Ubuntu For Free

I’ve recently learned that many issues related to suspend and hibernate are directly related to the video drivers. Even when not using the restricted drivers, often laptops still don’t correct handle suspend, hibernate, and resumes for both. I’ve written about my problems with suspend and hibernate in the past, and I’ve recently received help from the Dell Ubuntu Project and they’ve confirmed my bug report . Fortunately the provided an easy fix, even if it is unsupported. The Envy program correctly installs the most current version of the nVidia driver for my laptop and then suspend and hibernate worked after rebooting.

I tried out the new Hardy Heron Alpha 2 release of Kubuntu today and was kind of disappointed and kind of pleased. The wireless card, a broadcomm based 43xx Dell 1390 adapter still is not automatically installed properly. I didn’t bother getting it to work because I was disappointed the scroll function doesn’t work with my Touchpad on my Dell Inspiron 1520. I did however notice that it seemed my sound was fixed.

There’s obviously still plenty of work to be done on this, so we need everyone to try downloading it and report the bugs and issues that they find.