Michael Harper’s Tech & Art Blog

Welcome back Hardy Heron. I’ve been using 8.10 on my Toshiba Satellite but after the upgrade, I was having issues with the suspend - or standby - process. Sometimes I would be able to bring my laptop out of the suspended state and other times I would lose my work and the work located on my virtual machines. Not good. I suppose that explains the long-term support (LTS) version of 8.04 that makes it so stable. I had read that your graphics driver can cause issues with the suspend stand. Since I am using an ATI Radeon X1200, I attempted to use both the open and restricted drivers that are available for that model. No luck. I also adjusted power management settings but that had no affect.

I recommend 8.10 for desktop machines but for laptops, stick with the stable LTS versions of Ubuntu. I also continued to have issues with my wifi drivers continually dropping out after significant updates. I would have to reload and restart too often for comfort so I made a decision to bring Vista back from the dead and go back to dual-booting. Having to sit with clients while I tried to reconfigure my Ubuntu’s wifi was maddening. Also, I’m an avid Adobe CS3 user and as many know, there is a audio/video syncing issue with Flash CS3. It is less than half-second from my tests but enough to notice. If you’re working with timeline based projected in Flash (or any audio/video app) be sure to check the file in a host OS or another computer.

By the way, I recommend a partition size/hard drive size of at least 80 GB if you plan on using Vista and CS3. After my core applications were installed (Vista Ultimate, Firefox, AVG, Spybot S&D, What’s Running, CS3, Picasa, Microsoft Office 2007 Professional, etc…), I had already used 40 GB of my available space. That doesn’t leave much room for internal video editing. Bringing Vista back is good for my readers as I will now be able to cover many how-to articles that I strayed away from before, however, Ubuntu will remain my primary OS of choice.

That’s all for now. My next several posts will be on adding the Ubuntu Desktop GUI to Ubuntu Server and setting up USB support with VirtualBox 2.1.0.