[olug] ubuntu 5.10

[Matt Anderson]

After an 18 month Linux-on-the-desktop hiatus (been using a OS X  
PowerBook), I installed Ubuntu on my old Dell Inspiron laptop a  
couple of days ago.  I was mostly very impressed at how smoothly the  
process went -- it autoconfigured X windows to use the 1920 x 1440  
display, and once I found the graphical network interface  
configuration tool, setting up my D-Link DWL-G650 wireless card was a  
snap.  Mostly, everything just worked, and worked out of the box.   
The hardware volume buttons (fn-page up and fn-page down) even work  
and a little graphical volume meter pops up in X when I adjust the  
volume with them.

A couple of big annoyances though:

* tcsh is not installed by default, and doesn't seem to even be  
available part of the default package set.  After adding most of the  
unsupported package repositories, I was able to find a tcsh-kanji  
(which I installed and it works fine), but no plain old tcsh.

* There is no emacs or xemacs (or micro emacs either).  Not installed  
by default, and maybe not in the supported package set either (I  
can't recall if I looked before I added the non-supported sets).  I  
think that's just *bizarre*.  I can find packages through apt-get or  
synaptic, but I get dependency errors and complaints about packages  
that can't be or won't be installed for some reason or another.  So  
no emacs or xemacs that's easy to install.

Does anyone have experience with these issues?  Did I miss something  
obvious, or are there some moderately big problems with this Ubuntu  
release?  I doubt I'm the only one that thinks a lack of tcsh and  
emacs is a big deal.  :-)  I haven't much desire to grapple with the  
debian/ubuntu package management system, and though I don't really  
*want* to install emacs from source either, it sounds like the  
easiest thing to do at this point if I want it installed.  Anyone  
already deal with this issue?  What did you do if so?

A additional minor annoyance -- If I uncomment the line  
"#ACPI_SLEEP=true" (which should enable suspend to RAM or 'sleep')  
in /etc/default/acpi-support, and then execute /etc/acpi/sleep.sh,  
the laptop (apparently) goes to sleep just fine, but refuses to turn  
the display back on when it wakes up.  I've never had a working  
suspend on a linux laptop, so I think I can live without it, but I've  
become very accustomed to those little details working without a  
hitch since switching to OS X.

Things have really come a long way in the 8 years since I first tried  
to install linux on a laptop, but man, I still wish things would work  
just a little better, more smoothly, than they do.

--
  Matt Anderson