I just finished upgrading my laptop from Ubuntu 6.10 to Ubuntu 7.04. Right away I decided to try out the “Desktop Effects” which enables Compiz. It’s pretty stable and I haven’t had it crash yet. While Desktop Effects is enabled, I cannot play movies using the popular players (totem+xine, mplayer, vlc) as the player seems to just crash. I haven’t found the time to investigate this yet.

One other thing I noticed with the recent upgrade is that shutdown seems to hang randomly. I have seen this behavior before on my desktop and it was due to an APM bug in my BIOS and it would happen consistently. This time however, the hangs seem to be random and I suspect that some process is in an uninterruptible sleep and killall5 -9 in sendsigs is unable to kill the process.

Initially, I thought the hang was caused by a bug in my laptop’s ACPI and I decided to investigate. Searching around the web, I found out that my laptop is really a “white box” system from Clevo rebranded as “Neo”. It’s interesting because apparently Clevo has been supplying white box laptops to Alienware and other companies abroad, as I found out on this forum posting on notebookreview.com.