Laptop Ubuntu?

[Steven J. Owens]

Hi all,

     I've been a unix/linux user for years, but not much of a linux
sysadmin.  I'm also new at the linux desktop game, so I decided to try
out Ubuntu.  I tried out hoary, and I ran into some problems (see
below) that I haven't been able to sort out.  Somebody suggested
trying out breezy, and since I'm about at the point where I'm ready to
reinstall hoary from scratch, why not try out breezy?

     Are there any particular suggestions you'd have for a laptop
ubuntu user?  The biggest issues I can see are 

a) network configuration changing several times a day (office, home,
   hotspot)

b) suspend/resume several times a day (or reboot).

     I found it annoyingly tedious to manually juggle my NICs (having
to manually shut down the 802.11 on eth1 when in the office, so it
would use the wired eth0 connection, then manually starting eth1 when
in a hotspot).  So I installed the "whereami" package, which tries to
guess which nic configuration to use, depending on the circumstances.
This sort of worked, though I also learned that whereami doesn't
uninstall cleanly - I started a ubuntu bug for this and they seem to
be on track to fixing it.

     Problem b) is turning out to be thornier, but that may be because
of some of the things I did :-).  I started by installing hoary on my
thinkpad t43p.  Things went pretty smoothly, and I was happy for a few
days.  Eventually I noticed that "top" and "cat /proc/meminfo" showed
only 1GB memory, not the full 2GB.  On the advice of the freenode
#ubuntu channel, I installed the linux-686 package so it'd see my
whole memory and CPU.  

     After this, things got a little flakey.  The system literally
kept forgetting that the built-in 802.11 was there. This turned out to
be due to kernel/module mismatches - I had assumed that apt would take
care of those dependencies, but it turned out I had to do:

     apt-get install --reinstall linux-restricted-modules-686

     When I did this, then rebooted, it started seeing the 802.11
hardware again... until the next time I did suspend-to-disk and then
resumed.  Then I had to --reinstall and reboot again.

     After struggling with this for a while, I tried to ignore it for
a bit and get on with my life.  I mucked around with various packages,
trying to get firefox to play flash (mainly because I want to purchase
something from a site that uses flash for its menus - god I hate
that...) and also tried installing swsusp, acpid, and hibernate, to
get more reliable power management and resume-from-suspend.  This
added up to completely breaking suspend-to-disk :-).

     So, as I write this, I'm trying the dist-upgrade approach to
switching to breezy.  I have my data files backed up, so if this
doesn't work I'll try installing Breezy from CD.

     Even at the best of times, suspend-to-disk took a while to boot
back from.  Is there any way to speed this up?  I'm told
suspend-to-ram is generally not something to rely upon, unless your
hardware is really, really well known.  Nevertheless, I can't just
leave my laptop on my office desk all day long.  So if anybody has
suggestions for strategies to make this easier, I'm all ears.

-- 
Steven J. Owens
puff at darksleep.com

"I'm going to make broad, sweeping generalizations and strong,
 declarative statements, because otherwise I'll be here all night and
 this document will be four times longer and much less fun to read.
 Take it all with a grain of salt." - http://darksleep.com/notablog