So Near, And Yet...
It seems that Linux on my laptop is asymptotically approaching complete usability.
Upgrading to a 2.6.24-rcX has finally gotten rid of the annoying Intel binary daemon previously required to use the wireless connection, which means that NetworkManager no longer requires annoying amounts of prodding. Hooray! The big scary i386/x86_64 merge also means that the 64-bit kernel can finally take advantage of the tickless mode and the rewritten timer system, which seems to have sorted some annoying video timing issues I was having before. Suspend-to-RAM works perfectly. Oddly, hibernation managed to break, but a quick bug report managed to turn up a patch inside half an hour; success!
After updating everything else, it seems that Liferea (RSS reader) managed to speed itself up to a startling extent (I think they changed the backend to use SQLite). X is doing all the things it's supposed to do. Amazingly, display hotplugging even works - attaching an external monitor and/or an S-Video cable worked first time. The TV output also does not suffer from the hideous brightness/contrast issues of the current Windows drivers - it's possible to actually see what's going on in dark scenes, for example. There does seem to be a very intermittent flicker on the TV output, though - possibly xrandr is polling in a particularly stupid manner. It's noticeable but not quite bad enough to be truly annoying.
The only remaining showstopper is, I think, GNOME's annoying screensaver system. mplayer currently has no idea that it exists and is therefore unable to turn it off. There's a handy GNOME panel applet provided to let you disable the power manager manually, but it doesn't stop the screensaver. Argh! Xine (and thus Totem) still breaks nastily on some of my h264/Matroska files, so that's out. VLC plays things and even manages to kick GNOME properly, but seems to have the single most stupid video scaler in the entire known universe, so it makes things look utterly vile in full-screen mode. Drat and double drat!
Perhaps I should just try KDE...
Upgrading to a 2.6.24-rcX has finally gotten rid of the annoying Intel binary daemon previously required to use the wireless connection, which means that NetworkManager no longer requires annoying amounts of prodding. Hooray! The big scary i386/x86_64 merge also means that the 64-bit kernel can finally take advantage of the tickless mode and the rewritten timer system, which seems to have sorted some annoying video timing issues I was having before. Suspend-to-RAM works perfectly. Oddly, hibernation managed to break, but a quick bug report managed to turn up a patch inside half an hour; success!
After updating everything else, it seems that Liferea (RSS reader) managed to speed itself up to a startling extent (I think they changed the backend to use SQLite). X is doing all the things it's supposed to do. Amazingly, display hotplugging even works - attaching an external monitor and/or an S-Video cable worked first time. The TV output also does not suffer from the hideous brightness/contrast issues of the current Windows drivers - it's possible to actually see what's going on in dark scenes, for example. There does seem to be a very intermittent flicker on the TV output, though - possibly xrandr is polling in a particularly stupid manner. It's noticeable but not quite bad enough to be truly annoying.
The only remaining showstopper is, I think, GNOME's annoying screensaver system. mplayer currently has no idea that it exists and is therefore unable to turn it off. There's a handy GNOME panel applet provided to let you disable the power manager manually, but it doesn't stop the screensaver. Argh! Xine (and thus Totem) still breaks nastily on some of my h264/Matroska files, so that's out. VLC plays things and even manages to kick GNOME properly, but seems to have the single most stupid video scaler in the entire known universe, so it makes things look utterly vile in full-screen mode. Drat and double drat!
Perhaps I should just try KDE...