Brown is the new black – Ubuntu Linux and I

I switched over from Fedora 9 Beta to Ubuntu Hardy beta last week. Mainly because everything I’ve ever wanted is packaged and easy to find for Ubuntu and the third party package repositories seem to play a lot nicer together.

What about all the things I was looking forward to in Fedora 9? Turns out the main thing I care about out of that list is the Randr support and the new GNOME display configuration capplet developed by Red Hat. Which Ubuntu Hardy also includes. The packages won out!

There was only one thing that didn’t work out of the box with Hardy; sound. Sound is important! Fortunately the fix is well documented on the Ubuntu Wiki’s testing page for my laptop.

Simply append the following line to your /etc/modprobe.d/alsa-base

options snd-hda-intel single_cmd=1 model=lenovo

Et voila!

Update[a few months later]: It didn’t last long, I just can’t get on with Ubuntu. I originally went on to try Debian but ended up back with Fedora. I love all the work RedHat and Fedora engineers are doing. The kernel and plumbing layer in Fedora are really nice and I get to help test cool projects like PulseAudio, DeviceKit, etc.