Month: January 2011

Reliability, Trust, and User Experience

Lately, my Dell Vostro V13 has been acting up. Or, rather, Ubuntu has been acting up on it. At first I thought it was limited to hibernation: waking from hibernate often (and I mean often) failed, shutting power off to the machine sometime during boot. Then I began noticing that it had also been happening while booting back up from an ordinary shut down. Sometimes it took three or more tries to get back to the desktop in these circumstances.

I’ve explored what feel like countless possible explanations — shutting the screen before shut down/hibernate had completed, the wireless driver, the wireless being on during shut down/hibernate, the “splash,” “quiet,” and “no_console_suspend” flags in GRUB (and their 8 permutations), two shut downs/hibernates in a row (rather than alternating), the particular version of the kernel, and, finally, some unidentifiable kink in my installation that resulted in me reinstalling Maverick entirely.

Nothing seemed to alleviate the problem. Even the third or fourth boot after reinstall (the first one after updating to the newest kernel, in fact) failed in the same manner.

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