The Grumpy Editor encounters the Hardy Heron

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Your editor is not always known for making life easy for himself. Perhaps one of the most clear examples of masochistic behavior would be a certain preference for running development distributions on mission-critical systems. That said, your editor has stuck with a stable distribution on his laptop through a round of intensive travel earlier this year. But that was too easy, so, shortly before heading off to the Linux Foundation's Collaboration Summit, the laptop got moved to the Ubuntu "Hardy Heron" distribution. Needless to say, there have been some interesting ups and downs (literally) since then.

There is always a certain thrill that comes with upgrading a system and finding that important features no longer work. In this case, the problem was suspend and resume, which your editor uses heavily. In fact, the system would suspend just fine - as long as one failed to notice that, behind the cleverly darkened screen, the laptop's backlight had been left on. Needless to say, this new behavior is not helpful if one's goal is to save power while the system is suspended, but it gets worse than that. Your editor discovered this nice surprise after carrying the computer in a backpack for a few hours; by the time it came out, it was almost too hot to hold. Happily, no permanent damage appears to have been done.

Or, perhaps, unhappily. Your editor has been looking for an excuse to get a new laptop for a while.

The problem turned out to be a HAL configuration error combined with a strange internal model number which makes your editor's Thinkpad X31 different from, seemingly, every other X31 on the planet. Once your editor found the bug report and attached a "me too" comment, the solution was quick in coming. On the net, one can find complaints that Ubuntu is unresponsive to bug reports, but that was certainly not the experience here.

As an aside, it seems worth noting that life seems to have gotten more complicated, with a lot more code wrapped around the kernel than there once was. The problematic configuration file was /usr/share/hal/fdi/information/10freedesktop/20-video-quirk-pm-ibm.fdi - not a place where your editor, who is not a HAL expert, would have thought to look. That, it seems, is the price of more capable hardware and software, but sometimes your editor pines for the days when it seemed possible to carry a full understanding of the system within a single brain.

GNOME developers are (perhaps unjustly in recent years) known for taking a minimal approach to configuration options. That can be irritating, but just as annoying is their tendency to reset the options they do provide over major updates. Once suspend and resume work, your editor demands something else of a laptop when traveling: absolute silence. So the return of beeps to gnome-terminal was not appreciated. Those were easily silenced, but the GNOME developers also saw fit to bring back the blinking cursor - and they took away the configuration option which abolishes that intolerable feature.

Your editor first ran into the unstoppable blink with Rawhide; a query to the developers there turned up a quick answer. It seems that the GNOME developers have decided to create a single, system-wide parameter to control blinking cursors. Now, your editor approves of the concept of being able to turn off that behavior everywhere with a single switch - but only as long as that switch isn't hidden where nobody will ever find it. In this case, the GNOME developers have taken this feature, wrapped it in old newspapers, and stashed it behind the furnace in the basement; then they put a trunk on top of it. It is a rare user who will find it unassisted. In the hopes that it may save one or two readers from some time spent with search engine, your editor will now divulge the top-secret incantation which turns blinking cursors off:

gconftool-2 --type bool --set /desktop/gnome/interface/cursor_blink false

Naturally, a terminal window is required to run this command. It would have been nice if the developers who packaged this code for Hardy Heron had found a way to smooth over this change, but no such luck; as far as your editor can tell, no distributor has made that effort.

Another bit of fun is that your editor is no longer able to set the desktop background; the relevant configuration windows are ineffective. In this case, it would appear that the task of implementing the user's background choices have been moved to nautilus - just the place your editor would have thought to look for it. As it happens, your editor has no use for file managers and does not run nautilus - and is punished with an immutable Ubuntu-brown background for that sin. Happily, your editor still knows how to run xsetroot .

All of the above is a set of relatively minor grumbles, all of which are rectified in relatively short order. Once those details have been taken care of, the Hardy Heron release works quite well. One of the biggest aggravations from previous upgrades - having OpenOffice.org reformat the slides in all of your editor's presentations - was not present this time around. Hopefully we are moving into an era where "it didn't mangle my documents" is not something considered worthy of mention.

There was one very nice surprise as well. Your editor's laptop previously required almost 12 watts of power when running unplugged. This laptop is not at the bleeding edge of current technology, so the amount of time it was able to run without a recharge has been dropping for a while. With the Hardy release, steady-state power consumption has dropped to just over 9 watts - a big improvement. The credit for this change belongs to developers at all levels: kernel, applications, distributors, etc. The end result is a system which runs much more efficiently, and that is a good thing.

All told, your editor is reasonably content; this distribution looks like one which might just be worth keeping around. That's a good thing, since Ubuntu plans to maintain it as a "long-term support" release. Not that your editor intends to make much use of that long-term support; there should be a new development series starting soon, after all. One of the nice things about development distributions is that support never ends as long as one stays on the treadmill and the project itself remains alive.

