Fresh off the news that I will not in fact be getting my license plates this trip – the primary reason I’m out here [1] – I’ve made the difficult but necessary decision to make the cut over to Ubuntu from Gentoo far sooner than anticipated. Basically, the reasoning is simple: I can’t afford to spend another couple of days getting what I consider to be a necessary feature – suspend to RAM – up and running. It is certainly possible to do – I’ve read numerous successful accounts, see one here – but so far it’s been one step forward, two steps back.
To get suspend up and running, I first tried to simply replicate some of the simple ACPI scripts I had working in my x40 and my x23 before that – these accomplished very little. I then looked into enabling suspend within the kernel itself, but after stumbling around for a bit I discovered that to get access to that functionality within the stock Gentoo kernel, I’d have to disable SMP, which would have rendered one of my cores inert and useless. This set me back a little bit, until I thought to configure and install the suspend2 kernel available within Gentoo’s Portage library. Sure enough, the suspend2 kernel/patchset gave me SMP support *and* ACPI suspend, and all appeared well with the world. After rebooting into that kernel, however, I was unable to use wireless. Even after rebuilding the madwifi drivers, I’m unable to insert them into the kernel. And as much as I like suspend, wireless is far more critical. So that was out.
So left to choose between a.) digging around and finding a solution to the suspend2/madwifi issues, b.) trying a series of alternate custom kernel patches, or c.) going w/ Ubuntu which has more of this figured out, I’m going with c.
I certainly don’t blame Gentoo for this; their community has been, as discussed previously, awesome, and it seems as if many of the issues I’ve run into whether it’s SATA drive compatibility or the Intel sound drivers tie ultimately back to kernel 2.6.16 (I recommend that folks having issues look at going to 2.6.17 or 2.6.18). I will still be contributing a Gentoo installation page to Thinkwiki.org, and I’m committed to running Gentoo on our in house servers and potentially the x40 once I get its hard drive replaced, but my x60s will be an Ubuntu machine going forward. At least until I run into some huge issues on that end 🙂
[1] Having paid over $3K in taxes and fees at the time of my car purchase, I didn’t anticipate being asked for another $600 simply to receive license plates and thus had no checkbook with me. Not sure what my next move is, because I don’t want to make yet another trip back here just to get my plates, so I may just have to risk getting a ticket for the next few weeks, then get the plates when I fly the Az monster back out here before my drive home. Not ideal.
