Ubuntu 10.04 (Lucid) on Dell Mini 12

After a recent system update, my Dell Mini 12 went on the fritz: wireless networking stopped working reliably. Obviously, that's completely unacceptable in a device like this. I guess I could have tried messing around with the configuration files and drivers, but Dell's oddball Ubuntu 8.04 (Hardy) lpia distribution has been feeling long in the tooth lately anyway. So, following my mostly satisfactory Lucid workstation experience, I decided to try upgrading my Mini 12 to Lucid.

And, once again, almost everything worked just fine.

I prepared a USB drive with the installer (actually just a memory card reader plus the card from my camera) according to Ubuntu's instructions. Then I rebooted (using F12 to bring up Dell's boot menu, and then selecting USB), and selected installation.

The installer was exceptionally sluggish — for which I blame the Mini 12's underpowered hardware — but otherwise the installation went through without a hitch.

If you try the same with your Dell Mini 12, you'll want to look at these notes before you run the installation. Two post-install tweaks are necessary:

• To get acceptable graphics performance, you'll need to enable the Poulsbo GMA500 proprietary driver.
• For the wireless networking you'll have to enable the Broadcom STA wireless driver from the System -> Administration -> Hardware Drivers menu.

Overall I'm mostly satisfied. Lucid both looks and feels much slicker than Hardy, from the fonts to the windows. The desktop distribution's UI works fine on the 12 inch screen. And once you perform the tweaks above, most everything in the hardware works fine, including wireless, bluetooth, trackpad, sound, and the webcam.

The fly in the ointment this time? Suspend and resume are sometimes flaky. In particular, sometimes resume either fails completely or requires that I switch virtual terminals a couple of times (Ctrl-Alt-F2, Ctrl-Alt-F7) to jog it out of its slumber. Given the way I use this device, it's actually less of a big deal than you might expect (basically, when suspend fails, I just hard-reboot and restart my web browsers and emacs), but if this matters to you a lot then you might want to hold off. I guess I could try debugging the problem, but like I said it hasn't been that important to me.

So, OK, I have to admit that owning this computer overall hasn't been a seamless experience. (But then nothing is these days, not even my Macbook Pro from work; I've had many travails with MacPorts and Fink and X11.app and...). When I bought the Mini 12, my goal was to see whether a sub-$700 computer could keep me satisfied for more than one year, which would make it more cost-effective than a $2k computer which typically lasts me 3 years. In that sense, the experiment succeeded: it's lasted over a year, and I've gotten good mileage out of it. Meanwhile, I have not cursed at my Mini especially more than I've cursed at any other computing device I've ever owned. And the biggest positive qualities — compactness, light weight, near-silent operation — remain salient even today.

Ubuntu Lucid update

Following my disappointment with Kubuntu Lucid, I just got around to replacing it with the standard Ubuntu Lucid desktop. It's possible to switch desktop environments using a couple of package manager commands, but I decided to do a from-scratch reinstall.

With a little effort, I was able to make most of the Ubuntu desktop behave OK. Window management is still not up to par with KDE 3.5 + KStep window decorations, but it's enough for now. I'll probably switch my window manager to WindowMaker at some point. (NeXTSTEP-style window decorations with X11 window management gestures are the apex of desktop window management, for reasons that I could go into at length but won't today.) Visually, the new Ubuntu theme looks nice; in fact it looks and feels much better when you're using it than it does in screen shots.

However, there's one fly in the ointment. Sound didn't work. At all. Note that for all its flaws, Kubuntu, which is derived from the same base distribution, had no such problem, so it isn't simply a driver issue. I could bore you with all the details of my debugging adventure, but at the end of the day I blame PulseAudio, and Ubuntu's decision to make PulseAudio central to their desktop sound system. After a couple of hours of unproductive web searching and config file wrangling, removing the PulseAudio packages in Synaptic made sound work, sort of.

Yes, sort of. It still doesn't work quite right. When I open the System > Preferences > Sound menu, I get a dialog box saying "Waiting for sound system to respond" and nothing else. (This behavior occurred before I uninstalled PulseAudio, so that's not the cause.) Apparently a whole lot of people have run into variations of this problem since at least Ubuntu 9.10, and nobody seems to have definitive answers on how to solve it. I'd report it as a bug, but I suspect that it's one of those opaque symptoms with dozens of underlying possible causes and it's probably futile.

I want to emphasize that I haven't had a problem like this with a Linux distribution in years. This is literally a regression in behavior to Linux ca. 2005. Poking around by hand with .conf files in /etc just to get something working on my desktop is something I used to do. It's not something I expect to be doing in the year 2010.

So, anyway, I can't set my sound preferences. I guess I'll just have to cross my fingers and hope Ubuntu didn't assign any really annoying sounds to desktop events.

