Almost Somewhere

I’ve just upgraded my Lenovo 3000 Y410 (IdeaPad Y410 in Malaysia) from Ubuntu 8.04 (Hardy Heron) to 8.10 (Intrepid Ibex). I used the alternate installer CD to install (had a lot of problems to connect the wireless) and after that, the wireless just works!

Finally! No more the need to put the Y410 to sleep first. Then, I used the connection to upgrade the packages to the latest version.

I haven’t got a chance to try everything out yet but I really liked the new Network Connections applet. Makes a lot of sense compared to Hardy Heron where you are either on automatic, or you get confused when using several networks. I love it! Now I feel inclined to get that 3G subscription more than ever, if only to try out the new 3G support in Ibex.

What I don’t like is that somehow it doesn’t report the wireless strength correctly. The notebook is less than 2 meters away from the wireless dongle on the PC (I set up an ad-hoc network) and it shows 0% strength. I don’t know if the speed is fast or slow but Synergy seems lagging that it’s almost impossible to use. Maybe I need to update Synergy or maybe the wireless network has problems. It works fine in Windows XP. Hmm.. I’ll investigate later.

There’s also this annoyance that (I think) it didn’t carry over my touchpad settings… I was so confused at first why the buttons are behaving differently. Or maybe I thought wrong (been using Synergy to control it for so long). Guess I’ll have to set that up.

All in all, for the time being, I am happy that wireless just works, although the connection seems poor. And with VMWare Player 2.5 now supporting DirectX 9 with Direct3D, it’s probably time to scale down the Windows XP installation and use whatever Windows XP application I need through VMWare. Actually, I like VirtualBox better (lighter on resources) but VMWare Player is fine with me.