[wellylug] Ubuntu & Debian kernel differences

Bill Christiansen bill.christiansen at gmail.com
Wed Feb 2 15:19:25 NZDT 2005


When I was running Ubuntu on my old Toshiba P2 laptop I found that apm
didn't work properly causing problems with the cpu fan. I was able to
get around this by forcing it to use acpi instead by using the
acpi=force and pci=noacpi boot parameters. I recently switched to pure
Debian and expected to find the same thing since the distros are so
closely aligned, but to my surprise apm works perfectly. Another thing
that works in Debian is my DIVA Mobile V.90 pcmcia card. Gnome-ppp
automatically detected this on /dev/ttyS1, but I couldn't get it to
work when running Ubuntu. The good thing about this is I can now
disable my internal lucent winmodem and I don't have to worry about
recompiling the ltmodem driver whenever the kernel is updated. The pc
card modem also has slightly better performance than the internal
modem, I get download speeds of around 9 kbs/sec which almost sounds
too good for dialup.

I wouldn't want to put anyone off Ubuntu, it's a nice distro and good
to see it heading for  number 1 on distrowatch but for my older
hardware the straight Debian seems to work a bit better.




More information about the wellylug mailing list