Ubuntu 13.04 on the Acer Aspire One D270

After grappling with 12.04 for a Saturday, I decided to try out 13.04 in case the suspend problems were just fixed. It turns out that in 13.04, just about all of the eyecandy energy wasting options are turned on, and the graphics drivers still are fixed, so desktop animation effects are all cpu rendered and the performance on the AOD270 is hopeless. Der.

Things that work: suspend(!), backlight, wifi... didn't check much else because the rendering response is so sloooow.

Trying and failing to turn off animations in Unity 3D

My unity support test says:

$ /usr/lib/nux/unity_support_test -p
OpenGL vendor string:   VMware, Inc.
OpenGL renderer string: Gallium 0.4 on llvmpipe (LLVM 3.2, 128 bits)
OpenGL version string:  2.1 Mesa 9.1.1
Not software rendered:    no
Not blacklisted:          yes
GLX fbconfig:             yes
GLX texture from pixmap:  yes
GL npot or rect textures: yes
GL vertex program:        yes
GL fragment program:      yes
GL vertex buffer object:  yes
GL framebuffer object:    yes
GL version is 1.4+:       yes
Unity 3D supported:       no

At least LLVMpipe is already enabled, but... that just gets me a lame low latency ass dragging desktop with CPU rendered OpenGL. Is that what we're stuck with now? I hope not...

I tried turning off compiz (installed ccsm {I think originally following instructions from here}, then unchecked composite, and affirmed all dialogs, which froze the system, then I rebooted...), but Unity now fails to load after logging in. I just get a background rendered with a mouse cursor. But it responds. So googling for "Ubuntu 13.04 dconf reset 'Error spawning command line'", I found someone with the same problem, but from installing the NVIDIA drivers. It sounds like in ccsm I unselected the unity plugin with all the other stuff, and I need to reset it. Muah!

It turns out the desktop is still somewhat there, with ctrl-alt-t I can launch a terminal, and from there re-run ccsm, and re-enable the unity plugin and get back the desktop... but the slow fady graphics are still there, and slowing things down enormously.

Aside:

Another way of resetting compiz without ccsm is geting to a console via ctrl-alt-f1, and following some instructions from liberiangeek.net to reset unity and compiz. I tried installing dconf-tools, but it was apparently installed already. :-P 

When I ran 'dconf reset -f /org/compiz/' it just returns an error though:
error: Error spawning command line 'dbus-launch --autolaunch=8ffacacd6f66a44dce54a578517c66cf --binary-syntax --close-stderr': Child process exited with code 1Usage:  dconf reset [-f] PATHReset a key or dir. -f is required for dirs.Arguments:  PATH    Either a KEY or DIR  KEY     A key path (starting, but not ending with '/')  DIR     A directory path (starting and ending with '/')

I don't know about that dbus-launch part, but I definitely had a -f in my command so something is fishy here... at least I could still launch ccsm!

Unity 2D

I couldn't find any obvious way to install the old fallback, Unity 2D. It appears to be discontinued in recent ubuntu distros, and for some reason they've replaced the package with a dummy package. They probably didn't do this to make me feel like a dummy after installing it and thinking I was on the way to getting it back, but that was the effect. :-(

This is really too bad, because I quite like Unity, just not all the animations and mandatory 3D rendering of everything. So I punt.

Gnome

The gnome-session-fallback package is fortunately still around. I installed it, and it works nicely, right off the shelf. No more low latency slow desktop. :-)

Again unfortunately, it looks like the gui configurations aren't around anymore though. I can't even right click the panels to make them autohide, and instead needed this trick:

$ dconf write /org/gnome/gnome-panel/layout/toplevels/bottom-panel/auto-hide true

and to disable the animations:

$ dconf write /org/gnome/desktop/interface/enable-animations false

Awesome, it works ok.
:-)

External monitors

Unfortunately, I tried connecting an external monitor via either of the HDMI or VGA port, and it didn't work. So far I've only tried it through the System Settings->Display panel and haven't dug into xorg.conf yet, so there might be a solution still, but it didn't work out of the box. Bust. More on this later...

I have a couple more fixes, including how to get the external monitor working in part 2.