I've installed kubuntu on my laptop, planning to replace XP with it, no more windows poo, if kubuntu or any linux for that matter, ain't working I'm Steve's Jobs guys for good (*cringe*).
However, due to the way ubuntu is configuring (or not configuring) your HDD power management settings, I am hearing every few seconds a strange sound coming from the HDD, something like a de-click. It's like it would stop every 5 seconds or stop every 5 seconds and then start again.
After some googling and foruming (back again to the OS hacker's life, when you were installing and reinstalling windows 98 (faint !) drivers every night in your lousy student life) I found that the issue could be the aggressive power management saving policy. For the hard disk here's how you tell it to save the least, thus not stopping it at all or something, the explanations are a bit fuzzy:
hdparm -B 254 /dev/hda
And then the sound stopped. I guess this means it will smack the battery but I don't care I'm using it as a mostly desktop system anyway.
In other words I am not saying that Ubuntu is far from windows usability but still, imagine your secretary running something called hdparm in the console. Well not that they'd be able to detect strange hard disk sounds either, until it's smoked !
Otherwise I'm quite happy with kubuntu, Java, Eclipse, Tomcat they all running like a breeze. Surprisingly kubuntu's UI is quite nice, with one annoying inconsistency, I've set the general system font to size 7 but still in Eclipse's editor it's a lot bigger, I wonder how am I going to fix that.
And I still need to get the sound working, I have no clue on how to install/get/replace the driver for it but somehow I feel that these days I am going to meet a smart-ass who's going to tell me how to do it and then laugh at me.
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