A Late X Server 1.7 Means No Update For Ubuntu 9.10

[deanjo]

Different distros can have slightly different kernel patches and driver versions, maybe Blackstar is the victim on an unpleasant interaction between Virtualbox and some driver (graphics drivers are the first thing which comes to mind...)

Very possible, without details though it's hard to say but it's hardly "With enough tweaks you can make almost any distribution work as you'd like (besides openSUSE - that's hopeless)." which is absolutely laughable especially when we are talking about any linux. The other factor is that VirtualBox has had MANY patches to it over the recent months to address performance and virtualization issues.

[agd5f]

re: ATI KMS - too bad there's no TV-Out support in the KMS code. I downgraded back to 2.6.29 for that reason...

You don't have to downgrade, you can disable kms in grub, just add:
radeon.modeset=0
to the kernel command line.

[highlandsun]

You don't have to downgrade, you can disable kms in grub, just add:
radeon.modeset=0
to the kernel command line.

Ah, cool, thanks. I guess I can give Ubuntu Karmic another try soon then...

[BlackStar]

Very possible, without details though it's hard to say but it's hardly "With enough tweaks you can make almost any distribution work as you'd like (besides openSUSE - that's hopeless)." which is absolutely laughable especially when we are talking about any linux. The other factor is that VirtualBox has had MANY patches to it over the recent months to address performance and virtualization issues.

VirtualBox is always the latest version here. Boot speed is atrocious in openSUSE, worse even than Fedora. Ubuntu and Arch mop the floor with openSUSE when booting: think 20 seconds vs 1 minute and 20 seconds.

And yes, boot speed *does* matter when you want to launch 5 or 6 different distros and 3 or 4 different versions of each distro and test for regressions prior to releasing your code. Even automated, this kind of differences can get you from waiting a couple of minutes to a few quarters of an hour for a complete build server run.

Hats off to Ubuntu for improving Jaunty's boot speed to the extent they did. Looking forward to their upcoming work on this area.

[highlandsun]

Hats off to Ubuntu for improving Jaunty's boot speed to the extent they did. Looking forward to their upcoming work on this area.

Karmic boots even faster than Jaunty. It's amazing what a difference there is between the 2.6.29 and 2.6.30-31 kernels...

[BlackStar]

Karmic boots even faster than Jaunty. It's amazing what a difference there is between the 2.6.29 and 2.6.30-31 kernels...

Music to my ears! Gigabyte has also fixed their slow boot issues (kudos for releasing a bios update 3 years after the motherboard was released!) - at this rate, I might even forgive AMD for their broken suspend w/ compiz.

[some-guy]

VirtualBox is always the latest version here. Boot speed is atrocious in openSUSE, worse even than Fedora. Ubuntu and Arch mop the floor with openSUSE when booting: think 20 seconds vs 1 minute and 20 seconds.

What?

openSUSE boots MUCH faster than fedora and ubuntu for me.
suse is like 20-25 seconds, fedora is like 40, ubuntu is 30-ish

Are you booting from disk (or disk image) or livecd/iso?

[nanonyme]

Your boot times sound puzzlingly long, maybe I should time my own at some point. I recall I easily went under 20 seconds with a Gentoo years ago and my Fedora seems to boot fast enough.

[Kano]

@some-guy

Do you use a stop watch or bootchart?

[BlackStar]

What?

openSUSE boots MUCH faster than fedora and ubuntu for me.
suse is like 20-25 seconds, fedora is like 40, ubuntu is 30-ish

Are you booting from disk (or disk image) or livecd/iso?

I am booting all those distros from normal installations inside VirtualBox (same hard disk).

While I haven't tested openSUSE on a normal installation, I *have* tested Ubuntu, Arch and Fedora. In my experience, Fedora 4, 8 and 11 are the slowest (with Fedora 4 being the worst offender) and your results seem to agree. Arch is the fastest after a few simple tweaks (~16-17'' bootchart), while Ubuntu 9.04 is the fastest out of the box (18'') (edit: which is about 50% faster than Ubuntu 8.10 - impressive!)

Now, it *could* be that openSUSE is interacting badly with VirtualBox for some reason, but I've yet to see a single openSUSE version that boots fast in VBox. However, given that other distros do not have any problems with VBox (a few seconds difference at most, usually < 5''), I don't really think this is an issue with the VM.

I was about to go gather some VBox statistics for each distro (bytes read/written during boot, CPU time used), but my openSUSE 11 VM managed to kill itself after the latest upgrade: need to reinstall the VBox guest additions (no dkms?!), the cdrom is not in fstab anymore (huh?) and I really don't want to spend my time fixing a broken distro right now.