[NTLUG:Discuss] Linux incompatability of Toshiba L675D

[Ralph Green]

On Thu, 2011-04-28 at 09:11 -0400, Allen wrote:
> Toshiba L675D
Howdy,
  First, let me say that I largely agree with Terry.  Ubuntu 10.04 is
quite nice and I keep it on several machines.  It is a long term support
release.  An LTS release gets official support from Ubuntu(meaning bug
fixes) for 3 years on the desktop, and 5 years for servers.  Depending
on the applications you use, 10.04 may be a good place to stop for now.

  On the other hand, it may depend on the applications that are
important to you.  I'll tell you 2 applications I use where the newer
versions are worth some effort to get.
  VLC on Ubuntu 10.10 is version 1.1.4.  I use VLC as my main media
player and version 1.1.4 has one big improvement over VLC included in
earlier versions of Ubuntu.  You can drag media in your playlist easily
to move it up and down in priority.  It just seems to make it more
pleasant to use for me.  Ubuntu 11.04 has version 1.1.9 of VLC.  Stay
away from that.  Version 1.1.8 under OpenSuse and 1.1.9 under Ubuntu
both have had lots of problems for me.  There seems to be a bad memory
leak.  It is worse on 1.1.9, where it often starts a fast runaway and
chews up everything available before I can get to the system and kill
it.
  VirtualBox is at version 4.0.4 on Ubuntu 11.04.  Version 4 and up made
some nice improvements.  Particularly when it comes to moving VMs from
one computer to another, version 4 is better and worth moving to.  Since
you have a lot of memory in your laptop, I'll note that version 4 can
give VMs more memory that version 3.2 and earlier.
  You don't have to upgrade Ubuntu to get the newer version of one or
two programs.  You can download the source code of those programs and
build them yourself.  That is not too bad.  I do that for ffmpeg on one
machine, because the distros usually leave some features of ffmpeg out.
But, it makes upgrading more work.  You are now responsible for checking
to see if the source code has been updated, downloading and rebuilding
it.  That is a lot more effort than just doing and apt-get upgrade.

  If you are willing to do some experimentation, I'd suggest something.
I have had instances where a particular version of Ubuntu would not
install on a particular computer.  If the reason was not some new piece
of kit that was not supported yet, I could usually go back and install
the prior version and then do a system upgrade.  You may be able to
upgrade that 10.04 to 10.10 and have it work fine.  If you want to be
nice, and that works, please submit a proper bug report on that, so the
installer can be improved.

 I know 11.04 came out today.  I have been testing it all through the
development cycle.  My experience is that 11.04 is not ready yet.  If
you are experimentive, upgrade to it.  If this is a machine you will
rely on, wait a month before upgrading to 11.04.  A lot of bugs get
knocked out in that first month of a new Ubuntu release.
Good day,
Ralph