. Hibernate also isn’t causing a problem, but although it starts to hibernate, actually only drops down to suspend mode.

I’ve already got a partition set up for the installation, /dev/sda7, which was the upgraded Ubuntu 12 version I’m not happy with.

The first step is to create a bootable USB drive with Ubuntu 12 on it using the Ubuntu Desktop 12.04 LTS ISO.

The USB booted up into a Ubuntu installation with an icon on the desktop to install Ubuntu. I used /dev/sda7 which was the previous upgrade from 10 to 12 that I wasn’t happy with. The boot loader will be installed to /dev/sda as before. I added a separate 2 GB swap partition different than that used by Ubuntu 10.

The new system booted pretty quickly, but of course, I don’t have all my stuff on it yet. On to the check list:

• Ubuntu 10 still works
• Windows XP still works
• Wireless networking works
• Ctrl-Alt-Delete brings up the dialog box (by default!)
• Suspend works

While checking out the system, Upgrade Manager started itself to look for updates, but it crashed. I sent the crash report in and restarted it and installed the 20 updates that were waiting.

• Used the Software Center to install GKrellM, EMacs, Chrome, Fingerprint GUI, Dropbox and KeePassX.
• Fingerprint reader works.
• Lexmark Pinnacle Pro901 printer driver–The Printing application found the printer when I told it I had a network printer and entered its IP address. It identified the printer as Lexmark Pro800-Pro900, but had no driver for it. I installed Lexmark’s (disk space wasting) driver. I chose the 32-bit Postscript PPD for CUPS-based and OpenOffice Printing with Debian-based packaging. After installing it, I couldn’t figure out what to do next, so I ran dpkg --contents lexmark-inkjet-legacy-1.0-1.i386.deb and saw the file lxPro800-Pro900.ppd in /usr/local/lexmark/v3/etc. I gave that file to the Printing application with “supply a PPD file”. The test page printed just fine.

I’m finding the upgraded Ubuntu 12.04 on Pinto, the Thinkpad T60, to be noticeably slower than version 10. I’m going to try an install from scratch and see how that goes. If it’s still too slow, I’ll leave Pinto at version 10.