Playing with my Dell Mini 10v

I have been talking about getting myself a netbook so I do not have to lug my main laptop about when we visit family, or travelling to conferences. I have said I was going to order a Dell Mini 9 a few times. By the time I got round to ordering it the Dell Mini 10v had basically replaced it, sigh. Anyhow I really did order one. My 10v arrived a couple of days ago, and its prettier than I imagined. Say hello to Penfold.

So what is it like? Its very light and just that little bit bigger and more usable than the 9 I had seen. The keyboard is a decent size and the only keys which are not normal are the function keys which it seems I really do not use that much. A significant improvement over the 9's layout.

As a keen Ubuntu convert obviously I ordered the Ubuntu version which thankfully is still cheaper than the M$ loaded version, at least in the UK.
It had a Dell pre-install of Ubuntu based on Hardy. Although it seemed perfectly usable I wanted to see how well Karmic worked on this baby. A quick backup of the SSD and I was installing from a USB stick. Overall completely painless.

The only odd feature of this machine is the touchpad. The left and right clicks are activated by pushing down the corners of the touchpad. This has an odd effect as the buttons are in the active area of the touchpad and clicking tended to cause the mouse to jump, I will not even attempt to describe the gymnastics required to do a long drag.

I was resigned to getting a little travel mouse when using this thing but thought I would do a little googling first. This turned up a reference to an updates synaptics X driver from Alberto Milone. I have installed the xserver-xorg-input-synaptics package (only) from the PPA below:

https://launchpad.net/~albertomilone/+archive/ppa

That change seems to have sorted things out. The power of open source at work. Awsome.

Karmic Kapers

I've been putting it off long enought, its time to upgrade to Karmic fully rather than woosing about running just the kernel. So today I bit the bullet and let update-manager move me up to Karmic. So far ... well I am able to post this so things aren't all bad. In fact so far things are pretty good. As I have an all Intel box here I have Kernel Mode Setting (KMS) goodness. Rather unexpectedly I have full compositing of opengl apps!?! What does that mean, well it means that I can move an glxgears window around without it making a mess, and even 'tilt' my compiz cube desktop and see those applications running on the surfaces of it. Most impressive.

On the negative side I have had a couple of odd moments. When quitting some full screen 3D games I have ended up with my main desktop resolution changed, in one case to 640x480 which was a challenge to sort out. Also my sensors config was dropped on the floor. Most oddly I had to remove my twitter and identi.ca accounts from gwibber and readd them before they would do anything other than error on me.

Its probabally a bit early to recommend you come and join me in the wild-lands, but at least some of the wild animals out here are friendly!

Karmic Kernel Version

At the Ubuntu Developer Summit we had a session on the likely kernel version for the Ubuntu Karmic release. The decision at the session was that we would be aiming for a v2.6.31 based kernel for Karmic. This was based in large part on release timing, we are expecting this kernel to be released around three weeks before our beta freeze which gives us a fair amount of time to stabalise the kernel before the final release.

What goodness can we expect from the Karmic kernel. We are obviously expecting Intel support for Kernel Mode Setting (KMS) to be stable and enabled. We have some hope of seeing ATI Radeon KMS for at least some cards, indeed the first cut of this support has just been merged. We can expect some good improvements in the Intel graphics drivers as a whole. We also get some new in kernel compression LZMA which might allow smaller kernels and initramfs files saving a bit of space on the CDs. There is a pile of DVB updates merged already . Overall there is nearly 20k changes in already and the merge window is still open. Even staging drivers are getting some love.