Kubuntu 10.04 on ThinkPad T61 problems, would 11.10 be any better?

[burtbick]

Hi,

I have a Lenovo ThinkPad T61 and have been running Kubuntu on it since I got the computer about 4 years ago. All was working very well with the older Kutuntu release(s). The video system is an NVIDIA GeForce chipset.

Quite some time ago I updated to 10.04. Actually I wound up doing a fresh install, so there's no old cruft that should be causing any kinds of issues. The previous version of Kubuntu worked great on the T61. But after installing 10.04 operation was slow and unstable.

Almost always the notebook hangs on shutdown requiring a forced power down, different applications that had been stable would crash at random points. Note that where possible I had tried the latest versions of the applications that were unstable, but that didn't change anything.

I finally installed Gnome / ubunutu using KPackage Manager and it has been rock solid as long as I'm using Gnome. Performance is very good again, and none of the crashes seen before, even with the same versions of the applications that were installed under Kubuntu, and the notebook always shuts down cleanly.

I've been thinking about upgrading to 11.10 but I am concerned that I will still encounter the issues that I had when I installed 10.04, so I've been holding off.

Has anyone else seen this type of problem on the ThinkPad T61 and recent Kubuntu releases, and if so how did you resolve it?

I'm suspecting that it might have something to do with the NVIDIA driver, but I had tried a couple of different versions with no change in symptoms. Also I disabled the "eye-candy" which slightly improved the performance, but things were still pretty sluggish compared to how well Kubuntu had worked previously.

For now I'm using the Gnome shell but would prefer to get Kubuntu working properly again.

Thanks,
Burt

[andrewsimpson]

Yes, I have a ThinkPad T61 with Kubuntu 11.10. Clean install.

I haven't used KDE since the KDE3 days, and I wanted to avoid Unity, so I installed for a trial run. Very pleased that I did, it's given me no real problems, and it's encouraged me to convert a netbook and desktop machine too.

I think I've got a Intel video card, rather than NVidia. Whether that makes a difference , I don't know.

[james147]

Actually I wound up doing a fresh install, so there's no old cruft that should be causing any kinds of issues.

How fresh? A complete wipe, your did you keep you home directory?

Sometimes there are problems with the kde configs causing all sorts of weird behaviour between upgrades (mostly from older versions). I would test the system with a new user to see if its a config problem or not.

But I would always advice an upgrade (unless there are hardware problems with the newer versions) as it dose bring in allot o bug fixes and usability improvements.