Ubuntu 8.10 64-bit on an HP nx9420

I had been delaying loading a 64-bit disto on my nx9420 since I wasn't entirely sure it would be kosher, but yesterday I had some time on my hands, so I threw caution to the wind and gave it a whirl. The 64-bit version of 8.10 isn't as solid as the 32-bit version; I say that because I had a couple of issues: 1) NetworkManager is still broken garbage, 2) getting the supplicant drivers to work for wireless encryption was not automatic, 3) goofy issues with xul and firefox, 4) the menu.

I've contributed a couple of posts to my loathing of NetworkManager, so I won't go in to that any further. I'll simply leave it at: INSTALL WICD FOR THE LOVE OF ALL THAT IS HOLY.

The supplicant drivers not working out of the box really threw me for a loop. It'd been YEARS since I had to manually mangle those, so I'd mostly forgotten. Fortunately, `man` steered me right. The crux of it is that the wpasupplicant package doesn't create the /etc/default/wpasupplicant file. I hand created the file and put in only one line: ENABLE=0 After this, you're 'supposed' to be able to do a `/etc/init.d/dbus restart` and have things work, but I'd suggest you just reboot -- because if you restart dbus, your X session is going to go away anyways (unless you're using something like openbox). Once you've rebooted, just make sure wicd is using the wext supplicant driver (its under preferences) and you should be golden.

The whole xulrunner and firefox pissing match is probably my fault. I was doing an `apt-get dist-upgrade` and I think half the packages were installed but the finish-up scripts hadn't run. SO, when I ran firefox, it crashed because of a suitable GRE interpretor. I was able to get around this by manually running `xulrunner --register-global` before apt-get had finished its thing. So this was really a fairly small issue.

The main menu in Ubuntu is heinous. Really, its the stallwart Windows 95 Start button... but we're 14 years on from that particular 'innovation', so why haven't we made any real progress? Vista -- and dont' get me started on this -- has a fairly good Start Button (except that its painfully slow because its an eye-candy resource hog!) Linux Mint, and several other distros, has an EXCELLENT start button that is very much like Vista's. This is the 'slab' or 'uslab' start-menu. Unfortunately, I don't want to use Mint -- they've over branded the hell out of it, and I find it particularly annoying. (I just stopped myself from raging about Mint, so...) The beauty is, of course, that Mint's menu (a.k.a. mintmenu) is a DEB, so I just downloaded it and installed... added it to the panel, and BOOM! Instant goodness! I had tried a couple of other slab-esque start menus, but they all sucked and weren't as refined as Mint's. The MAJOR downside of this is that mintmenu has a 'dependancy' on two other mint packages, which in turn are dependant on other packages, etc... so if you let apt-get do its thing, you'll basically end-up upgrading to Mint. That's a problem. SO, I hand installed mintmenu. Now, apt-get barfs about unmet dependancies every time I try to do anything. I'm working on a solution to this.

One *MAJOR* bit of niceness about 64-bit ver of 8.10 is that suspend to RAM worked OUT OF THE BOX! I didn't even have to apply the patch from Stephan! W00t!

Anywho, all said and done, I'm very happy with my 64-bit install. There were some bumps in the road, but overall I don't think any of them are sufficiently bad to warrant abandoning the effort.