Yesterday I threw in the towel. I’ve been having problems with ACPI on my new Ubuntu partition. I’ve got other small problems but the ACPI ones are really the deal breaker. A laptop that can’t hibernate isn’t much of a laptop.
I’ve been digging through the articles and online trying to come up with solutions to the problem. Maybe I could help debug or a patch existed.
I couldn’t find much, except that it was likely to be some sort of weird hardware problem that was nobody’s fault. Some advice seemed to recommend trying the latest kernel out.
So yesterday I followed the instructions and upgraded my system to Intrepid Ibex. At first it seemed to go very smoothly, but then there were problems generating menu.lst and some of the packages failed. I tried manually editing menu.lst but upon booting up the newer kernel seemed to fail with my video card.
The system sort of works right now, although it seems to have problems shutting down or restarting. I can boot using the older kernel. So I’m going to keep around the system for a few in case I need a handy Linux box.
Of course after I did all this Ubuntu released alpha 3 of Intrepid Ibex. Perhaps the LiveCD of the new version will fair better, for now though I’m taking a break and going back to the slower, more sluggish but more compatible Vista system.
Coincidentally I also bade farewell to Ubuntu (6.06) this weekend, after nearly two years of use on a Gateway Solo 9300 laptop. I finally got fed up with the periodic drop-out of the wireless connection with a Linksys WiFi card (Atheros chipset), with a buggy Nautilus that refused to show Samba shares on my home network, and, dare I say it, with the GNOME desktop environment which my family dislikes. So I wiped Ubuntu and installed PCLinuxOS 2007. It correctly detected all the laptop’s hardware and works perfectly; at last I have a rock-solid wireless connection. And it’s a joy to use (the “Administration Center” is particularly easy to use). I had no problems using the Synaptic package manager to update all the packages to their latest release. Give it a try before going back to Vista, because you may find that it works a treat on your laptop. It’ll certainly be far faster than Vista, too.
My wireless seemed to work fine, and I was hopeful that with a bit of tinkering I could use the proper ath5k driver instead of ndiswrapper. But the ACPI is really what kills it. It doesn’t seem to be Ubuntu’s fault, but rather the Linux kernel itself. Sometime later I’ll try it out again as it appears there is hope for the newer kernels.
When I first got my laptop about a year ago I tried out the latest version of Ubuntu and found my sound, wireless, ACPI and god knows what else didn’t work. With the latest hacks I couldn’t get the wireless working then and scrapped the idea of Ubuntu for then.
So who knows.. in another six months the latest version might work perfectly.
GNU/Linux works perfectly with any standard implementation of ACPI. If other distro’s have the same problem with your system, I would venture to speculate that your motherboards ACPI is defective by design. Like the infamous Foxconn G33M-S which deliberately hands Linux corrupted DSDT tables (Linux and FreeBSD do not work properly with this board).
Just a follow up, I ended up installing a later version of ubuntu which has worked smashingly. It has run without a hitch for a couple of years now.
We now run four ubuntu machines and one windows xp.