More Reasons Not To Get Grandma To Install Ubuntu
In my last post I mentioned a few issues I had with getting a functional Ubuntu laptop. Well, the niggles continue, and I think it’s worth listing them with solutions and workarounds where I’ve found them.
Input Device “Hiccoughs”
Since I installed Ubuntu, I’ve noticed an odd hitching or stuttering in the pointer movement where every so often it would just stop moving for about half a second. Similarly, I seemed to be making a lot of typing errors, and weird errors at that, where I seemed to be missing two or three characters in a row or occasionally adding multiples of single characters. I’ve never been great with the laptop keyboard, and so I pretty much blamed myself, but after a while it became clear that it wasn’t me, it was the computer and I wasn’t the only one.
It seems that there is some issue with a particular controller chipset that is used in Acer laptops, including my 1682WLMI. Hunting through the related bug reports, I found a few suggested solutions, but the one that works for me is this:
sudo rmmod acpi_sbs sudo rmmod i2c_acpi_ec
What this does is to remove a couple of acpi modules that make it their business to check on the laptop battery status at regular intervals. It’s the battery check that causes the input to be lost and removing the modules resolves the problem. Unfortunately, removing the modules also means that you can’t see the battery status. This doesn’t bother me as such, because my laptop is normally plugged into the mains, but it could add a bit of suspense to the life of someone who works on the road. Another issue is that the modules will be reloaded on boot, so you either have to type the commands in again, or add the rmmod commands to your rc.local script.
Umount Before Shutdown
I mentioned this before, but I haven’t resolved it yet, so I’ll mention it again. I have a bunch of network shares mounted using cifs. Getting them up and working was tedious in itself, but they still haunt my shutdown process, making the OS pause for a minute or so while it decides that it can’t unmount them because it needs root access or something. In order to avoid this delay, I have to remember to manually do a “sudo umount” for them all myself. Fortunately, they are all under one directory,so I can wildcard it in one command, but it’s still a pain.
Yes, it’s possible to hack together a script to deal with this issue, and some kind soul posted one on the Ubuntu forums, but I’m coming at this from the perspective of a desktop OS user, and even as a reasonably knowledgable one, I don’t feel it should be my job to perform these kinds of tasks. Network shares are normal, everyday occurences in the home and office environment and Ubuntu needs to abstract this stuff away from the user.
iTunes Replacement Hunt Ongoing
So, where I left it, I was using Amarok and it seemed like it was up to the job. Well, maybe it will be in a few versions, but not at the moment. The problems:
It doesn’t seem to like non-ascii chars in filenames. Following a change to get cifs to recognise unicode charset, all my Björk tracks have disappeared from the collection. This doesn’t make me happy. [Update: This turned out to be a Samba bug. See my next entry.]
It can’t edit mp4 tags even though it displays them and allows you to try and edit them. I’ve been told by someone in the #amarok IRC channel that it can do so “if it is compiled with that option”. Err… right. I need to build the thing from source to switch a feature on? Why isn’t it on by default? Seeing as the instructions for building from source don’t mention the option in question, I’m reluctant to start grabbing source just to see if I can figure it out.
Podcast support is just flaky. It’s painful enough having to re-enter all the feeds (couldn’t this be grabbed from my itunes library?), but once you have a few podcasts set up, the pain continues. In iTunes, you have a global setting for how you want your podcasts handled. Basically, you can decide how many episodes to store and whether or not to download them automatically. If you set it to keep the latest five episodes and download automatically, then iTunes will check your feeds every so often and download up to five new episodes. Here are Amarok’s options:
Looks the same, right? In fact, they are pretty much the same. Unfortunately, they don’t work, or at least they fail to follow through on the promise of meaning the same thing. Firstly, see at the top where it says “Configure All”? That’s because this is the context menu from the top of the podcast playlist tree (if you click the image you’ll get a larger section including the whole of the Amarok window) and you get it by selecting “Configure Children”. This is potentially great stuff, because it exceeds iTunes in that it means you could configure all your podcasts and override the settings for some, keeping fewer episodes or only getting them on demand. It remains potential because the options don’t work, and never get applied to the children. You have to go to each podcast individually for the settings to stick.
Okay, so a bit of a chore, but not too bad. At my podcast consumption peak I still only had a couple of dozen subscriptions. I just have to go through and set them up once and it’s done, right? Yep, except that when I went through them all, set them all to the above “grab a bunch of episodes when you can” setting and clicked “Refresh All Podcasts”, guess what happened? Nothing. Well, not precisely nothing. It does indeed refresh the feed and pick up any new episode listings, but what it fails to do is actually get some episodes and queue them to be put on my ipod when I sync it, which is what the settings above advertise.
You can get podcasts by selecting the episodes, right-clicking and choosing Download Episode, however if I do this with multiple episodes, a download will occasionally hang, and stopping the background task causes Amarok to shut down entirely. To be blunt, this is not really working in any shape or form. The whole point of podcasts is that they can work like opt-in broadcasts that you get without having to make any extra effort. Amarok’s current implementation doesn’t provide this automation at all.
Amarok is an amazing achievement and I don’t mean to single it out as a “bad” application. It does a huge amount very very well and I’m sure it will keep getting better. It’s entirely possible that none of the problems above will affect you at all, in which case, you’ll love it. Personally, podcast functions are important to me, and I have a fair number of tracks with non-ascii characters in them, so these issues are hard to live with. The m4a tagging is not so much of a problem, but it is annoying seeing as I’m really only half way through fixing the jumble of genres that iTunes applied to my CD collection. I could re-rip everything to MP3 (Yeah, right. Another week feeding CDs into my PC for several hours a night.) or I could transcode the lot, but this is getting away from the reasonable expectation that this feature should work.
I don’t want to come off as churlish. I’m getting all this stuff for free and I know it. I am a programmer, and so you could just fire the “Well, if you don’t like it then help fix it” response back at me, and indeed, perhaps I will submit a patch or two in time. However, I’m part of a fairly unusual group. Linux in general and Ubuntu in particular isn’t supposed to be just about we tech-savvy enthusiasts any more. It needs to focus on usability and solid, tested releases and focus hard. High-profile apps like Amarok are the vanguard in the march toward the mainstream and so they are going to come under more scrutiny than most of the OSS community. It’s going to be tough on them, because they’re young projects by definition and rapidly adding features. I hope they can ride the storm, but as I believe these are key applications for the OS , perhaps Ubuntu would do well to adopt Amarok and perhaps Banshee (which I am currently gathering strength to try building from source to see the podcasting features due for version 0.11) to help them along. Of course, they might already help these projects out for all I know.
I don’t see any Linux being a serious candidate for consumption by tech-mortals until rough edges like those listed above are sanded off. In the meantime, Grandmas should still use Windows or OS X. Unless they’re Grandmas who enjoy hacking about with computers, of course.
