I’ve been running Ubuntu 10.10 in some form since Alpha 3. Currently, it is installed on my media center PC, netbook, primary desktop (on a secondary partition) and at least one VM. My experiences follow:
The netbook: For all it’s problems, Ubuntu 10.10 is actually a breath of fresh air my my little craptop. Not only is it (mostly) functional, it’s pretty fast. I can play loads of games on it, and I even get about 2hrs. battery life on a tiny 3-cell battery. Disconnecting from a power source always triggers a “low battery” notification, and the system immediately tries (and fails) to enter hibernation. After unlocking the desktop, everything is as normal. For what it’s worth, manually engaging hibernation works fine.
Something like every 20th boot, NetworkManager will simply forget how to auth to my access point, and I’ll be forced to rip all traces of my SSID from GNOME’s settings. After that, wireless springs to life.
The first time I’ve enabled the webcam after initially setting up the hardware, Cheese refused to find it. Restarting Cheese, it now finds the cam but cannot achieve a framerate above one frame every eight seconds. Only when lowering the camera’s resolution to the lowest levels (160×120, atrocious) did it behave properly. Still, recording was spotty at best, and of three recordings, two could not be replayed.
Media Center: I upgraded to 10.10 just after Beta, and immediately started having display driver problems. The system acts like the nvidia driver (no, not the ‘nv’ package) is installed, even nvidia-settings makes noticeable changes to the display. All seems well. However, XBMC complains that no OpenGL device is present.
A day later, daily updates killed the installation — it completely fails to boot, even into recovery mode. I don’t know how to solve this, so I guess a clean install is in my future. Luckily, I’m dual-booting this installation with Windows 7.
VM: I haven’t spent much time with this because VirtualBox Guest Additions don’t yet provide a module compatible with X.Org 1.9, so the experience is pretty miserable.
Primary Desktop: What a cluster. This system has an ATi Radeon HD 5770, and between the open drivers not handling OpenGL and the closed drivers completely forgetting all settings on every reboot, getting a “nice” configuration on a powerhouse desktop is frustrating at best. Last time I looked at it, CCC would simply close as soon as I attempted to apply a setting, and as I logged out and back in again, metacity failed to startup. I have no idea. I guess I’ll try again with the release candidate.
