Since I have plenty of RAM in my Mac Mini and a fast connection, I decided to torrent the ISO and install it in VirtualBox.

Unlike current versions of Debian, fresh out of the “box” it doesn’t grok resizes of the VirtualBox display.

The magic search thing you get by hitting the Ubuntu logo responds rather slowly. Even after I turned on “3D acceleration” in VirtualBox. At least it helpfully suggests things that I can buy. It appears to be doing network IO with each keystroke (to offer incremental suggestions), but unlike Google search (on their web page), it seems to be slowing down the UI with each keystroke rather than doing that work completely asynchronously.

More playing around with the UI suggests that VirtualBox’s 3D acceleration isn’t enough and it’s just doomed to be slow in VirtualBox.

I continue to be unimpressed with recent Ubuntu changes.

Here’s what I needed to do to get it to work. First, you need proprietary drivers for the 802.11bgn chipset (BCM4312 with LP-PHY). It should be possible to provide this non-free firmware at install time, but I never got that to work so instead I just installed with the wired ethernet and installed this firmware later on the running system by adding the “non-free” and “contrib” repositories to /etc/apt/sources.list and doing:

apt-get update
apt-get install firmware-b43-lpphy-installer


This may require a reboot to take effect, there’s probably another way, but it’s more effort.

You’ll probably also want the proprietary NVidia display driver if you have the NVidia ION chipset variant of the S12. Just follow the instructions at NvidiaGraphicsDrivers for installing the current version using DKMS. Reboot again, or you could reboot once for all three of these changes.

Suspend seems to immediately wakeup due to USB interrupts. Putting the following in /etc/rc.local (and rebooting or executing the script as root) seems to fix that:

for i in 0 1 2 3 ; do
echo USB$i >/proc/acpi/wakeup
done


Those are the USB controllers, it still wakes up fine from hitting a keypress.

You may also want to add some of the recommended tweaks from powertop. A way to get them in scriptable form is to run it as powertop --html=<filename> option and cut end paste some of that into rc.local. I got things down from about 17 watts to 12 watts on battery.

I haven’t tried to mess with the built-in camera yet.