Okay, I need to follow up on the prior post. I’ve been doing a lot of work in Windows lately (yuck!) for my photography and a gig that involved living in Word, Visio, and Excel (clearly why I got an MS in Computer Science), so I haven’t been in Linux much. Finally, the Lenovo W500 was rebooted into Linux and all of the 192 updates were applied successfully. The result? Here’s a run-down of what appears to be the state of Ubuntu’s notoriously poor support for this laptop (due to the ATI video card):

• Suspend and restore seem to work okay with desktop effects enabled
• Desktop effects, with Emerald installed, look sweet
• Restoring, Maximizing, and Resizing Windows with desktop effects enabled is all screwed up.

WHAT THE HELL? Seriously–this is such a well-known issue, that’s so consistently complained about, that this should really be fixed in the main release by now. Or at least there should be a fix. Well, thankfully, there is a fix. A (very) long story short: apparently there’s a conflict between the way X handles certain things with desktop effects on between Intel drivers (for the integrated graphics cards) and ATI drivers (for instance, in the W500 machines). Ubuntu decided to opt for having X work out of the box with Intel instead of ATI, and there’s an ongoing debate between XOrg’s developers and ATI and neither will put in the effort to actually resolve the issue. (I hope I got all that right, after Googling about this for about 45 minutes).

In any case, the way to fix the lag is as follows:

1. Add “ppa:launchpad-weyland/xserver-nobackfill” to your software sources. Click on Applications –> Ubuntu Software Center. Click on Edit, Software Sources. Click on Other Software. Click on Add. Paste in this:
   

   ppa:launchpad-weyland/xserver-nobackfill

2. Open a Command Terminal. Type:
   

   sudo apt-get update

   and hit enter; then type:
   

   sudo apt-get install xserver-xorg-core=2:1.6.4-2ubuntu5~ppa1 xserver-xorg-core-dbg=2:1.6.4-2ubuntu5~ppa1

   and hit enter.

3. Sit back and wait. After it’s complete–hopefully successfully!–restart your computer, enable desktop effects, and enjoy not having to deal with that annoying freeze / lag whenever you resize, restore, maximize, or create a new window. Damn, it’s nice!