Ubuntu 9.10 Karmic Koala on Dell Inspiron 6000

October 31st, 2009 | by richfreedman |

Ubuntu’s 9.10 Karmic Koala release dropped yesterday, and I dove right in, downloaded it (via BitTorrent), and installed it on my aging Dell Inspiron 6000 laptop.

I didn’t do an upgrade, I reformatted my primary partition, and installed it clean. I keep my /home directory on a separate partition precisely so that I can do this easily, every 6 months as a new release comes out.

Installation was quick and easy, and so far, I’ve seen no major problems.

Notes so far:

  • As expected, the “Extra” visual effects (Compiz) does not work properly (the laptop has an ATI Mobility Radeon X300). “Normal” visual effects mode works fine.
  • The base installation is missing just about every useful codec. This blog post is a nice guide to installing all of the media “goodies” in Karmic.When I first installed all of the packages listed here, none of the video codecs seemed to work properly, including “Movie Player” crashing whenever I tried to open a video of any type. I figured that I’d either have to uninstall the packages, or maybe just re-install Karmic, and then install one package at a time, until I found the culprit. Fortunately, at this point, I powered the laptop off. When I started it again, everything worked fine, and has continued to do so.
  • I was seriously impressed with the short boot time in Jaunty Jackalope, and Karmic’s boot time is even faster. All I can say is, “Wow!”
  • Karmic has a new login screen, that lists the user names, and has you pick one. Frankly, I don’t care for it. First, my fingers are “trained” to type my user name and password to log in, and now I frequently type my user name in the password field. Second, not that I need to worry about it so much on my home laptop, but displaying a list of the user names lowers the barrier for someone attempting to log in who shouldn’t be able to. Third, I think that the new screen is very ugly. I like Ubuntu, but their themes always seem to suck bigtime. Brown themes, black login page with blocky graphics…ugh. Fortunately, this stuff is easy to change.
  • I don’t do a wide variety of things with this laptop – basically web browsing and Java programming. Occaisional audio editing. Occaisional image editing. Not too much else, so I can’t really comment on the range of applications that ship with this version. I’ll report more as I find anything interesting.

  1. 10 Responses to “Ubuntu 9.10 Karmic Koala on Dell Inspiron 6000”

  2. By db on Nov 3, 2009 | Reply

    I did a clean install of Karmic on my Inspirion 6000 and the system crashes all the time. I’m running basic apps (Firefox, Rhythmbox, etc). I can move the cursor around, so it’s not an oops. But there is no response to keyboard or mouse. Anyone else seeing that?

  3. By richfreedman on Nov 3, 2009 | Reply

    Yes, after a day or so of light, use, I’m seeing the same thing. I thought that it might be Firefox, since that’s generally what I’ve been using when it locks up, but I’m not sure.
    I was also getting some weird video artifacts, so I’ve turned off visual effects entirely. I’m hoping that might solve the lock-up problem too.

  4. By db on Nov 3, 2009 | Reply

    I think it’s graphics related, since the crash is usually preceded by some funky graphics. Perhaps the display is crashing but everything is still running. I reverted back to Hardy for now. Too bad too, because I liked the boot and overall performance of Karmic.

  5. By richfreedman on Nov 3, 2009 | Reply

    I’m still on Karmic, but have disabled Compiz completely. It’s been stable for several hours now, which is a big improvement.

  6. By db on Nov 3, 2009 | Reply

    I thought I disabled it completely too. I’ll check back in a day or so to see how you are doing.

  7. By the_guv on Nov 3, 2009 | Reply

    @db, suppose you checked

    System > Admin > Hardware drivers

    .. poss there’s an alt gfx driver?

    there’s tips on this, the media issues Rich brings up and a bunch more at my 25-part Karmic Koala Bible

    http://guvnr.com/pc/karmic-koala-bible

    compiz is too hungry on my laptop, but fun on the big PC (8mB RAM mind, quads all that, as opposed to 2, 1.9 Athlon).

    firefox is behaving nicely for a change though .. had to disable all my plugins with Jaunty

    tx for post Rich .. interesting read

  8. By richfreedman on Nov 8, 2009 | Reply

    It’s been five days, and no issues since I turned Compiz off entirely (System–>Preferences–>Appearance –>Visual Effects –> None)

  9. By inkadu on Feb 3, 2010 | Reply

    Installed Karmic on a Dell Inspiron 6000 and I’ve gotten crashes every few hours — complete lock up (not even REISUB works). Seems to happen whenever — pidgin, firefox, especially Hulu though…

    I’ve run Xubuntu on another a dell desktop and that crashes, too, so I’m tired of troubleshooting this issue. Meh.

  10. By inkadu on Feb 3, 2010 | Reply

    FYI – No visual effects and an ATI Radeon…

  11. By DanB on Mar 8, 2010 | Reply

    I have had the same problem. Everything worked fine in 9.04. In my case the system freezes but I can still move the mouse. No keyboard. Turning off visual effect works and had no lockups until I turned it back on then lock ups started again. Typing this after turning it back off. To bad. Other things like network manager seem to work better in 9.10

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