Recently, I upgraded my work laptop with an SSD disk.The laptop, a Lenovo Thinkpad T510<\/i>, has been pretty reliable but getting a bit long in the tooth. A conventional 2.5″ disk three years old is a cause for concern if used daily, and anyway, SSDs are amazingly fast these days. It’s almost like buying a new computer.<\/p>\n
I should also mention the Nvidia Optimus<\/i> graphics card. It’s basically two cards in one, an Intel<\/i> graphics chip for the daily stuff that doesn’t require much graphics processing and an Nvidia<\/i> chip for the stuff that does, the idea being that the OS switches between the two to either save battery or boost performance.<\/p>\n
So, anyway, while I simply cloned the Windows partitions from the old disk (using Acronis<\/i> software), I eventually decided to try a new Linux distro rather than fixing the cloned Debian Sid<\/i> I’ve been running since 2010 or so. The Debian<\/i> system was spread out over several partitions, which caused problems when booting the cloned system–apparently UUIDs changed when cloning, crashing the system.<\/p>\n
I wanted something Debian<\/i>-based, of course. Apt-get<\/b> rules and all that, and Debian<\/i> is pretty hard to break even if you run an unstable version of it.<\/p>\n
First, I tried the new Linux Mint Cinnamon<\/i> distro (v 17), having heard some very good things about it. The installation went without a hitch and I was soon able to boot into the desktop (what a pretty one, btw) using the open-source Nouveau<\/i> display drivers. They were OK but not great, so I decided to replace them with Nvidia’s<\/i> proprietary package and something called nvidia-prime<\/i> that would allow me to switch between the two graphics chips. This seemed to work well, until I came to work the next morning, placed the laptop into a dock and booted using an external monitor only.<\/p>\n
No desktop appeared, just a black screen.<\/p>\n
Opening the laptop’s lid, I discovered that the desktop was actually there, after all, but only on the laptop screen. Nvidia Settings<\/i>, the helper software that allows you to configure the X server and screens, was broken and so I couldn’t use it to configure the monitors. The Cinnamon<\/i> display settings would only share the desktop between the two screens but not allow me to only use the external monitor.<\/p>\n
Changing from the Nvidia<\/i> chip to the Intel<\/i> one did not significantly change this, but introduced a new problem: I no longer had the option to change back to Nvidia<\/i>.<\/p>\n
I looked around to see if there were newer Nvidia<\/i> packages around, or perhaps a newer kernel, since that’s what I would always do in Debian Sid<\/i>; there would frequently be something in the experimental branch that would help me. Linux Mint<\/i>, however, while Debian<\/i>-based, is far from Debian Sid<\/i>. It is meant to be stable, and anything, um, unstable would have to come from somewhere else entirely.<\/p>\n
I found a 3.15 kernel from a Ubuntu<\/i> branch and installed that, but Linux Mint<\/i> would then insist that a 3.13 kernel was actually an upgrade, so I gave up and realised Linux Mint<\/i> wasn’t for me after all.<\/p>\n
I then spent the following evening (and night) installing and testing Ubuntu 14.04<\/i> in place of Linux Mint<\/i>, as a Google search suggested nvidia-prime<\/i> would work out of the box in it. It did, but after a few hours of fooling around with Ubuntu<\/i>, I realised I truly hated Ubuntu’s Unity<\/i> desktop.<\/p>\n
Discouraged, I wiped Ubuntu<\/i> from the disk in favour of Debian’s<\/i> Testing branch, but that didn’t go well. I downloaded an ISO, remembering that Debian’s<\/i> installer would not support WiFi cards during the install, only to discover that they had a) switched to XFCE<\/i> from Gnome<\/i> as their default desktop and, more importantly, b) my WiFi card was still considered bad as it was non-free according to Debian’s<\/i> rather strict criteria and so the firmware was not on the ISO and I had no wired network hooked up to that laptop.<\/p>\n
I could have used the Windows partition or my Macbook Pro to download the missing firmware, of course, but I got annoyed and wiped the disk again, now installing the new Kubuntu 14.04<\/i> instead.<\/p>\n
Which is where I am now. Kubuntu<\/i> also handles nvidia-prime<\/i> out of the box, but it also has the (for me) familiar KDE<\/i> desktop. It’s not perfect (the system fonts, for example, are ghastly and I have to do something about that very soon) but it’s good enough for now.<\/p>\n
Now, you may be tempted to point out that Nvidia Optimus<\/i> works out of the box there, too, and with more finesse, but if so, you are missing the point.<\/p>\n
Linux is fun, and the very fact that there are so many distros out there speaks in its favour. If something in Windows doesn’t work for you, you won’t have a Windows alternative. Well, you have Windows 8, but seriously?<\/i><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Recently, I upgraded my work laptop with an SSD disk.The laptop, a Lenovo Thinkpad T510, has been pretty reliable but getting a bit long in the tooth. A conventional 2.5″ disk three years old is a cause for concern if used daily, and anyway, SSDs are amazingly fast these days. It’s almost like buying a […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[29,26,31,28,32,34,33,30,27],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.sgmlguru.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/66"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.sgmlguru.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.sgmlguru.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.sgmlguru.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.sgmlguru.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=66"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/www.sgmlguru.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/66\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.sgmlguru.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=66"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.sgmlguru.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=66"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.sgmlguru.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=66"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}