Saturday, December 02, 2006

Ubuntu continued.

I've recently resurrected my desire to continue using Ubuntu at work mostly because of the insane security policies that have been enacted. We have actually been pushed to the point of absolutely having to write down our passwords because of the size, the randomness, and frequency of required change. Its truly a pain and no one is acting like they even notice the human side of the problem. Anyway, I digress. I upgraded 6.06 to 6.10 so that I could play with some of the new stuff. The only problems I've noticed from the upgrade was the hitch with the fglx ATI graphics driver not being used after upgrade. It was a minor glitch, easily fixed. I just used the instructions to reinstall it. As it turned out though, the only thing I needed to to was reenable it in the x.org configuration file. So after continued use, I see three problems that I'd really like to see fixed or find a way to fix them myself.

First: Sound isn't working from zsnes. I know it isn't a big deal, but it works in Windows just fine, but if it worked here. It would be so nice. Sound is produced but its noisy and sounds clipped. I searched for solutions for about 30 minutes, but I haven't given it more time than that yet.

Second: Every time I go from home to work and back again, the network adapters need to be brought up and then down. At work I'm wired and at home I'm wireless with WPA. I suspect my WPA solution is the problem, but I'm not annoyed enough about it to do anything right now. I just sudo ifdown eth0 or eth1 and then sudo ifup eth0 or eth1 depending on where I am. As long as I remember to turn the radio back on at home, it works all of the time when I do that.

Third: Inserting an external USB mouse permanently disables the touchpad until reboot. That is super annoying. After a little research, I've heard that it is because of the fglx ATI driver, but I really want the accelerated 3D support so I need that driver. I read somewhere about how to re-enable the touchpad manually, but I haven't gotten to it yet.

Basically, other than that stuff, I haven't given up using ubuntu yet. Its still pretty good.
More later...