----------------------------------------
Ubuntu Issues
July 19th, 2020
----------------------------------------
My wife's computer has been suffering recently. It's a relatively new
ASUS ZenBook, lightweight but powerful enough to support the research
that she does for work. The laptop barely has been turned on with the
pre-installed Windows 10 installation before we agreed to install the
latest Ubuntu LTS.
Since then, it's been a cascade of issues that have forced me to do
some kernel hacking in order to fix various pieces of hardward issues
in the Linux kernel. The first was the issue with sound, a small fix
in terms of code (I think the patch we applied was about 30 lines of
code changes) but required a recent kernel outside of Ubuntu's
recommended version for LTS. It was fun for me, but for a distro that
prides itself on "just installing and working" it was frustrating for
my wife to have to go to the lengths of recompiling the kernel for a
fix.
-----
Fast-forward to the past week, where the internal Intel wifi chip has
suddenly started having issues with the microcode, meaning that the
firmware fails to load on startup killing the connection to the internet.
The error messages are fairly vague, and while I managed to find some
activity in the Linux kernel bug tracker, the patch there didn't seem
to make a difference on getting the firmware to load. I suspect that
something got botched when there was a security or LTS update that
triggered automatically.
I started to notice the cracks when I'd be trying to rebuild the
kernel modules for the LTS kernel and for some reason the modules
would always point toward the modules that I had backed up and not the
ones that I had recently rebuilt. The process of debugging was
entirely untransparent and hard to get information on.
I'm in the process of backing up her data via a Live CD and pulling
the nuclear option of wiping the harddrive to start with a fresh LTS
install.
-----
On my own machines, I do a lot of work with music production, so the
Linux kernel and the supporting software for that (JACK, Ardour, etc)
are a necessity to run over a *BSD. In the past I've had issues like
my wife's computer which necessitated a nuclear re-install of the base
system every couple of years. I haven't encounter the need to do so
in such a long time that the past events have been surprising to me.
-----
After messing around on tilde.institute, I've installed OpenBSD bare
metal on an old laptop that has overheating issues. I'm reminded here
of the joy of simplicity, on the KISS principle and how that actually
manifests with real-world consequences. Granted, I am not doing audio
production on that machine, but I do not worry about the nuclear
option for the OpenBSD laptop. We'll see if that opinion holds after
I go through my first point release as a data point against Ubuntu.
