Lucid Kernel Final Configuration

Now that release is fast approaching it was thought appropriate to advertise the final kernel configurations for all of the main distro and ports kernel flavours.  The purpose is to expose the main configuration changes to scrutiny and to provide pointers to the full configurations where those are of interest.

For Lucid we have aimed primarily on stabilisation and supportability. As such we do not expect there to be any radical configuration changes in these kernels.  There has been a drive to commonise and standardise options between architectures and flavours where at all possible to help standardise the experience.  There has also been a drive to pull out to modules some sub-systems which are commonly replaced by users, such as HID, and also pulling out the majority of the PATA and SATA drivers as it is most common to only require a single one of these.  We have also enabled KMS for all graphics hardware where it is supported.

To aid in this comparison we have generated a delta report between Karmic and Lucid which shows all items which have changed and how the value has changed.  This report can be found at the URL below:

  https://wiki.ubuntu.com/KernelTeam/Configs/KarmicToLucid

To facilitate series to series comparison we include pointers to both the full Karmic and Lucid configurations for each flavour, all of which can be found at the URL below:

  http://kernel.ubuntu.com/~kernel-ppa/configs/

Enjoy!

Lucid Kernel Freeze

Today, March 11th 2010, marks Kernel Freeze for the Lucid kernel.

This means that the kernel moves from active development into its

stabilisation phase. All planned kernel features are now set, included,

and enabled and the kernel team focus now moves from new enablement

to testing, bug isolation, and fixing of issues found in the kernel.

The kernel will now transition over to the stable maintenance team,

they will be responsible for patch acceptance from here on.

What does this transition mean for you. Now is the time to test things you

care about and report any issues in Launchpad against the linux package.

If you have bugs open found earlier in the cycle please retest with the

latest and greatest kernel and report back whether those bugs are still

present and where you tested. The upcoming Beta-1 release is an ideal

test platform.

Additionally this transition means that is will be much harder to make a

change the kernel. From today patches will need to meet the same criteria

as would be required for SRU[1] to a released kernel. That means that

the patch must have a Launchpad bug open, it must be a fix for an actual

bug being experienced in the field, it must be sent to the kernel-team

email list for review, it must recieve two ACKs from kernel team members,

and finally you must test the updated kernels and report back.

Lucid will be with us for a long time so please help us make this the

best kernel possible. Please test beta-1 and report your issues. Thanks!

[1] https://wiki.ubuntu.com/KernelTeam/StableKernelMaintenance

Lucid DRM Update

After much discussion within the Ubuntu Kernel team, the Ubuntu X team,
and with the various Graphics upstreams it has become clear that the
2.6.32 drm stack is not of sufficient quality to form a good basis for a
LTS release.  2.6.32 does not contain Nouveau so we are already committed
to a backport of that for KMS there.  Upstream is essentially saying
ATI Radeon KMS support in 2.6.32 is so bad that the recommendation is to
disable it globally.  Finally i915 does not support the latest chipsets
well, and backports are already extremely painful; chipsets which are
slated to become prevalent over the next few months.

The recommendation from upstream is to use the 2.6.33 drm stack if we
desire KMS to be enabled generally, a clear goal for Lucid.  Following a
review it does appear that the drm subsystem is sufficiently self contained
that it is possible to backport just that subsystem into our 2.6.32 tree.
This gives us a hybrid kernel gaining the long-term stable support backing
for the main kernel (a major bonus as this has to be supported for 5
years on servers) while gaining the more stable 2.6.33 graphics support
for desktop use.  Additionally upstream is essentially rejecting 2.6.32
as a supportable stack, and is committing to longer support for 2.6.33
as their stable version.  We are therefore planning to upload a hybrid
2.6.32 kernel containing the 2.6.33 drm backported.

From an Ubuntu stable maintenance standpoint we should be able to track a
hybrid of 2.6.33.y for drm and 2.6.32.y for the remainder of the kernel and
due to the separation that drm enjoys we hope to avoid major conflicts.
Plug gaining the longest possible support from upstream for each part.
This will also remove the requirement to install an LBM package to get
Nouveau cleaning up the install significantly.  It seems likely that
Debian and other distros will be following a similar hybrid approach
allowing us to share the maintenance burden.

Wibble Wobble Gwibber

It happens to us all in the end. "No there is no point in being on FaceBook, Twitter is pointless", you know the drill. You are certain you do not need these things in your life but you sign up just "to be in touch with so and so". Before you know it you have about 20 accounts and no idea which one to check when, and little inclination to do so as time is so in short supply. Gah!

I have recently discovered Gwibber. A simple little desktop application which does all that checking for you and shoves all the interesting titbits in one box. Gwibber reads all your incoming updates and shoves them into a single personal timeline, even colour coding the entries so you can tell them apart. Want to reply to something just hit the reply icon and it sends the reply to the right place without you even needing to know which service they are from. What more could a minimalist want I ask you? Struggling with your feeds, give it a go.

Bookmark Knots

I have bookmark knots in my life. I have a laptop, a new netbook, oh another laptop, a media server on my TV. Err, plus my bookmarks are different on every single one of them. In fact I have given up cause I could never find the right one and deleted them from all but my day-to-day machine.

Gaining a new netbook has brought a new urgency to solving this problem. I want to be able to take my netbook away to conferences and yet I need that to be a workable environment. Bookmarks are key to my finding anything it seems, so I need to get those synchronised on both these boxes. As I am already owned by Google I started out evaluating the google task bar. It looks ok I guess but it adds a taskbar which on a netbook is like stealing half the screen, it also does not have sidebar support. On my netbook I have taken to removing all the taskbars and using the bookmarks side bar instead to gain some space, so whatever I found really needed to support those.

Enter GMarks. This Firefox extension basically replicates the Bookmarks menu and sidebar but synchronised with google bookmarks. It even seems to support a toolbar though I have yet to find out how one gets that to display. So far so good. I will let you know how I get on with it.

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!