Ubuntu Karmic 9.10 on HP EliteBook 8530p – All is fine!
After reading this interesting post on Phoronix about the great increase of performance between ubuntu 9.04 and 9.10, I finally convinced myself to make the upgrade.
My first concern was about the ATI driver, which gave me some trouble with 9.04.
Anyway after a good backup, I started the upgrade, and in almost 2 hours I was up and running with 9.10, with a lot of improvements!
The upgrade installed automagically the fglrx driver version 2:8.660, my previous version (built from source) was 2:8.620, however, after the first reboot I started in recovery mode to issue the magic command “aticonfig –acpi-services=off” because I feel that this is still crucial to make the driver work.
After this safety measure, I rebooted and really appreciated the boot speed! Upstart is making a great job really!
So far, I’m very impressed by this release, my major benefits are the following:
- Ultra fast boot and shutdown
- Great performance of the ATI driver. The black areas that sometimes were appearing for example scrolling a Firefox full screen window have disappeared
- Upgrading Skype to 2.1.0.81 solved the problem about the editing of my profile and avatar display
- Performance are really increased, for example opening PDF with Evince
- Not yet tested printing feature
- Suspend to ram works fine
- VMware Workstation works fine
((enjoy))
