It has been a while – but after a month of work, lawn mower woes, bush trimming madness in the rain, work, and a brief hospital stay due to “idiopathic pancreatitis” or perhaps gastrointeritis inconclusively, I am back!
Believe it or not, I have taken a laptop detour from Linux and am running Windows 10 at the moment. A surprisingly pleasant experience that I will save for another post. Though “Edge” is a bigger stinker than “Internet Exploder.”
And today brings an email from Canonical’s Adam Conrad saying that the build for Ubuntu 14.04.3 is finished and will be released formally tomorrow. As you’ve all seen in previous postings, my experience with the last point release 14.04.2 was not so good and took a long time to repair. The burning question – Is 14.04.3 fixed? Are all the things that made the 14.04.2 experience so bad resolved?
Let me begin first mentioning my hardware – A “new to me” Dell Inspiron 1545 2.0 gigahertz single-core celeron with a snazzy red lid – it was destined for the dumpster but for $50 and two additional gigabytes of RAM I had laying around the house, I was able to restore to full working order having replaced the palmrest/touchpad assembly and battery. Surprisingly I had to remove 18 screws and I had nothing left over. It won’t be the life of any LAN party, it probably won’t do gaming beyond solitaire and minecraft, and it surely won’t impress the computer enthusiasts of the world. It’s still good for blogging though, and believe it or not it compiles C++ and C# code quite nicely. And the wide 15.4 inch display is very pleasant and nice. This laptop also has the sinister, nefarious, evil “Broadcom” chipset for the wifi. which is famously not readily supported by Linux distributions due to the fact that its drivers aren’t totally open source. Ubuntu is one of the few distributions that has out of the box support for it.
After a brief 10-minute download utilizing the zsync utility and the old 14.04.2 image, I created a flash drive and booted up. The Ubuntu installer came up and I checked the box to “install third-party software” and waited. To my surprise, the next screen giving me the option of where to install Ubuntu came up and……..and………and………
I clicked on the wireless applet and………..
and…………..
There were wireless networks available!!! Hallelujah!! Praise the Lord!!!
For that
reason, and that alone, I declare that Canonical has redeemed themselves.
Other goodies to note:
1) It has kernel updates – Linux kernel 3.19 and the hardware stack from their later “Vivid Vervet” release built in.
2) It has all the major updates rolled in so no big downloads after you do a clean install.
3) For those of you already running Ubuntu 14.04.2 that want to just update and get all the new kernel goodies, visit this page: https://wiki.ubuntu.com/Kernel/LTSEnablementStack
Until next time!