Kubuntu Lucid and KDE 4 reactions

Speaking of how software makes you dependent on other people, the newest Ubuntu Long Term Support (LTS) release just came out. This means that in a year, support for the previous LTS release will wind down; which in turn means that Ubuntu users must upgrade sooner or later, unless they want to sacrifice security updates and compatibility with new releases of third-party software.

So, I took the plunge: yesterday I downloaded and installed Kubuntu Lucid.

This is the first Ubuntu LTS release that runs KDE 4, the latest major revision of KDE. I've been using KDE for about 11 years, ever since version 1.1. My immediate reaction was simply that KDE 4 is a mess. And after playing around for a few hours, tweaking settings, and trying to settle in, I still think KDE 4 is a mess. As I use it more, I'm not settling into it; I'm simply accumulating more irritations.

Without exhaustively listing all the details, my complaints basically break down into three categories.

First, there are pervasive performance problems. In every corner of the UI, "shiny" effects have been prioritized over responsive, performant interactivity. To take just one example, under KDE 3.5, the Amarok media player used to be super snappy and responsive; it left iTunes or Windows Media player in the dust. In KDE 4, Amarok takes a couple of seconds to expand one album or to queue up songs, and resizing UI panels is painfully slow and janky. (My workstation has a 2.13GHz Core 2 Duo and a good graphics card. This should not be happening.) Similar problems can be observed in the desktop panels, file manager, etc.

Second, in general, the UI changes seem designed to push KDE's new technology into your attention space, rather than getting out of the way so you can accomplish tasks. Again, here's just one example: in the upper right corner of the desktop, there's a little unremovable widget that opens the "activities" menu:

The upper right corner of the desktop is a hugely valuable piece of screen real estate. By placing this widget in the upper right corner, the developers are signaling that this menu contains operations which will be frequently accessed. Do they really think users will add new panels to the desktop frequently? (For non-KDE users, a "panel" is KDE's equivalent of the Mac OS X dock or the Windows taskbar.) So far, almost every time I've clicked this widget has been by accident while trying to close or resize a window.

If you're a desktop developer who wants to show off your technology, this design may sound good: you put this menu there to make sure users discover your desktop widget and "activities" technology*. However, if you're a user, then this menu mostly gets in your way, and you wish it were tucked away somewhere more discreet.

Third, the KDE 4 version of every application has fewer features and more bugs than the KDE 3 version. The "Desktop" activity no longer has a way to "clean up" icons without repositioning all of them in the upper-left-hand corner. The Konsole terminal application's tab bar no longer has a button from which you can launch different session types. The list goes on.

Anyway, of course, I don't pay for KDE, and so in some sense this is all bitching about free beer. However, suppose I did pay for KDE. Would I have any more input into the process? Windows users pay for Windows; if you don't like the direction Vista and Windows 7 are taking the UI, do you think you personally have any chance of influencing Microsoft's behavior? Mac users pay for Mac OS X; if you disagree with Steve Jobs, do you have any chance of influencing Apple's behavior? In fact, you do not, and both user populations have experienced this reality multiple times in the past decade. Mac users loved the Mac OS 9 UI but they had to give it up when Apple stopped supporting it on new Macs. Microsoft users who are attached to the Windows XP UI will likewise be forced to give it up eventually, when Microsoft stops sending security patches.

The KDE 3 to KDE 4 transition is simply KDE's version of the OS 9 to OS X transition, or the XP to Vista/7 transition. Except that those seem to have worked out OK in the end, whereas KDE 4, which was released over two years ago, seems to have lost its way permanently.

I'm writing this post not just to point out KDE 4's defects — I mean, it feels good to vent, but who really cares — but also to marshal further evidence in support of my contention that owning software doesn't mean much anymore.

Even the fact that KDE is Free Software means little in this case. I mean, what am I supposed to do now? I can't stay with the previous Ubuntu LTS release forever, unless I want to expose myself to security risks, and also be unable to run or to compile new software, both of which are deadly for a software developer. Conversely, I can't singlehandedly maintain a fork of the KDE 3 environment forever; this guy's trying but without a large and active community behind the project, it's doubtful that it will remain current for long. And frankly, I'm getting older, and I don't have enough time to invest in both hacking around with my desktop environment and also accomplishing the other things I want to accomplish in my life.

So, I can either (1) suck it up and live with KDE 4, or (2) abandon the desktop environment I've grown to love over the past 11 years, and jump ship to GNOME or something. (Right now I'm leaning towards (2).) Adopting software means making a calculated bet on the behavior of other people. And sometimes you lose.

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*BTW "activities" are 80% redundant with virtual desktops and therefore hugely problematic and confusing as UI design, but I won't get into that.