OpenZA

I’ve recently upgraded my Lenovo Y510 from Ubuntu 8.04, Hardy, which I’ve been running since around May 2008, to Linux Mint 8, Helena (which is based on Ubuntu Karmic Koala 9.10). I used to upgrade to the latest Ubuntu every 6 months, but it got a bit tiring keeping up on the upgrade treadmill, running around fixing things, especially things that worked before. I decided to stick to the Long-Term Support version (LTS), as the intermediate versions tend to have more regressions.

With Hardy, there were ongoing annoyances I’d learnt to live with. My screen brightness modifier worked the wrong way around (brighter was dimmer). Flash in the browser caused problems with sound (Flash 9 didn’t work well with PulseAudio), and I’d have to close the browser to get it working again. My webcam image was upside down. Firefox would eventually consume all available memory and need to be restarted. The system was unresponsive for a few seconds after booting up. When wireless was off, it would be on, and I’d need to flip the switch to on and then off again to really switch it off.

I’ve been meaning to try Linux Mint for a while, to see whether I could recommend it to complete beginners. Ubuntu was fine, but for beginners, especially if I just gave them the CD and they installed it themselves, installing all the extra codecs to get music and DVD’s playing properly was often problematic.

At first glance, Helena looked great. Based on Ubuntu Karmic Koala 9.10, it’s more polished, booted faster, and was more responsive. Little touches such as the volume control not taking up a huge chunk in the middle of the screen – rather appearing neatly in the corner, the consolidated menu bars freeing up a few extra pixels, or the improved menu, all add up to a noticeable improvement. Most of the little Hardy annoyances seemed to be taken care of (except for the webcam and the off-on-off wireless).

It didn’t last long though. Sound was a complete mess, breaking seemingly at random at some point in the session. Lennart Poettering, a lead developer of PulseAudio has been ranting about Ubuntu’s implementation of PulseAudio since they first implemented it in Hardy. He also blamed application developers, in particular Skype and Flash. He was equally displeased in the buildup to Karmic.

The blame-game goes back and forth, with criticism of PulseAudio equally vociferous, and all sorts of contrary advice floating around (much of it around uninstalling PulseAudio).

Next, the system, although starting off more responsively, degraded very quickly. Whereas beforehand I’d have Firefox open with 30 tabs for most of the day before running into trouble, things fell apart much quicker. Even worse, once the browser hung, I couldn’t just click “X” to close it, and have to manually kill it to close it down. The disease spread to other applications, all needing to be killed manually.

So, in short, lots of little improvements, but two rather large regressions.

Fixing these though proved trivial. For me, two little fixes seem to have helped – installing libsdl1.2debian-pulseaudio (over libsdl1.2debian-alsa), and instead o using the buggy version 2.0.x of Skype, which doesn’t work well with PulseAudio, rather installing the beta 2.1.x. Thankfully at least Flash 10 works with PulseAudio (Flash 9 didn’t, causing the sound problems mentioned above). Now, both the sound and the related memory problems have gone away.

So although I seem to have a stable system now, and am personally happy with Helena, it still took a bit of fiddling around, beyond what the average user would be comfortable doing. It’s getting closer though and, hopefully, with Lucid Lynx 10.04 being a LTS release, sound will finally be a painless experience for most people.

First published on Neverness.