Envy Life
October 30th, 2011, 03:39 AM
I've always felt my system was a house of cards, using dmraid I can never rely on a kernel upgrade to properly set my grub boot settings. Went well for the last handful of upgrades, but finally got bit on 11.10. So I could handle grub, but what I can't stand is the graphics breaking.
I thought Unity under 11.04 has ran pretty well for me. Aside from a few little hiccups with ctrl-alt-t sometimes not working for no apparent reason. This time Unity starts up fine, but I have two monitors and it goes back to mirrored mode. Well the Unity launcher worked for a bit and then disappeared. I can no longer run apps, hot-key doesn't work, launcher is no where to be found, even across reboots.
I decided to try to mess with the video driver (ATI card), and trying to hack my way through I broke graphics entirely, and had to reset with "aticonfig --initial". Unity still doesn't work so I tried gnome-shell. The fonts and display was hosed up possibly from an old configuration (This box has been through 6 ubuntu distribution upgrades), who knows. So I go to Unity 2D.
I'll just thank whomever decided to do this, but just having it there smacks of foresight that admits that Unity 3D is a pile of garbage in 11.10. Anyway with mirroring screens still, I had to install fglrx-amdcccle, so that I could configure dual monitor setup. I did that, rebooted, second screen is a mess, re-configured again, and finally have a working box again after a half day's worth of frustration. For now I'm sticking with 2D I suppose, I'm tired of messing with it.
I feel like I'm back doing old-school Linux desktop installs with Ubuntu 5 or 6, or maybe before with Debian or Mandrake, where every upgrade breaks one of the only 2 things important to a desktop - disks and display. 11.10 seems a few steps backwards from the seamless upgrades I started taking for granted, and is, frankly, the only reason I used Ubuntu in the first place.
I'll just end by saying I did 3 prior 11.10 upgrades and all went seamless. The difference? Newer Ubuntu installs with out-of-the-box standard configuration. Does this mean I'm going to have to start doing clean installs once per year like the Windows days of the 90's? I'm beginning to think so.
I thought Unity under 11.04 has ran pretty well for me. Aside from a few little hiccups with ctrl-alt-t sometimes not working for no apparent reason. This time Unity starts up fine, but I have two monitors and it goes back to mirrored mode. Well the Unity launcher worked for a bit and then disappeared. I can no longer run apps, hot-key doesn't work, launcher is no where to be found, even across reboots.
I decided to try to mess with the video driver (ATI card), and trying to hack my way through I broke graphics entirely, and had to reset with "aticonfig --initial". Unity still doesn't work so I tried gnome-shell. The fonts and display was hosed up possibly from an old configuration (This box has been through 6 ubuntu distribution upgrades), who knows. So I go to Unity 2D.
I'll just thank whomever decided to do this, but just having it there smacks of foresight that admits that Unity 3D is a pile of garbage in 11.10. Anyway with mirroring screens still, I had to install fglrx-amdcccle, so that I could configure dual monitor setup. I did that, rebooted, second screen is a mess, re-configured again, and finally have a working box again after a half day's worth of frustration. For now I'm sticking with 2D I suppose, I'm tired of messing with it.
I feel like I'm back doing old-school Linux desktop installs with Ubuntu 5 or 6, or maybe before with Debian or Mandrake, where every upgrade breaks one of the only 2 things important to a desktop - disks and display. 11.10 seems a few steps backwards from the seamless upgrades I started taking for granted, and is, frankly, the only reason I used Ubuntu in the first place.
I'll just end by saying I did 3 prior 11.10 upgrades and all went seamless. The difference? Newer Ubuntu installs with out-of-the-box standard configuration. Does this mean I'm going to have to start doing clean installs once per year like the Windows days of the 90's? I'm beginning to think so.