Ubuntu 8.04 - outstanding issues
Posted on August 7th, 2008 by matt
Couple of things I’ve yet to resolve:
- Can’t get the WineHQ version of Wine to do anything more than crash when trying to run WoW;
- Crossover Games runs WoW at a really nice framerate, not a great deal different to Vista on the same hardware. Unfortunately I can’t quite convince it to do audio if anything else at all is doing so;
- rdesktop “feels” slower than the Windows RDC client talking to the same machine via the same ssh tunnel. There’s probably something tweakable, it’s not Ubuntu-specific — this is the usual default for rdesktop;
- Haven’t yet figured out how to get the system to default to the display settings I want: ignore the builtin LCD, use the external one at 1280×1024. I can set it this way after login (fn-F8 twice, then run the nVidia settings doover and fix the resolution) but logout and it resets to the internal at 1400×900;
- Apps — Firefox in particular — don’t behave very well when there’s high I/O load. Copy 8GB of files from one part of the filesystem to another, watch Firefox turn grey;
- Firefox is really not liking Facebook. At all. It works, mostly, but gets really slow. This is not so on Windows or OS X.
I wouldn’t mind resolving at least some of these, but none of it is troublesome enough to be a major priority given that I’ve got a new iMac on the way.
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There’s something weirdarse wrong then - Firefox should just work fine, WoW on Wine works well modulo driver dodginess. Though PulseAudio swooping in for 8.04 is a sore point, if you want sound in Wine apps you basically have to disable it. Check the forum/mailing list on winehq.org.
The Firefox problems may be because I’ve installed Flash, hard to say. Flash on Linux sucks, too — it’s OK as a small embedded item in a page, but if you try to do fullscreen video with it it’s a bit jerky. That’s more a problem with Adobe than anything else though.
Disabling Pulseaudio was how I got sound in the first place, but I’ve found that it cuts out if I dare to switch to another app, so really there isn’t much point. I’ll live with no Warcrack sound until the iMac arrives.
Hm, OK, it’s not Firefox. It’s Xorg. The trigger seems to be trying to render complex pages in Firefox, like the main Facebook view or some of the lists-of-people type pages on OKCupid, and when it happens Xorg eats 100% of the CPU (both cores, it seems). Probably something funny in the nvidia driver.