A recent install of Ubuntu on the Laptop of a friend showed (apart from being painless, and resulting in a nice looking destop within a few minutes) some Problems, that probably exist on all distributions.

I also include some in here that I have blogged about earlier.

  • Broken hardware: his Intel i845 based board lists 1280x801 as resolution, but his flat panel is only 1280x800. While this can be easily solved by using the 855resolution tool, this should some time happen automatically. Several resolutions (everything except 1280x800 and 1024x768) is still being rejected on this machine.

  • Multiple Screen support. Currently each graphics driver has a different way of setting this, and I’m not sure if you can change that on-the-fly with the RandR - I guess no. We definitey need a way for users to configure this easily; probably we need the make a standard driver interface first? at least the standard case should wor - having a projector connected to your external output at a usable frequency, and having video overlay working there.

  • Different mouse drivers (especially Synaptic Touchpads) and Plug’n’Play. Plug’n’Play of mice only works because of a kernel-level hack - namely the /dev/input/mice “device”. The big problem here is, that you can only use one driver for this device. Usually you will use the ps/2 driver; almost any modern mouse will work with that. But if you have a synaptics touchpad or similar device in your laptop - which is really common - you can’t use that to its full potential since some 2.6 kernel revision. (Until then, psaux was not included in the /dev/input/mice events, so you could just add a second device entry with the appropriate driver)