My five must-have settings for Ubuntu 9.04 (Jaunty Jackalope)

Posted on by acme

I’ve recently upgraded successfully from Intrepid Ibex (8.10) onto Jaunty Jackalope (9.04) – Err – yes – I’m talking about Ubuntu, to be more precise, about Kubunu x86_64. The upgrade was quite a success, and actually the first one, after which my system was still usable, although I heavily screwed around in it.

Here are my first impressions, and a few must have mods or settings.

  • 1) VDPAU
    I’m utterly pleased to announce, VDPAU and compositing window manager like Metacity (Gnome), KWin (KDE/Plasma) and Compiz are working now. Also TwinView is working for me. I’m using this repo:

    # nvidia
deb http://ppa.launchpad.net/ubuntu-x-swat/x-updates/ubuntu jaunty main
deb-src http://ppa.launchpad.net/ubuntu-x-swat/x-updates/ubuntu jaunty main

    Nvidia’s default driver is 180.44 at the moment, and has still a few major bugs in it. In order to use the repository above, just add these lines above into your /etc/apr/sources.list and perform a aptitude update. Then go into KDE Start menu –> System –> Hardware Drivers. And remove the current Nvidia driver (if you are using one at all). Reboot, and add now the new driver with Hardware Drivers again.
    It’s Nvidia version 180.53 at the moment and still has some flaws. I’m using this line to test the VDPAU output with a AVCHD sample from my Canon camcorder HF100:

    /usr/bin/mplayer -vo vdpau -vc ffh264vdpau -fps 50 my-sample-file-here.mts

    Pressing madly “f” for fullscreen while playing a clip, mplayer crashes after a while. The console gives me this output:

    [vdpau] Error when calling vdp_presentation_queue_block_until_surface_idle: A catch-all error, used when no other error code applies.
[vdpau] Error when calling vdp_output_surface_destroy: An invalid handle value was provided.

    Restarting KDE makes mplayer play again for a while. So I’m quite satisfied with it now. Without any special tweak mplayer is running almost with no CPU utilization. The new VDPAU version from Nvidia does real magic here. Guys, just great – Thank you 🙂

    To use Ctrl+Alt+Backspace for restarting your X session (KDE) you need to turn on the DontZap option. By default this combo is now disabled 🙁 Your ServerFlags section in xorg.conf should look like this:

    Section "ServerFlags"
    Option         "Xinerama" "0"
    Option          "DontZap"               "false"
EndSection

    There’s no GUI available at the moment. You have to edit your xorg.conf manually.

  • 2) Emerald
    Don’t know why, but Emerald and Compiz didn’t work for me properly. I had always distortions somewhere on the screen, or the decoration didn’t show up at all sometimes. Now I can use this very nice window decoration.


    Just perform a:

    aptitude install emerald

    and download a few fancy themes.

Pages: 1 2

5 thoughts on “My five must-have settings for Ubuntu 9.04 (Jaunty Jackalope)”

  1. Nice guide!
    I fail to install nvidia drivers though. I get:

    W: GPG error: http://ppa.launchpad.net jaunty Release: The following signatures couldn’t be verified because the public key is not available: NO_PUBKEY 3B22AB97AF1CDFA9
    W: You may want to run apt-get update to correct these problems

    I have tried to run apt-get update, but it doesn’t do anything. How do I continue?

  2. @cewan
    do the following to add a trust for this site.


    sudo apt-key adv --recv-keys --keyserver keyserver.ubuntu.com 0x643dc6bd56580ceb1ab4a9f63b22ab97af1cdfa9

    I usually don’t do this, because if all works smooth on performing “aptitude update” on the command line, I tend to believe I do have an ‘clean’ (unmodified) sources.conf. You can always install packages also from untrusted parties, simple by manually grant the process by typing a ‘y’, if being asked.

  4. You don’t have to manually edit Xorg.conf, you can also install the “dontzap” package and then run the command:

    dontzap –disable

    To clarify, you want to have the DontZap option in Xorg.conf to say “false” instead of “true” (as you have in your example code). Ie. you want to have the feature off.

Comments are closed.