I am in the process of trying to get hardware video acceleration working via VDPAU on my T61 laptop. Rather, I should say I was working on this, as I in fact succeeded (mostly) today. In the process, I had to upgrade my laptop from Ubuntu 9.04 (Jaunty Jackalope) to 9.10 (Karmic Koala). On one hand, I had everything working on Jaunty nicely the way I like it; on the other hand, Karmic brings a lot of really nice polish to the desktop; on the gripping hand, the upgrade broke a few things.

In particular, it broke my two-finger scrolling. I spent about an hour hunting down help on the internet, learning about SHMConfig and VertTwoFingerScroll, making several configuration file manipulations, and waiting for several reboots. In the end, I found the solution, and it was much simpler than all of that: System->Preferences->Mouse.

You see, I have become so ingrained with the idea of editing configuration files manually that it didn’t even occur to me to look in the preferences dialog! One expects their existing behaviour to remain the same, and all of a sudden changes — what happened? xorg.conf must have been overwritten! Linux proponents like to say that configuration files give the maximum flexibility, and that if you want to try Linux you should be sufficiently comfortable with editing them. However, the overall user experience needs to be kept in check. If you are going to have a configuration file and a GUI dialog, do not make them exclusive — they both have to work, and they need to remain consistent with each other.