Progress report: I upgraded my eee PC 1000 to 9.10 "Karmic" on Friday. A couple of quirks I encountered:
I like the Synaptic package manager, and am not ready to give it up for the new "Ubuntu Software Center" just yet. (I get the impression that the new program is an attempt at a iTunes-like App store, with the possibility of letting developers charge for their apps at some point.).
Synaptic was reporting that many of the apps I had previously installed were "auto-removable". This doesn't mean that they would be removed automatically by the system itself, but that they would be removed if I ran the "apt-get autoremove" command. This is something I do regularly, so this was a bit alarming to see. It turned out that most of the apps in question were redundant, replaced by others, but there were a few I wanted to keep anyway.
The solution was to mark those apps as "manually-installed", which is what they are. Select them, then uncheck "automatically installed" from the Package menu. They then appear as "Installed (manual)" in Status view.
The other things was that I found the performance went down badly. This was down to factors specific to my system here:
- this netbook has solid state drives, so it helps to change a few things, as detailed on some web pages such as
this. The upgrade had undone the changes I'd made before, such as the "elevator=noop" change to GRUB. This has a major positive effect on Linux SSD performance.
- Our ISP at home, Eircom, has chronic DNS problems: try and open a webpage, it takes several seconds for them to resolve the website address so your browser can talk to it. This is easily solved by switching to OpenDNS by following the instructions
here - or, as I had done, changing the DSL Router configuration. (You can just use their servers without creating an account or anything like that.) Turns out Eircom had pushed out a router update that reset the DNS settings, so it has gone back to defaults, but I've been able to set up the OpenDNS servers on the netbook itself, using their instructions.
Apart from that - I like it. Graphics performance is improved a bit, and performance is now acceptable using the "Extra" graphics settings, though I don't really need that level of "bling" on my humble little netbook.
