Yesterday I started the upgrade procedure to Ubuntu 9.04. It's a little bit early to do an upgrade, as 9.04 has more than a month of developing, but I wanted to do some testing and bug reporting. After all my eee machine is not my primary workstation so even if something breaks it's not a problem.

Previously I was running easy peasy 1.0, which is actually an ubuntu system with some modifications to make it more eee friendly. The main difference from ubuntu is that easy peasy 's team uses Array's own kernel to support wifi, bluetooth and other "special" eee hardware.

I just executed sudo update-manager -d and the installer downloaded everything and did the upgrade. I was impressed by the fact the although easy peasy does some tricky modifications to the ubuntu system, ubuntu's update manager has able to upgrade successfully. I rebooted and here I am, Ubuntu 9.04 with all the new fancy stuff, like the new notification system.

The system is working... almost. This release is going to be a big step towards supporting netbooks but there seem to be some hard edges we still have to deal with:

• WiFi support: My 901 comes with a RealTeak wifi card, identified as RT2860. I can connect to WEP and unsecure networks out of the box, but for some reason no WPA support is buid in! There is a bug report here. I hope the kernel team gets this fixed before releasing, or this driver is crippled.
• EEE-applet is not working out of the box. Sends commands to some non-existing paths under /proc, which since the use of eee-laptop module, have moved to another place. Anyway I prefer eee-control, but this is not in the repositories If you get the Intrepid package from the official website and change the first line of the eee-control-tray and eee-control-daemon from /usr/bin/python to /usr/bin/python2.5 everything seems to work as promised. The change is needed because 9.04 is defaulting to python 2.6 which is missing a module for eee-control to run.

I have also tested the buildin camera which works fine but I haven't tested the bluetooth module yet. Probably that's also fine. Note that the system feels unstable but remeber that actually is in alpha stage.

The good things are that suspend is way faster! It's almost instant, while with easy peasy I had to way for like 10 to 15 seconds to get started. Also the response feels really good and in combination with the new eye candies and a better compiz system the look and feel is superb.

So 901 owners, wait for same days before you upgrade to Ubuntu 9.04 if you are using a WPA(2) system. Once we get this fixed the system will be great!

Extra hint: Some Ubuntu notes on optimizing your installation for the "small guys"

Edit:

I found a WiFi workaround. Download the wifi package from array.org and install it. It will build rt2860 driver, version 1.7.1 instead of the latest 1.8.0. The driver won't be installed because dpkg complains about it being older than the one already installed, so remember to copy the driver to the correct directory.

 
sudo cp /var/lib/dkms/rt2860/1.7.1.1/`uname -r`/i686/module/rt2860.ko \
/lib/modules/`uname -r`/kernel/drivers/net/wireless
sudo depmod -a
 

and then disable the wireless networking through network manager, unload the driver and load the new one.

 
sudo modprobe -r rt2860sta
sudo modprobe rt2860sta