I just upgraded my main desktop PC, running Ubuntu 10.04 (“Lucid Lynx”). After an 8-year hiatus, I’m back on Intel, with a nice new Core i7 930 and a Gigabyte x58a-ud3r.

There’s not a great deal to write about compatibility, as everything “just worked” out of the box.

The upgrade went well — one of the great things about Linux is how well it takes to a complete brain transplant. No HAL trouble or “repair install” nonsense that you get on Windows.

Here are the things I had to do after the upgrade to get a 100% perfect system…

Digital surround
I use a digital coax conneciton to my AV receiver. This worked right out of the box, with the digital stereo option chosen in volume control -> Sound Preferences -> hardware. However, I was only getting stereo rather than 5-channel sound. To fix this, open: /etc/modprobe.d/alsa-base and add:
options snd-hda-intel model=6stack-dig to the end, then restart.

Suspend/Resume

With S3 (Suspend to RAM/STR) enabled in BIOS, I still couldn’t get the system to sleep properly. As it turns out, the problem is due to the USB3 driver. I fixed this with a script that unloaded and reloaded the driver on suspend/resume. Follow these instructions on the Ubuntu Forums for creating this script.

With this change it seems I can pretty much suspend and resume all day, without any ill effects.

The icing on the cake was resuming from suspend with my USB keyboard. By default no USB devices will wake the system — you have to use the power button. To fix this, you first need to find out which bus your USB device is running on. Type lsusb, find your device, and note the bus number.

If, for example, your USB keyboard is running on Bus 5, then you’d use the following command to enable resume:

echo "USB5" > /proc/acpi/wakeup

Add that command to your /etc/rc.local file, before the final “exit 0;”, then log out and in again.

Other than updating my /etc/network/interfaces with a new ethX device (since I use manually-configured static networking), that’s pretty much all I had to do to complete the brain transplant.