Let's Push Things Forward

My last run on the dependency upgrade treadmill ended with me dist-upgrading from Ubuntu 8.10 to 9.04. I'd been avoiding the upgrade because I'd read that the performance of Intel video cards (which I have) was terrible and there didn't seem to be a fix in place yet.

Sadly, there isn't a fix in place, and as far as I can tell, there won't be for the lifetime of 9.04. With the number of Linux users with Intel video cards, I can't believe this wasn't a release-blocking bug.

Anyway, there does seem to be a manual work-around. I followed steps A-C, and performance is back to good. Eg, I can again watch 720p flash full-screen (1920x1600 on my i965).


Back in 8.10, performance would usually gets a *little* sluggish with my usual assortment of programs running (probably something like 40 windows from 20 programs spread over 9 desktops). Given that it's an integrated card (displaying on a large external monitor), I was impressed that it could handle this load. I haven't been in this new package setup long enough to know for sure, but I'm holding out hope that it may be even faster than before (which is supposedly why pieces of X were rearchitected, causing this snafu in the first place).