may 2, 2008 : steve kong : 1 comment(s)
So, I installed Ubuntu 8.04LTS (Hardy Heron) on my play notebook and found it extremely well-done. So, I figured, after four months of Vista on my main notebook, I could switch over. Heron did everything that I need, so why not get away from Vista for a while? I installed it on my main notebook and it was heavenly. The damned thing is smooth, fast, and runs really well. It boots up quickly and has a sense of polish all over. Though, I did switch away from the Human theme over to the blue Glossy one. Everything else was great. Then, I remembered something.
A while back, I found a bug report about the APM settings in Ubuntu that were overly aggressive and led to people's harddrives dying. What was happening was that when a notebook was woken up from suspend or hibernate, it was unable to decided if it were on battery power or AC. It just decided that it was on battery power -- then switches on the most aggressive power savings mode on the harddrives. This causes some people to see their harddrives in a sleep/wake cycle that happened at a rate of 10s per second (most harddrives have a 600,000 sleep/wake cycle limit).
I thought, hey it has been a year-and-a-half since this bug was opened. They must have fixed it already -- especially for a Long Term Support release like Heron. Nope, they didn't do it yet.
I just reinstalled Vista on my main notebook and the Vista SP1 update is running right now.
Comments
Hi ultramookie.
Thank you very much for this post. I came across it while looking for DNS-323 stuff as I have recently started to fun_plug it up.
I have been using Ubuntu for two years now and have liked it. I got a new laptop in January, and after seeing Vista for ten minutes was ready to go back to Ubuntu.
But when I did put lovely linux back on, not only did I run into wireless support issues, but the harddrive clicked. It didn't sound right, but thought maybe it was normal. I left it. But because of the wireless issues I have not spent much time in Linux since then. I got excited with 8.04 because it has fixed the wireless issues with my new card. I have been in linux for the last week. Harddrive clicking away.
I read your post and freaked out. I did the workaround right away. Do you think it's sufficient? Or do you remain suspect? Is that why you went back to Vista? Thanks.
Dave
May 5, 2008 @ 03:10 AM