Club Linux Coffs Harbour

Charlie O'Sullivan just posted this comment on another thread, which I thought was worth promoting to a thread of it's own:

Hi, I'm helping a primary school in Lismore where all Year 5 and 6 kids have a HP 2140 Minibook each. They are using Jaunty. We have tried the following video editors:

Kino, Kdenlive, Lives, Avidemux, Open Movie Editor.

All of them crash at some point when importing, adding effects or whatever. There is no pattern to it. Kino for example, which is supported by and comes with Edubuntu, crashes any time you move / advance the movie or if you right click anywhere on the screen. We are not sure if it is a video driver problem or what. I loaded all the programs on a HP 8430 (with 4GB ram - the minis have 2GB) and have similar problems. Is there anyone in your group who can help with this? I really want to promote Ubuntu to schools but it is difficult when a basic requirement isn't up to scratch and the kids cant use the webcam.

As the problem happens across different applications it looks to be a hardware issue.

The first comment I have to make is that these problems usually aren't a case of Ubuntu failing to support the hardware, but the hardware manufacturer failing to release their device specs, so it's either hard or impossible to write software to support it. See this post about why hardware manufacturers might want to make it as difficult as possible for people to write free drivers for their hardware.

However, a bit of Googling finds that the models you're using have Intel 950 and ATI Mobility Radeon X1600 video chipsets respectively. Intel and ATI have both in recent years been playing nice with their hardware specs, and even releasing their own drivers as free software. It's not necessarily the case that these are the chipsets in your particular machines, as manufacturers will switch hardware within the same models, so it's best to install the GNOME device manager to see what the model numbers really are, and then Googling.

I can find quite a few posts complaining about video drivers in Jaunty. Rather irritatingly, Ubuntu plays very fast and loose with it's non-Long Term Support (LTS) releases, and it seems like in this case they've gone with a brand new release of X.org, which does not yet support a lot of older video chipsets ("older" here meaning more than a few months old in some cases). The general advice seems to be to use the last LTS release (8.04 "Hardy Heron") rather than Jaunty. Really for a relatively large organisation like a school, I'd recommend sticking with only LTS releases anyway, as it's much easier managing upgrades once every two years rather than once every six months.

Anybody else have any suggestions?