Now that I got my laptop back, I’ve been trying to get it to work with Ubuntu Edgy. I tried a lot. I spent hours pouring over kernel command line options, to stop the random hangs I was experiencing due to bad interrupt configuring.

Eventually I gave up and decided a new kernel is the only solution.

Ubuntu has a great custom kernel guide, and a git guide. The build took 2 hrs. and Git downloaded well over 100MB. Then I tried to build a restricted modules, and after fighting for a few days, gave up in disgust. My new kernel suffered from the dreaded ati-ixp double speed clock. I tried every option, and in the end, no_timer_check seems to be the one to use.

So I put this in my menu.lst:

And after using that a bit, I upgraded to fiesty anyway, and bricked my system, thanks to a lovely initramfs-tools bug. I now carry around a monolithic kernel (like all my debian boxen use). You just can’t trust initrds…. :-)

After reading an article about using aptitude properly, I decided that it’s time to make the switch from apt-get. Sure, on some really low memory systems, running aptitude isn’t an option, but for most machines, keeping track of which packages were installed as dependancies really helps keep a system trimmed.

I didn’t like the way that the author did it, I opted for a variant of one of the comments:

While rather a monster command, it does a good job of selecting things that were probably installed as dependancies. If you see anything in the list of things to be removed that you want to keep, you just add in an !~npackagename. Then after that, I run aptitude, limit to ~i!~M (installed, but not automatically) and mark everything that should be a dependancy with M.

Then, it’s simply a case of only ever using aptitude, and your system will be kept nice and clean :-)

Aptitude search patterns are really powerful, instead of having to do the whole dpkg -l | grep ^r type mission, you can just do aptitude search '~c'.