I have now been using Ubuntu 8.10 (Intrepid Ibex) on my HP 2133 mini-note for about 6 weeks, so here is the progress report.
Overall everything seems to work reliably and the machine has done stirling service. I have even done some photo editing in GIMP and am in need of 16bit TIFF support (hint hint).
The best improvement in 8.10 over 8.04 is more reliable WPA. I no longer have any problems with the WPA Supplicant getting lost on resume from hibernation. In fact, the whole wireless thing is much better and connection to my home network is very quick. As an aside I plugged a friend’s Sony Ericsson K610i in to USB so as to charge it and Gnome Network Monitor immediately reported a new mobile internet device. It doesn’t work with my P1i though – I have to use Gnome PPP manually as described previously.
Hibernation and suspend both work reliably – there is some complaining about CPU clock assertions but it ain’t broken anything yet.
I have gone back to XFCE. I like XFCE, it is simple and light(ish) but does all the business. I was tempted by the ancient charms of blackbox (I think I was in a retro mood – I used it extensively several years ago) but succumbed to the ease of use of XFCE! I can report a marked improvement in general application performance, especially application start up, using XFCE rather than Gnome.
The marked drop off in battery life I remarked on after first upgrading to 8.10 seems to have been a glitch. I am back to 90-100 minutes of use (including wlan) from a full charge on a three cell battery.
I still have to use a cable to get mobile internet (3g) via the Sony Ericsson P1i. This is actually not a major drawback given the amount of juice pulled from both batteries when using bluetooth. Using bluetooth the battery guage on the P1i falls quicker than my old 4.1l Cortina’s fuel guage on a fast blast along the Hume.
The only part still displaying any problems are the Via chrome drivers. The Beta version of 02 December runs fine in 2D mode but compiz cannot be enabled. This is not really an issue for me as I have stated before, but it is worth knowing. Openchrome doesn’t work.
So all in all, a good upgrade and a much better experience than Vista (which was painful) or XP (which is generally horrible anyway) on the little beast.