Economy Size Geek

I ended up reinstalling my home workstation over the weekend. I did it for all the wrong reasons it turned out. Mostly because the problem I needed to solved ended up being in my gnome configs instead of the system as a whole. But in the process, I did something I don’t think I ever done. Maverick (10.10) has been out for a few months. I went and looked at all of the articles about what new things it brings to the table. After reading them, I decided to stick with Lucid (10.04). Partially because as an LTS it is stable and partially because by staying here I won’t be forced to upgrade every other box I use. (Yes I know I don’t have to but I’ve learned it ends up being annoying when you have different software on different boxes – best to keep them in sync).

I’m super excited about Unity. I won’t miss X when it goes away (assuming they can get Wayland to work). While I’m waiting, I did learn a couple of tricks to improve my Lucid install while still avoiding Meerkat.

Since I’m using an SSD as my boot drive, you need a newer kernel than the one that ships with Lucid to get TRIM support.

They are currently offering the Natty Narwhal as a backport for Lucid.


sudo add-apt-repository ppa:kernel-ppa/ppa
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install linux-image-generic-lts-backport-natty linux-headers-generic-lts-backport-natty


Once you switch over you can add discard option to your fstab to get TRIM to turn on.

The only pain I experienced was the Nvidia drivers for my card stopped worked because of the newer kernel. I downloaded the Natty packages for that

nvidia-common_0.2.24_amd64.deb
nvidia-current_260.19.21-0ubuntu1_amd64.deb
nvidia-current-dev_260.19.21-0ubuntu1_amd64.deb
nvidia-current-modaliases_260.19.21-0ubuntu1_amd64.deb

and they installed like a charm. I’ve even survived some updates to the kernel without losing X (Which is a nice change of pace really). Now they just need to release that 200 line patch to the kernel that is suppose to make the desktop experience even more awesome.