Exams and honours being over, I decided to revisit my multi-boot (7, SL, Ubuntu) and give it an upgrade. Ubuntu 9.10 “Karmic Koala” had been released but at the time I was too busy to upgrade (Windows being my main operating system).

I don’t use Linux too much. I’m proficient at it to get around, compile, install, even mess with kernel compilations, but I only use it when I really have to test something out. I had 9.04 installed; it was fresh, untouched, the only thing that had been installed is the proprietary NVIDIA drivers. Instead of doing a full reinstall, I thought I’d take the easy way out and use the GUI update manager. Huge mistake. After downloading about 700MB of packages, the installation began and failed approximately half way through. A completely optional component, OpenOffice, was able to bring the installation script to its knees with an error that said something along the lines off – Failed to install <insert random OpenOffice component here>. Your system may be in an usable state – Yes, such a minor package was able to cause such a gigantic problem. I attempted to re-open Package Manager and even tried apt-get…neither worked. Needless to say, rebooting resulted in an unmountable mounts. I am baffled as to how a clean 9.04 install failed to upgrade.

Instead of messing around in recovery mode I decided to chuck in my 9.10 DVD and go for the install….since I had nothing important installed anyway. Installation seems to take a lengthy amount of time, and to this day the Ubuntu installer STILL makes no logical sense. Seriously, why is an installer removing packages when installing the operating system for the first time? I don’t care about the technicalities, this is NOT good user interface design.

At the time of installation, my disk configuration looked something like this:
Boot Priority 0: DVD Drive
Boot Priority 1: 160GB Ubuntu Drive
Boot Priority 2: 300GB Windows 7 RAID0
Boot Priority 3: 250GB Mac OS X Snow Leopard Drive

During installation I chose to install Ubuntu to the Ubuntu drive (funnily enough). This drive at the time was set to the highest boot priority. Alas, after installation, Grub seemed to have made itself on to the Windows 7 drive (for no particular reason) AND the Ubuntu drive. I mean what the hell? This drive had nothing to do with the installation and the Grub installation on the Windows 7 drive kept on failing with “File Not Found” errors. It’s almost as if the Ubuntu installer goes something along the lines of:

foreach (Drive d in drives) {
if (windows_installed(d))
// Make Windows partition unusable to piss off Microsoft fanboys.
// Who needs Windows anyway?!
install_broken_grub(d);
}

I decided to go ahead and reinstate the 7 MBR, disconnect all drives (except the Ubuntu drive) and do yet another install. Hoorah! We’re in. Straight off the bat, X-Fi Digital Out no longer works (it did in 9.10). The ALSA mixer seems to have disappeared and whatever the hell the new sound configuration manager is, it does not allow 5.1 Digital Out. Attempting to install the proprietary Creative drivers fails due to missing includes. OK, no problem I’ll solve that later.

Instead I decided to go ahead and update Ubuntu and install the proprietary NVIDIA drivers. All done via the Ubuntu UI. What seems to have been success turned into utter failure upon reboot. I was greeted by a constantly flickering console screen. Booting to recovery mode revealed that apparently “the NVIDIA drivers do not support the GPU at PCI0:0″. For the record, both cards are relatively new (GTX 260 and 8500GT) and worked perfectly in 9.10. OK, so, why the hell hasn’t the generic driver been reinstated so the GUI is accessible? It actually turns out that Ubuntu had installed version 173 of the NVIDIA driver rather than 185. Why? (you might ask) Well, it turns out that upon being prompted to install the driver, the default selection is version 173, even though the one tagged as “[Recommended]” is 185. Why the hell isn’t the recommended selection the default?! Why the hell doesn’t Ubuntu gracefully recover on such a catastrophic failure. Surely this is simple to detect. Either way, I am now at the point at which I’ve installed version 185 and rebooted to find Ubuntu is freezing on boot (every time).

After several forceful reboots, Ubuntu decided to boot….and hoorah, wobly windows. Now to fix the X-Fi.

After an hour or so of tinkering…I did three things…who knows which of these actually made the thing work, but here goes (X-Fi Digital Out on Ubuntu 9.10):

1. Open sound preferences, make sure the hardware configuration for the X-Fi device is set to analogue 5.1 out + analogue stereo in. (This makes a lot of sense, right?)
2. Make sure the input and output device are set to the X-Fi device (and not some integrated sound card)
3. Open up a Terminal window, type alsamixer. Scroll left (with the left arrow) till you find “Digit-IO”. If it’s Off, toggle it to On by pressing ‘m’.
4. You might have sound now…you might not. The only other thing I did was install the Creative X-Fi drivers. Note: These don’t compile by default on 9.10!

So here’s how to compile them:
1. Download them here: http://support.creative.com/downloads/download.aspx?nDownloadId=10792
2. Extract them to your desktop
3. You’re going to modify two files, let’s start with ctatc.h
4. Look for the line “#include <sound/driver.h>” and comment it out like so: “//#include <sound /driver.h>”
5. Now the next file, xfi.c
6. Again comment out “#include <sound/driver.h>” like so: “//#include <sound/driver.h>”
7. Now look for the line: “card = snd_card_new(index[dev], id[dev], THIS_MODULE, 0);” and replace it with:
“snd_card_create(index[dev], id[dev], THIS_MODULE, 0, &card);”
8. You can now follow the README included with the drivers….sudo make, sudo make install, sudo reboot :)

Frankly, this user experience is pathetic. Something needs to be done. The Ubuntu team need to stop wasting their time thinking up obscure codenames and ripping off the Windows 7 pulsing logo. Quality control is much to be desired.