My Karmic Dilemma part 2

I've found a temporary fix to the frozen suspend/hibernate bug I'm experiencing. It's only a workaround solution, but at least I don't have to keep rebooting my system after I open my laptop to resume work.
This fix requires the latest version of Ubuntu Tweak (vr 0.4.9).
In Ubuntu Tweak under System>Power Management there are boxes checked for both Suspend and Hibernate. Simply uncheck them both and reboot.
Now when I restart and close my laptop lid, the screen simply blanks and resumes immediately as soon as I lift the lid. Problem solved.

My Karmic Dilemma

I've tried using Karmic Koala Alpha 5 for the last couple of days on my laptop, but the suspend/hibernate bug was really hindering my appreciation of it.
Having to reboot my laptop every time I closed the laptop lid when I stepped away for a while is not the way I want to run my system.
I've since removed it from my system in frustration, and I'll just wait until Karmic goes into beta testing on October 1st.
I'm not willing to test Alpha 5 on my desktop computer as I can't risk losing any files on the hard drive. I wish that I had a spare hard drive to trial it there as I'm sure that it would run properly on the desktop pc as the graphics card is brand new and up to date.
Now that I've decided to remove Karmic from my laptop, I've decided to use it as a testing machine for other flavours of linux. I've just installed opensuse 11.1 on it and except for the minor glitch with my wifi setup, which I expected, opensuse is running extremely well on my laptop.
I have compiz running smoothly with all graphic effects enabled. Similar to earlier versions of Ubuntu. I suspect opensuse is not using the most up to date kernel or graphics drivers or I'd be experiencing problems with it as well.
I'll try it out for a few days and then move on to other distros. I've already burned a couple of live CDs of other distros to test drive. This will only be temporary while I await the beta release.

ATI support has left the building

Since installing Ubuntu Karmic Koala Alpha 5, I've discovered that being on the bleeding edge of testing software comes at a cost.
My main concern revolves around a suspend/hibernate bug that I have submitted. Whenever I close the lid of my laptop and place the system in suspend mode, it blanks the screen and freezes the system when I resume work, forcing a reboot.
In doing research about this bug I discovered something that may be related to this issue, and
it seems that older model ATI card owners will be out of luck. AMD will no longer be providing support. This means that the fglrx driver will not support kernel 2.6.30 or newer. Karmic is currently running 2.6.31.9-generic.
Catalyst 9,8 is said to have support for the 2.6.30 kernel and I have read that there are patches available.
Using older Catalyst versions won't work either as they won't work with the Karmic Xorg.
Using the open source ATI drivers allows the system graphics to work with multiple monitor support, however this also means not being able to take advantage of OpenGL or direct 3D.
It is rumoured that Ubuntu will release up to date ATI drivers come final release date.
But for now, if you have a newer ATI card or better yet, no ATI card, then you may have better luck using the latest release of Ubuntu Karmic.

"Whoa. Déjà vu"

"A déjà vu is usually a glitch in Ubuntu. It happens when they change something."


The above quote was actually from the Matrix with a minor change, but I've just installed the latest Alpha (5) of Ubuntu and there were a few things I've discovered.
They've made some changes to some things in this next version, but as it's still in alpha testing, some more changes may yet occur.
Here is my video of the boot up process for starters. youtube link
I've encountered a few bugs that are somewhat annoying and may prevent me from continuing to test this until it is released as a beta.
The most annoying bug causes my laptop to freeze at a blank screen every time I close the laptop lid and place it in suspend mode. When I reopen the laptop, the screen is simply blank and no key presses will wake it up again, forcing a reboot.
I'll be writing more about my experiences with Ubuntu 9.10 soon.